Belarusian boards lie to the east

The Russian manufacturer of building materials, the TechnoNIKOL company of Igor Rybakov and Sergey Kolesnikov, bought a woodworking enterprise near Minsk from the Lithuanian VMG Group. The cost of the transaction could reach an estimated 2.7 billion rubles. The company was focused on exporting to the EU, but because of the sanctions, Belarus has practically lost this market. The new owner intends to reorient the export of products to the countries of Southeast Asia.

TechnoNIKOL has closed a deal to buy a subsidiary of the Lithuanian VMG Group Swoods Export, a woodworking enterprise in Borisov near Minsk, the company itself told Kommersant. The VMG Group did not respond to Kommersant’s request.

Among the assets of Swoods Export is a sawmill with a capacity of 600 thousand cubic meters. m of processed wood per year, a workshop for the production of up to 120 thousand tons of wood pellets and up to 24 thousand cubic meters. m of finished products per year. The new owner of the enterprise plans to introduce technologies at the plant for the production of products of higher added value: planed moldings for interior and exterior decoration, glued wooden sets and house kits. Investments in the project are planned at the level of €20 million, or about 1.8 billion rubles. at the current exchange rate of the Central Bank, clarified “Kommersant” in TechnoNIKOL.

The company, which produces roofing, waterproofing and thermal insulation materials at 52 enterprises in Russia, already has five industrial sites in Belarus. The turnover of TechnoNIKOL in 2022 reached 200 billion rubles. The main owners are Igor Rybakov and Sergey Kolesnikov.

The VMG Group includes 20 enterprises in the EU and Belarus, where, in particular, furniture factories are located that supplied products to the Swedish IKEA. In March 2022, after the start of the Russian military special operation in Ukraine, the group announced the suspension of work in Belarus. TechnoNIKOL clarified that Swoods Export has stopped producing only furniture components.

The fair value of the Swoods Export business, even taking into account the loss of sales markets in the EU countries, could be about €50 million, but, given the sanctions against Belarus, the Lithuanians could sell the asset much cheaper – within €30 million (2.7 billion rubles at the exchange rate Central Bank), says Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of Infoline-Analytics. Aleksey Sharov, managing partner of Averta Group, does not rule out that the transaction amount did not exceed 0.5 billion rubles.

The main market for the products of the new TechnoNIKOL enterprise is Belarus, said Sergey Kolesnikov, managing partner of the company. In addition, according to him, it is planned to arrange exports to Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. With a decrease in the cost of logistics to the countries of Southeast Asia, TechnoNIKOL will consider the possibility of deliveries in this direction. The reorientation of exports to these countries is connected precisely with the impossibility of delivering such products from Belarus to the EU, states Mikhail Burmistrov.

The volume of export of building materials from Belarus abroad in 2022 for the first time exceeded $1 billion, the head of the Ministry of Architecture and Construction Ruslan Parkhamovich specified earlier. In Russia, this indicator is not disclosed. Experts cited only data on the export of sawn timber: in 2022, the figure decreased by 20.8% year-on-year, to 23.328 million cubic meters. m, calculated in “Roslesinforge”.

Over the past year, Belarus’ economic, transport and logistics ties with Asian countries have expanded, which will help promote products to these markets, Alexey Sharov believes. However, Mikhail Burmistrov, on the contrary, doubts this, believing that the effectiveness of supplies from Belarus to Asia may be in question due to the complexity of logistics.

Daria Andrianova