OREANDA-NEWS. July 05, 2012. The Japanese carmaker Mitsubishi has chosen the port of Tallinn as its strategic partner in shipping goods to the Mitsubishi plant in Kaluga, Russia.

The chairman of the supervisory board of Port of Tallinn, Neinar Seli, told BNS that Mitsubishi informed the state owned port company in writing on Monday that the shipments will handled via the port of Tallinn.

He said that through logistics companies and operators approximately 200 containers would be moving to Russia weekly, amounting to roughly 30,000 containers a year.

The other contender for the Mitsubishi shipments aside from Tallinn was the port of Riga, whose representative said last week that the proposals made by Tallinn to Mitsubishi were considerably better than those made by Riga.

Seli described the decision of Mitsubishi as positive recognition. He said Mitsubishi's choice in favor of Tallinn was influenced by cooperation on carbon emission credits, which has boosted Estonia's reliability in the eyes of the Japanese industrial group. "And probably also that same transit chain, so that after a lot of scrutiny they preferred Estonia to Latvia," he said.

"Latvia did try to be in competition too using various rail tariffs and discounts, but what one based the decision on was cooperation of the entire chain and operators," said Seli.

"What matters is that this goods flow will come through our port and and the port will get its port fees on it, and that our development of so far has been noticed," he added. "One's definitely eyeing expanding the container terminal here too."

Mitsubishi is determined to triple its vehicle output in Russia and has decided to ship components to Russia via the Baltics.