OREANDA-NEWS. April 28, 2010. Belarusian producers should reconsider their strategies for new markets, Prime Minister Sergei Sidorsky said when visiting BelAZ.

We need to change the strategy of arrival onto new markets. We need to shift from primitive deliveries, simple manufactures to sophisticated forms. I mean the markets of the countries where we have the presence already, Sergei Sidorsky said. We need to arrive onto new market with new equipment and also with our own technologies, knowledge and gain a foothold there, noted the Prime Minister.

According to the PM, BelAZ should seek to set up joint facilities in the countries where it has a good market share. “We have a BelAZ joint facility in China. It was inaugurated last year. However hard it was but we managed to outpace our competitors,” the head of government remarked.

Last year BelAZ launched supplies to Chile (five vehicles have been delivered already). “The country has a big mining industry. We can win over that market despite the fact that it is far away,” Sergei Sidorsky said. BelAZ vehicles are also delivered to Australia.

Belarus now needs to double or triple the presence, not the sales, of its specialists on foreign markets. One of the elements of the export strategy is to send specialists to foreign countries (Asia, Africa, Latin America) where they will showcase Belarusian products. These specialists will be based at Belarusian embassies and will act as experts promoting Belarus’ economic interests on foreign markets, the Prime Minister said. “This is a new area for us. It is perceived differently but this is a closed issue. The government has already developed a comprehensive document. We have made the projections where we will have the presence. It will not happen immediately. But I think that we will be able to meet this goal in a short period of time,” the head of government stressed.

Speaking about the BelAZ performance, Sergei Sidorsky said that the warehouse stocks are reducing. Three or four months ago they were as large as the six-month output. Today they have reduced to the three-month volume. “It was a market meltdown then. The mining industry was at a halt in fact. Now the market is recovering, consumers have started buying the equipment. The main thing is that now the consumer preferences are changing. Namely small-tonnage vehicles are now not that popular with consumers while the demand has increased for large-tonnage trucks, the Prime Minister said.

Sergei Sidorsky believes the company needs to launch the production, as soon as possible, of a new 360-tonne capacity truck and produce as many of them as necessary to satisfy the demand of the markets where BelAZ has recently advanced to.

The Prime Minister got familiar with the new quarry equipment designed by BelAZ including the heavy-duty trucks of the 360 tonne and 240 tonnes payload capacities and other vehicles.

Belarusian Autoworks (BelAZ trademark) was founded in September 1948. The BelAZ product line includes open-pit trucks, front end wheel loaders and bulldozers, recovery trucks, carrier vehicles for underground works, heavy-load carriers for metallurgical plants and other production machines. BelAZ occupies one third of the global market of heavy-duty trucks and is one of the top ten mining equipment producers in the world.