by Gilles Guillaume
PARIS (Reuters) – Michelin has abandoned the idea of selling its Russian operations to its local management due to difficulties with the project and has instead entered into discussions with a local player, a spokesman for the company told Reuters. tire manufacturer.
Like many companies present on Russian soil, the Clermont group announced last June, a few months after the invasion of Ukraine, its intention to sell its activities in Russia to its local management by the end of 2022.
“We are now in discussions for a takeover by a local player,” the spokesperson said. “We abandoned the track of a takeover by local management because the file was too complicated.”
The spokesperson did not comment on the identity or nature of the actor with whom Michelin is in discussions, simply indicating that the group hoped to conclude those “soon”.
Michelin employed around 1,000 people in Russia last year, including 750 at the Davydovo plant near Moscow.
This site, opened nearly twenty years earlier, produced between 1.5 and two million tires a year before the crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, and Russia then weighed around 2% of Michelin’s total turnover.
The Russian daily Kommersant reported on Tuesday that the French group had found a buyer for its Russian factory in the person of the local tire distributor Power International-shiny, and that the operation was close to being concluded.
(Gilles Guillaume, edited by Matthieu Protard)
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