Manufacturers will be supported by a square meter – Newspaper Kommersant No. 163 (7364) of 09/06/2022

The White House expects to soon launch the industrial mortgage mechanism – the selection of projects for participation in the program has been announced for the fourth quarter. We are talking about loans up to 500 million rubles. for the purchase of industrial real estate at 3% or 5% per annum. It is expected that with these funds, enterprises will be able to purchase production areas of up to 10 thousand square meters. m – in general, the need for them is estimated at 500 thousand square meters. m per year. In return, companies are expected to intensify the launch of new production facilities.

The government plans to start selecting projects under the industrial mortgage program in the fourth quarter of this year, Deputy Prime Minister and Industry Minister Denis Manturov said yesterday. The essence of the mechanism is to finance the purchase of industrial premises. For industrial enterprises, the loan rate will be 5%, for innovative technology companies – 3%. Loans are provided for a period of up to seven years and for an amount of up to 500 million rubles. As Denis Manturov explained, the upper bar was chosen based on the average cost of industrial space in the country. According to him, the maximum loan will make it possible to purchase up to 10,000 sq. m. m of industrial real estate – “approximately enough today to accommodate a small, medium-sized plant or several workshops of a large enterprise.” In general, the need for enterprises to purchase production space using credit funds was previously estimated at 500 thousand square meters. m per year.

Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin explained yesterday that the government decree necessary to launch industrial mortgages has already been prepared and now it is necessary to launch the program “as quickly as possible”. The new measure has been announced as a measure that will allow businesses to quickly expand production, since it takes two to three years to create production buildings from scratch, and the purchase of ready-made premises is constrained by high interest rates on loans (the Ministry of Industry and Trade estimated them at 13–15%). Among the expected effects were a two-three-fold reduction in the implementation time of investment projects, as well as a reduction in the risk of downtime of unoccupied areas.

According to Mikhail Mishustin, the measure will allow enterprises to optimize the cost of acquiring new premises – “this is usually a very costly part of the estimate” – and, accordingly, will stimulate the expansion of production. Separate expectations, as follows from the words of Denis Manturov, relate to the acceleration of the start of “serial production of critical nomenclature – this is about 2 thousand positions for raw materials, materials and components.”

Earlier, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov reported that in 2022 it is planned to allocate 0.5-1 billion rubles for the new measure, but the current figures for this part were not announced yesterday. The Ministry of Industry and Trade told Kommersant that, taking into account the assessment of demand, the planned volume of lending and the required amount of subsidies were calculated – proposals were sent to the government as part of the preparation of the draft budget for 2023-2025. The Ministry of Finance did not comment on the amount of funding for the program.

As Yevgeny Protopopov, co-chairman of the Perm regional branch of Delovaya Rossiya, notes, industrial mortgages “can support the development of production at the moment” – there is no cheap money in industrial construction, and therefore enterprises cannot build or reconstruct the necessary areas. Maxim Tretyakov, vice-president of the Opora NP Association, notes that a diverse range of state support measures for industry is now provided, but they do not apply to the “zero cycle” – the acquisition of real estate and the placement of an enterprise. “The gap is being closed now,” he says. According to Evgeny Protopopov, about 80% of the main technological buildings and industrial facilities fit into the maximum loan amount. “The other 20% are either huge corporations or huge factories where industrial mortgages are no longer needed as much.”

Evgenia Kryuchkova