E. Kuzmina

Sterkh already has preliminary agreements with clients for 80% of the refrigerated warehouse space, said Nellya Stepanova, CEO of the Osinovaya Roshcha logistics park. The opening of the second stage of the project – a dry storage warehouse with an area of 12,000 sq. m – is planned for the summer of 2011, with investments of 500 million rubles. Sterkh will determine the construction dates for the 45,000 sq. m warehouse complex in the coming months, says Kruttsov. Its cost is about 1.3 billion rubles.

On Friday, the Sterkh Corporation opened a class A refrigerated warehouse complex in Osinovaya Roshcha. Its area is 15,000 square meters, capacity is 25,000 tons. The facility, worth 1 billion rubles, began to be built in September 2009. It could have operated in conjunction with the Vyborg customs post, which had been operating in Osinovaya Roshcha since 2007, where Sterkh has about 60 hectares of land. But in May of this year, the post was liquidated by order of the Federal Customs Service.

The project has not lost its relevance, there is a shortage of high-quality refrigerated warehouses, says Konstantin Kruttsov, director of strategic management at Sterkh. According to him, the estimated payback period is seven years. In 2009, VTB North-West allocated 723 million rubles for the project for five years, said Dmitry Olyunin, chairman of the bank's board. The rate for the first tranche is 16%, for the second - 10.5%, under the federal target program of the Federal Agency for Fishery, the project received an interest rate subsidy in the amount of 2/3 of the Central Bank refinancing rate, Kruttsov specified.

A refrigerated warehouse does not need a customs post, frozen goods mainly arrive in St. Petersburg by sea and are cleared at the port, says Alexander Puchkov, Deputy General Director of Eurosib. But the entire Sterkh project would be many times more attractive to clients if there was a post there, he believes. There are practically no high-class warehouse complexes in the north, and since the beginning of last year, the average number of vacant spaces has decreased from 35 to 20%, recalls Nikolay Pashkov, Director of Professional Activities at Knight Frank St. Petersburg.

The Sterkh warehouse is one of the largest in St. Petersburg, but shipments from manufacturing companies and distributors to retail chains that have their own warehouses are growing, and the need for warehouses is decreasing, says Alexey Prokofiev, head of the Talosto marketing department.

Warehouse without customs