Mantera and En+ are planning a joint tourism project in Primorye

Difficult business conditions in the Far East are forcing investors to look for ways to reduce investment risks. Thus, the Mantera structures of Alexander Tkachev, intending to build an amusement park and a resort and hotel complex in Primorye, created a joint venture with the En+ division for the project in the region. The tourist flow in Primorye this year has increased by one and a half times, but the payback of large-scale projects threatens to take 30 years, experts say.

En+ Tourist Infrastructure LLC and Vostok Finance LLC of Dmitry Anfinogenov, the top manager of the Mantera group of the family of Alexander Tkachev, established Far Eastern Asset LLC in December. The main activity of the new structure is holding companies, the partners own 50% each, as follows from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities.

En+ Tourism Infrastructure was created to develop non-core assets of the En+ group founded by Oleg Deripaska. The portfolio includes the Legend Hotel Group and the regional tour operator Baikal Travel Club. The company’s two hotels in the Far East are the Energetik boarding house in Buryatia and Pacific Plaza Sakhalin in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Dmitry Anfinogenov was involved in the development of the Krasnaya Polyana gambling zone in Sochi, and serves as the executive director of the Association of Entertainment Industry Operators and Sports and Entertainment Events. Mantera declined to comment; En+ did not answer Kommersant’s questions.

Mantera structures have already announced plans to implement tourism projects in the Far East. In 2021, as part of the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF), the group signed agreements to invest 38 billion rubles. in the creation of a theme park and resort and hotel complex on Russky Island in Vladivostok (RUB 15 billion), a golf resort with a hotel (RUB 8.5 billion) and an entertainment complex with a casino and hotel (RUB 14.5 billion) . The implementation of the projects has not yet begun. And at WEF 2022 and WEF 2023, Mantera structures again entered into agreements to create a theme park on Russky Island. In 2023, the volume of investment in this project was already estimated at 27 billion rubles.

The founder of Ivashkevich Hospitality, Stanislav Ivashkevich, notes that such a project should be designed to accommodate several thousand people, and implementation is associated with significant risks due to the significant scale and the need for technological solutions. According to him, in Vladivostok investors will have to face a staff shortage, underdeveloped infrastructure and difficult weather conditions. The payback on large-scale projects in this region may take 25–30 years, warns Mr. Ivashkevich.

Tourism expert Alexey Kozhevnikov believes that given the complexity of the Far East and the distance of the macro-region from solvent tourists, for large investors, the implementation of projects here can be mainly related to entertainment purposes. In this case, creating a joint venture with another prominent player will likely help reduce risks, the expert notes.

The demand for travel to the regions of the Far East is growing. According to Rosstat, at the end of ten months of 2023, 3.3 million people stayed in hotels in the macroregion, which is 41% more than a year earlier. In Primorye, the number of guests in hotels increased by 52.7%, to 896.4 thousand people. According to Stanislav Ivashkevich, the hotel market in the Far East is supported by an increase in incoming tourist flows, especially from China and Japan. According to Ostrovok.ru estimates, this winter the total number of accommodation bookings from foreign tourists in Russia has increased fourfold year on year. Russia is visited by travelers from the Middle East (38%), Europe (32%), Asia (19%) and post-Soviet countries (10%).

Vice-President of the Association of Tour Operators of Russia Sergei Romashkin points out that the flow of foreigners in general plays an important role for the tourism industry of Primorye. Before the pandemic, they accounted for half of the total volume of tourist arrivals in the region, but in the current conditions, he points out, it is not easy to accurately predict the pace of recovery in inbound tourism.

Alexandra Mertsalova, Anatoly Kostyrev