OREANDA-NEWS.May 05, 2012. OJSC Cherkizovo Group (LSE: CHE), Russia's leading integrated and diversified meat producer, announces the opening of new bird houses at the poultry breeding facility in its Penza cluster. As part of the capacity increase project in our Penza cluster, we have built 21 additional bird houses at the poultry breeding facility “Vostochnaya”, reported the press-centre of Cherkizovo Group.

Previously, this facility consisted of 4 bird houses with a capacity of 246 000 broilers, but with the new bird houses, this will increase to 1 million heads. All the bird houses use state-of-the-art equipment in line with the most cutting edge technology.

The total investment in constructing the additional bird houses at the facility is approximately US \\$18 million (530 million roubles).

At the end of 2011, we launched the largest incubation facility in Russia at the Penza cluster, with an annual capacity of 105 million eggs and a modern slaughtering facility for 8 000 heads an hour. The building of a 300 000 tonne fodder plant is currently underway.

In 2011, the production capacity of the Penza cluster was approximately 83 000 tonnes of live weight poultry meat. After the whole capacity increase project is completed in 2013, this number will rise to 140 000 tonnes.

CEO of Cherkizovo Group, Sergey Mikhailov commented: "By launching new sites we continue to realize our capacity increase project in the poultry segment. We aim to increase not only the quantity, but to further enhance the quality of our products. That is why we only invest in the most up to date, technologically advanced production projects."