The Moscow Times

National Logistics Company is planning to invest roughly $200 million into the
construction of a 300,000-square-meter warehousing complex in the Moscow region.
The new warehouse, the largest in the Moscow region, will be located 24
kilometers southwest of Moscow between Kievskoye Shosse and Minskoye Shosse on a
65-hectare plot of land owned by the company, said Vladimir Klepikov, head of
the analytical department at NLC.
NLC has been active on the Moscow market since 1995 and owns Terminal Lesnoi,
Terminal Rentcenter and the NLC Khimki logistics park, which opened in October.
The company accounts for roughly 30 percent of Moscow's logistics market,
according to expert estimates.
The first 60,000-square-meter stage of the new warehouse complex should open in
late 2005, while the entire project is scheduled for completion in 2007,
Klepikov said. He refused to disclose the total size of the investment.
Igor Zhukov, general director at BEL Development, estimated that a complex in
that part of the Moscow region would cost about $500 per square meter, or $150
million for the entire project.
Zhukov's figure was supported by Alexei Novikov, senior consultant at Knight
Frank, but Darrel Stanaford, director at Noble Gibbons in association with CB
Richard Ellis, said that the project may cost about $210 million, or $700 per
square meter.
"The complex will be on par with similar Class-A warehouses in Europe. It will
be used for storage of all types of goods and will have a convenient loading
area, including access for trucks," Stanaford said.
"The terminal will have its own rail link, which gives certain advantages, but
Kievskoye and Minskoye are connected by a very narrow road, and if NLC does not
widen it, its clients will have huge transporting problems," Novikov said.
In order to operate effectively in Moscow, a logistics company should have its
terminals in the three major transporting directions -- west, south and north --
experts said.
"We are currently considering several projects to build terminals in the
southern Moscow region," Klepnikov said.
In terms of warehouse size, NLC's only possible competitor around Moscow was,
until recently, agricultural producer Belaya Dacha, which, jointly with France's
Bouygues, announced plans in 2004 to build a 320,000-square-meter complex in
Kotelniki.
But the head of Belaya Dacha's supervisory board, Viktor Semyonov, said that
plans have changed.
"We decided to build a 110,000-square-meter terminal, since the site is so close
to Moscow, where land is expensive. The remaining 200,000 square meters we will
build someplace else," Semyonov said.