St. Petersburg Hyundai plant downtime to end in January 2024
ST. PETERSBURG. Dec 26 (Interfax) - The St. Petersburg automobile plant belonging to South Korea's Hyundai (Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Rus LLC) come out of downtime in January 2024, the company's press service told Interfax.
"The downtime at the plant has not been extended into January," Hyundai said.
The automobile company's plant in St. Petersburg suspended production as of March 1, 2022 due to difficulties with the supply of components.
As reported, the Hyundai plant will be sold for a symbolic price to the Art-Finance company, which is close to the Avilon dealer holding, the recent buyer of Volkswagen's Russian assets. The deal was approved at a meeting of the company's board of directors.
"Hyundai is currently negotiating with Art-Finance on the details of the transaction," the automaker said.
At the same time, Hyundai plans to continue to provide after-sales service and other services to its customers in Russia.
The transaction price was not specified in the company's statement. South Korean daily The Chosun Ilbo said that the deal was approved at the symbolic price of 140,000 won, or nearly 10,000 rubles at the current rate.
Art-Finance LLC was registered in Moscow in mid-February. Its main owner is the president of the Avilon car dealer group, Andrei Pavlovich. As reported, in May, Art-Finance acquired the assets of the Russian representative office of Volkswagen Group Rus LLC, including Volkswagen Components and Service LLC, Scania Leasing LLC, Scania Finance LLC and Scania Insurance LLC, which were under its control. VW reported in its financial statements that these assets were sold for 125 million euro. Later, the acquired companies were renamed as part of a rebranding to create the AGR automobile group.
As reported, the Russian assets of Hyundai, including the car plant in St. Petersburg, were previously also of interest to Kaliningrad's Avtotor, which, after ending cooperation with its South Korean partner and German BMW, is now working with the owners of Chinese brands BAIC, Kaiyi and SWM in its home region.
The Hyundai car plant has been operating in St. Petersburg since 2010. The production of cars there was suspended in March 2022 due to difficulties with the supply of components. Until spring 2022, the plant, with a capacity of more than 200,000 cars per year, produced the Hyundai Solaris, Hyundai Creta, Kia Rio and Kia Rio X-Line models. At the end of 2022, the company's revenue had dropped 75.6% to 50.3 billion rubles, and there was an 18.8 billion-ruble net loss against 11.2 billion rubles of net profit the year before.