Toyota plant in St. Petersburg will be handed over to US

The Ministry of Industry and Trade is considering the transfer of Russian assets of the Japanese automaker Toyota to FSUE NAMI. Denis Manturov, Deputy Prime Minister and Head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, told reporters about this at the RSPP congress.

The Russian division of Toyota is the company “Toyota Motor” announced the closure of the assembly site in St. Petersburg in the fall of 2022. The company promised to fulfill all social obligations to the team, maintain after-sales service for Toyota and Lexus cars and support the dealer network. But after the sale of the asset, it was not planned to resume the production of Toyota cars at the site.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade, together with the government of St. Petersburg, are working out possible scenarios for the development of this site, the department reported at the time.

The Toyota plant in Shushary, St. Petersburg, like other foreign car plants in Russia, has been idle since March last year after the start of the CBO. Prior to that, this assembly site worked for 15 years, production was launched in 2007. It was the first assembly plant to start work in St. Petersburg.

At the automobile plant in Shushary, Camry and RAV4 models, popular with Russians, were assembled. The plant’s capacity allowed to produce up to 100,000 cars per year. The company also supplied cars to Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia: by the end of 2021, the company exported about 11.9% of products manufactured in St. Petersburg to these countries. In total, 80,800 cars were assembled at the site that year.

After the transfer of the plant of the Japanese concern to the ownership of NAMI, only one car assembly site will remain in St. Petersburg, in respect of which the foreign owners have not yet made a final decision. This is a plant Hyundai. The plant of another Japanese automaker, Nissan, was transferred to the same NAMI last fall, and in February 2023 it was sold to AvtoVAZ.

Myself “AvtoVAZ» lost its main shareholder, the French group Renault, last spring. Its share (almost 68%) was also transferred to US, and the Moscow plant where the brand’s crossovers were produced was taken by Moscow and organized the assembly of Chinese JAC crossovers under the Moskvich brand there.

In November 2022, after the launch of the procedure for dismissing employees by agreement of the parties (their number was 1,900 people), an unscheduled inspection by the prosecutor’s office and Rostekhnadzor took place at the Toyota plant in St. Petersburg. Together with the tax and labor inspectorates, as well as FSUE NAMI, they checked the company’s compliance with the requirements of tax, labor legislation, technical regulation and industrial safety requirements.

Toyota has estimated losses from the cessation of production in Russia, including the cost of employee compensation upon dismissal and asset impairment, at about $650 million. This is about 40 billion rubles. at the exchange rate at the time of the announcement in November last year. For comparison, under a special investment contract that the automaker signed with the government in 2019, the company was going to invest 20 billion rubles. into Russian assets.

There are a lot of plants that are being transferred by outgoing companies, and for each one it is necessary to find a new manufacturer, notes auto expert Vladimir Bespalov. There are not very many options for production at the Toyota site – you will either have to attract a Chinese partner, or repurpose the site for the production of other products, he explains. “In the first case, NAMI will obviously remain a participant in the project, in the second case, if the project is not related to auto production, it would be logical for a new owner to come to the site. It is possible that there will be an option to repurchase the plant – it depends on what exactly Toyota and NAMI agree on, ”says Bespalov.