TOMSK, February 11. /TASS/. A Russian-Chinese wood processing plant was commissioned in Russia’s Tomsk region, West Siberia, on Monday as the first of 10 facilities scheduled within a Russian-Chinese wood industry cluster.
Under the Russian-Chinese investment partnership program designed up to 2022, Chinese partners will invest more than $460 million in the cluster, region’s governor Sergey Zhvachkin said.
Construction is under way under a Russian-Chinese intergovernmental agreement. The project’s investor is Chinese AVIC Forestry Corporation. The capacity of the main facility to produce veneer in the city of Asino, Tomsk region, is 100,000 cubic meters.
"We cooperate a lot with China, the amount of trade is big. But there has been little investment up until the recent time," Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said at the ceremony to unveil the plant.
"These facilities show that the situation is changing. We begin investing in production, creating real jobs and doing this at a high technological level," Dvorkovich added.
The wood industry cluster will also include facilities producing plywood and laminate. A furniture factory will be built and a saw-mill as well. When the cluster reaches its estimated capacity by 2023, up to 1.7 million cubic meters of productucts will be manufactured.