St. Petersburg – The Russian Post has announced plans to open 36 new automatic mail sorting centers throughout the country in the coming years, said Russian Post General Manager Alexander Kiselev on Tuesday at a news conference in St. Petersburg. The first sorting center, to be built in St. Petersburg for €50 million, will serve the Northwestern region of the country.
According to Kiselev, the new sorting centers to be built could cost some €12-15 million each. With 480 million rubles, or $16 million, in profit for 2010, the Russian Post intends to fund the construction of the centers in part from its own revenues as well as from government subsidies and borrowed funds. The Russian Post expects to invest 15-17 billion rubles into modernization this year alone.
The new St. Petersburg sorting center will be equipped with state of the art electronic equipment. It will be the largest facility of its kind in the region and the second largest in country after the sorting facility Moscow, launched in 2009, which is the largest in Europe.
The St. Petersburg center will be able to process 1.7 million letters and parcels per day and will serve four neighboring regions. The Russian Post expects the new center to work at full capacity as the number of parcels and oversized envelopes sent by Internet retailers, in particular, has grown by 40% each year.
The German firm Siemens, which provided the equipment for the new St. Petersburg facility, expects to participate in further projects with the Russian Post. “There are no suppliers of such equipment available in Russia,” Kiselev noted at the news conference.
Source: Russian Post
