Turkey’s Vestel grows in Russia

Vestel is the first foreign company to produce TV sets in Russia. In November 2003, Vestel opened a factory in Alexandrov, a town 120-kilometers from Moscow. The factory has a production capacity of one million TV sets per year.

Vestel Group’s Foreign Trade Chairman Turan Erdogan yesterday told the Anatolia news agency that they were planning to increase capacity of the TV factory in Russia to 1.5-2 million TV sets per year from the current one million.

"We are starting white goods manufacturing in the town of Alexandarov with an additional investment. Construction goes on now. We will start refrigerator production in Russia as of the middle of 2005," he added.

Stressing that they have set a target of 500,000 units for annual production during the first stage, Erdogan noted that annual production would increase to one million units in 2006.

Erdogan emphasized that they were not planning any other new investments abroad, except for Russia.

"There’s no point in investing if production is not advantageous. We send goods to all parts of the world from Vestel City in Turkey," he said.

Giving information on Vestel Group, the company exported $1.5 billion last year, predicting that their export revenue would total $2.1 billion this year.

Underlining that Vestel is the biggest TV set producer of Europe, Erdogan stated that they would have produced 12 million TV sets by the end of this year.

"We have to open to new markets from now on. We plan to open to new markets with new products. There are still markets (to explore) in Europe. South America and Africa are potential markets as well," he added.