OREANDA-NEWS. Corum and Metinvest, an international vertically integrated company, have signed a five-year strategic alliance agreement to strengthen their partnership, which will positively impact the businesses.

“Cooperation within the alliance means a strong opportunity to develop the relationship between Corum and Metinvest Group into a long-term strategic partnership by understanding our clients' issues and integrating into their business,” noted the CEO of Corum Group Yevgeniy Romashchin.

The agreement provides Corum with guaranteed annual orders of equipment and spare parts and a higher income from servicing, which helps to plan the load of capacities and boost the efficient consumption of resources.

For Metinvest, the agreement ensures better production efficiency, lower cost per tonne production, new machinery, improved safety and equipment reliability.

As part of the alliance, in 2014 the companies are going to launch five pilot projects to repair and service the equipment at Metinvest's ore production and processing plants, supply and install new spare parts and opencast mining machinery.

The projects will include production tests for new equipment at Metinvest's Krasnodonugol mines. Vladimir Knyazev, Krasnodonugol Technical Director, talked about advantages of the alliance in more detail: “The alliance will help us to order and receive equipment on time. It is important as in such way we will timely achieve the volumes required in production programme. In addition, Corum will soon provide us with a dedicated consignment inventory to minimise the downtime of the equipment needing some spare parts. Timely check-ups of the equipment by manufacturer will help to reduce any outage time. This will surely have a positive influence on production performance of Krasnodonugol and Metinvest Group as a whole.”

In May 2013, Corum signed another strategic alliance agreement with DTEK, Ukraine's largest energy business.