Russian automaker AvtoVAZ plans to build a plant to assemble Lada cars in Venezuela, the South American company’s president Hugo Chavez said at the weekend.
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The plans have been around for a while. Last November, Bloomberg News said AvtoVAZ and Sollers had agreed to build an assembly plant in Venezuela.
The automakers signed a memorandum of understanding with Venezuela’s Corporacion de Industrias Intermedias (Corpivensa) but Russia’s Ministry of Industry and Trade gave no details of the venture’s size or timing.
Negotiations between AvtoVAZ and Sollers (formerly Severstal-Avto) began last July, according to earlier reports, when a delegation of top-ranked Russian bureaucrats and entrepreneurs visted Venezuela.
One of the delegation, AvtoVAZ president Boris Aleshin told Kommersant at the time that, in tandem with Sollers CEO Vladimir Shvetsov, he had negotiated with Venezuela’s authorities the construction of an automobile plant there.
If the deal went ahead, it would be the first time Russian automakers had cooperated to jointly build an overseas assembly plant, Kommersant noted last July.
