"The Russian Railway Company board of directors will hold a session this November to discuss the establishment of ten subsidiaries," she reported when appearing Tuesday at a Russian infrastructure conference organised by the Adam Smith institute. Nine of these ten firms are works on repairs and spare parts and special technology manufacture while one company will produce railway automatic and teleautomatic systems. The 2004-2005 schedule for setting up subsidiaries and dependent societies, endorsed by the RRC board of directors, provides for launching about 30 subsidiaries by the end of 2005, said Belova. This applies to companies involved in freight locomotive repairs, logistics, container carriage and freight traffic services, according to the vice-president.
Dealing with investment, Belova reported that private operators in railway carriage invested over $500 million in the acquisition and modernisation of freight carriages in 2003-2004.
She noted that the development of competition in the sphere of rolling stock is one of the core objectives of the structural reform in the railway transport. Over 22 percent of freight carriage is the domain of private rolling stock. Private operators own a pool of about 200,000 cars which carry about 30 percent of all the cargo of Russia. The Russian Railway Company is facing the competition of 80 private operators, including 12 that sprang into being in 2004.
Task No.1 is to turn private operators into full-fledged carriers that are responsible for the entire cycle of shipments, which implies their ownership of carriages, locomotives and freight-handling capacities. Present-day operators are actually engaged only in the exploitation of equipment.
Belova claims that two years will be enough to introduce legislation for setting up private carriers that will offer stiff competition to the Russian Railway Company.
