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Belarusian Railway intends to open representation in China

30 July 2010

The Belarusian Railway is studying an opportunity to launch its own representation in China, the head of BZhD (Belarusian Railway) Anatoly Sivak told reporters on July, 29.

“We want our representation to operate in China,” Anatoly Sivak noted. – We should position ourselves there, embrace those cargo traffics which arise and go from East to West and from West to East using a flexible tariff policy as well.”

According to the head of BZhD, if the previous problem for railroading was a lack of rolling-stock for cargo transportations, then the nowadays problem is a lack of cargoes themselves. This is connected with the fact that business and industrial activities moved from East to West. Today, China is the main consumer of raw material resources. Europe deals with completely different cargoes, Anatoly Sivak emphasized. “Our transit flow which goes to East is the main one, the flow going from West to East is 8 times smaller,” he said. In this connection BZhD has to fight for each cargo by reducing tariffs for particular types of cargoes to 70%.

Alongside with that the Belarus trunk railway is working out other cargo transportation directions as well – from North to South and back. “These are Switzerland, Finland and further to Turkey,” Anatoly Sivak specified. Such transportations have good dynamics and they pay for themselves. Container transportations have particular prospects. For the first half-year of the current year, BZhD transported 65.8 mln. tons of cargoes which exceeds the level of the similar period of the previous year by 3.3%. For the period under consideration cargo transit grew 6.4% to 26.5 mln. tons of cargoes. “We expect to transport 11 million 700 thousand tons of cargoes in June on the whole which is slightly less than in the pre-crisis July of 2008 (11 mln. 826 thous.tons),” Anatoly Sivak said. He also added that following the results of the year a task to come to a level enabling to attract 1 trln. 237 bn. BYR as capital investments is assigned.

Speaking about railway transportations Anatoly Sivak noted that there was positive dynamics. “For the first time in 7 years we come to a level exceeding 100% in terms of passenger transportations. Before we could note a drop in passenger transportations, we were loosing our passengers year in and year out,” the head of BZhD reminded.

Source: BelTA