As part of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, on June 18, 2010, JSC TransContainer and the GEFCO Group signed a memorandum of intent to create a joint venture to develop multimodal transport between European countries and the Russian Federation. The document was signed by General Director of JSC TransContainer Petr Baskakov and Christian Zbylut, Vice President of the GEFCO Group.

The main objective of the joint venture will be to provide customers with comprehensive freight forwarding services for the delivery of goods by rail in containers, including the organization of terminal handling of goods and the provision of door-to-door services. According to the document, partners will develop optimal routes for the delivery of goods, types and methods of providing freight forwarding services to the benefit of customers.
According to Petr Baskakov, “preliminary starting volumes of transportation can be 2-2.5 thousand TEUs per month.  OJSC TransContainer owns logistics technologies that provide a certain cargo flow from Russia to foreign countries. In turn, GEFCO has relevant developments in the field of organizing cargo deliveries to Russia.  By combining our competencies, we will be able to offer customers a qualitatively new diversified service.”

“The creation of a joint venture is a very significant and large-scale project for us, so the best partners have been selected for its implementation. It is a great honor for us to work with Russia, in particular, with OJSC TransContainer, which is fully and efficiently responsible for the service and its part of the project,” Christian Zbylut commented on the signing of the memorandum.

OJSC TransContainer is the leading railway container operator in Russia and provides 64% of railway container traffic. JSCo RZD owns 85% minus one share of the company, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development – 9.25%, investment funds Moore Capital Management LLC and GLG Emerging Markets Fund – 2.5% each, Troika Dialog Investments Ltd – 0.75%.
GEFCO Group is one of the 10 largest logistics companies in Europe, with a turnover of more than 3 billion euros, 400 branches in 80 countries and a staff of 10,000 employees. GEFCO is a leading global provider of integrated logistics services for industrial enterprises, including component deliveries to plants, just-in-time deliveries, distribution and storage of finished products worldwide, as well as high value-added storage services. The GEFCO Group is part of the Peugeot-Citroen Group, and about 25% of its activities are aimed at managing Peugeot logistics around the world.