A land plot with an overall acreage of 23 ha, allocated for the potential greenhouse complex, belongs to LLC Agrotechnologii. In February 2020, 99% of the charter capital was passed on to the LLC Rost Managing Company and the remaining 1% to the owner and general director of MC Rost, Mr. Sergey Rukin. The investment project was planned to be completed in 2021. The plan was to grow cucumbers and tomatoes (up to 6.7. thousand tons a year) as well as lettuce and leafy greens (up to 200 tons).
The Deputy Marketing Director of Rost, Mr. Igor Karasik, reported that the company is withdrawing from the project in view of the “changes in the market”.
According to him, Rost have started many projects, thus currently they want to shift the focus on those. Mr. Karasik refrained from mentioning further details.
Experts believe that the September agreement on purchasing the competitor company Fito could be the project in question. Fito is a major producer of tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, eggplants and strawberries presented under the brand names Dolina Ovoschej and Vyberi Menya. Once the agreement is concluded, Rost could produce 320 thousand tons of tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce and berries.
The overall acreage of the greenhouses owned by Dolina Ovoschey amounts to 195 ha. Rost itself owns four functioning greenhouses, and two more with an overall acreage of 193 ha are under construction. The overall acreage after the construction works are completed should reach 388 ha. After the agreement is concluded, Rost would manage 10 greenhouse complexes. Almost all of them are located a lot further south than the Leningrad region: in Moscow, Tyumen, Lipetsk, Bryansk, Rostov, Nizhny Novgorod, Tambov, Krasnodar, Stavropol regions and Mordovia.
However, Fito has several owners and a part of them have not yet sold their assets. Moreover, the biggest part of the projects carried out by the Dolina Ovoschey have not yet reached break-even point and have not settled the credits. Therefore, the experts do not exclude the possibility that the agreement can be aborted.
Source: www.dp.ru