Olga Erashova

At last, the future of an industrial park to be located at free premises owned by KAMAZ Inc. is becoming clearer. At their meeting held on 20 February, 2004 Ravil Muratov, Deputy Prime Minister of Tatarstan, Alevtina Kudryavtseva, Deputy Minister of Economic and Industry, and other top managers of the republic, Naberezhnye Chlny city, and KAMAZ Inc. discussed the ways of arranging of such a park, which they named “Master” Kama Industrial Park (KIP).

The concept of KIP is to bring vehicles and spare parts production together, attract small and medium business, develop flexible production lines, and possibly to reach a “synergy” effect, etc. All the participants of the meeting emphasized that this is going to be a feasible project and unanimously expressed in favor of it.

Industrial parks are already known in the world practice. However, the “Master” KIP project is an original one as KAMAZ Inc. is the first company in the republic to integrate cooperation of big and small business. Under this project, small business will be able to rent production facilities at low cost, and also will be rendered easy term services. In return for this, small business will have to supply components to KAMAZ under long-term contracts with it.

KAMAZ management and its experts have worked out a feasible scheme of the project launching and have negotiated with representatives of small and medium business. The Government of Tatarstan will back up the “Master” KIP project and is going to assign 150 million Rubles to implement it. It is planned that already in March small business will start cooperation with KAMAZ.

There is no doubt that the project is going to be a real challenge for Tatarstan. It will ensure the Company with a lot of advantages, including budget allocations and labor wage increase. It’s quite important that introduction of small business into the spare parts market will ensure increased competitiveness of KAMAZ trucks. No doubt the project of the “Master” Kama industrial park will be a success.