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Astros St. Petersburg is setting up today's biggest commercial warehouse in the North-West 535d34f Region built according to full Western standards. The new facility has total area 200000 sq m of which 75000 sq m is covered. The terminal is to be located in the new industrial area of Gorelovo, at the southern end of the town where the rail approaches are already in place.
Although the project originated two years ago, it faced some delay due to changes in corporate tax regulation. Today however the construction has green light as the ground was bought and all needed approvals were made by the Oblast Committee for construction operations, according to Mr Bernard Van Dycke, Astros St. Petersburg Commercial Director. The construction will start in spring, and opening of the first 15000 sq m is foreseen by January 2003. With less then a year to go, negotiations for long term contracts (3 to 5 years) with prospective clients are running smooth. At full operational stage, when entire 75000 sqm is built, about 200 people will be employed. In Mr Van Dycke's opinion, St. Petersburg has a lack of warehouse complexes meeting international standards for size, equipment, number of available services and quality of service. Most warehouses are old refurbished buildings, ex production units missing a good structured lay out, lacking a railway connection or having too small a surface to serve big clients. In Moscow several such centers have been set up in the last 2 years, yet they are fully contracted for coming years by big multinational corporations like Unilever, Nestle, Procter&Gamble, etc.). Astros Logistic Center (ALC) will offer clients the following services: full and temporary bonded customs regime, with own in-house brokers temperature control, security, anti fire alarm groupage and small trucking to city limits handling operations: sorting, palletizing, marking, repacking, etc inventory management system forwarding by truck and rail connection state of the art handling equipment (cranes, forklifts, etc.) skilled staff serving 7 days a week, 24 hours per day.
The objective is, as Mr Van Dycke defines it, to service clients' 'full' logistic needs, so they can concentrate on selling or producing. Astros has extensive experience in tobacco warehousing & logistics, but also receives positive response from producers and dealers in other industries such as paper & board, household goods, foodstuffs, glass, cotton & textile, tiles, furniture, etc. Apart from this logistic center, the Astros group of companies for the moment has 2 other warehouse projects running in the CIS, in Namangan (Uzbekistan) and Kharkov (Ukraine). Source: SeaNews, 14/01/02 |
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