Moscow, Russia (Ports Europe) January 5, 2025 – Forced by Western sanctions to consolidate transport and logistics businesses and bring them under state control, the Kremlin initiated at the end of December 2024 the creation of a joint venture between the giant RosAtom State Corporation, TransMashHolding (TMH) and businessman Sergey Shishkarev.
The ambitious goal of the merger is to “form a national leader in the Russian transport and logistics market and one of the leading players in the international logistics market, including an operator of new international transport and trade corridors”.
Initially, TMH will buy out 1% of the Delo company from its founder and largest shareholder Sergey Shishkarev. The share of the Rosatom State Corporation in Delo company will remain at 49%. Upon completion of the deal, TMH will nominate a CEO of the company. Surprisingly, Shishkarev, with close links to the Kremlin, was never a subject of U.S. or European Union sanctions…
The deal is to be closed by the end of 2025, merging all of their logistics assets. In the future, the JV plans to attract new strategic or institutional investors to the company’s capital. No financial details of the JV creation were disclosed.
The Delo Group of Companies was established in 1993. Initially, its main business was concentrated in Russia’s largest port of Novorossiysk, the hometown of its founder, businessman Sergei Shishkarev (he is 125th in Russia’s Forbes rating with an estimated fortune of $1 billion in 2024).
At the end of 2017, the group purchased 30.75% of the port holding Global Ports from Transportation Investments Holding. According to the London Stock Exchange, where Global Port was traded, this package was worth $238 million.
At that time, another 30.75% of the port holding belonged to the Danish conglomerate A.P. Moeller – Maersk A/S, 9% each was controlled by Ilibrinio Establishment and Polozio Enterprises, 20.5% of the shares were in free float.
After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the imposition of Western sanctions against Moscow, Maersk sold its stake and Delo consolidated 100% of the shares of Global Ports, the largest operator of sea container terminals in Russia.
The company owns container and multifunctional terminals throughout Russia (Petrolesport, First Container Terminal, Ust-Luga Container Terminal and Moby Dick in the Baltic, Eastern Stevedoring Company in the Far East) and two container terminals in Finland, in Helsinki and Kotka (managed by Multi-Link Terminals Oy, JV Global Ports and CMA Terminals).
It also manages the Yanino Logistics Park dry terminal near St. Petersburg. The largest shareholder in Global Ports is the Delo group of companies belonging to Sergei Shishkarev and RosAtom.
A significant expansion of Delo’s business was the purchase of 50% plus two shares of TransContainer from state-owned Russian Railways at the end of 2019. Delo won the auction, paying 60.3 billion rubles (around 4.5 billion euro) for TransContainer’s share.
Soon after the purchase of TransContainer, 30% of the Delo management company was bought out by the state corporation Rosatom through AtomEnergoProm. The purpose of the deal, as the parties explained at the time, was to develop a new logistics direction and create a platform for launching a global international transport and logistics business.
“The main areas of cooperation will be the development of international multimodal and transit transportation on the Asia-Europe-Asia route, including through the Arctic Northern Sea Route (NSR). RosAtom became the infrastructure operator of the NST in 2018)”. Subsequently, Rosatom’s share in the management company grew to 49%.
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Background
Currently, DeloPorts (owns stevedoring terminals for handling containers and grain in the Novorossiysk seaport), the multimodal integrator of logistics services Ruscon, and the Sakhalin Shipping Company (SASCO, which has 12 vessels of various types, from container ships to port tugs) are also in Delo’s portfolio.
The group’s companies control nine sea (with a total capacity of 3.9 million TEUs) and 47 land (3.7 million TEUs) terminals, and 41,000 railway container platforms, according to Delo’s own data.
RosAtom has been expanding its portfolio of logistics assets for several years now. In addition to the Delo Group, at the end of 2023, by decree of President Vladimir Putin, 92.4% of the state-owned shares of the logistics giant FESCO were transferred to the authorised capital of RosAtom.
In early 2023, this package was seized from the previous owners – Ziyavudin Magomedov, Mikhail Rabinovich and Andrey Severilov – at the request of the Prosecutor General’s Office. The remaining 7.5% is a free float.
Another logistics asset of RosAtom is International Container Logistics (MKL), a joint venture with DP World from the United Arab Emirates. In MKL, the state corporation owns 51% through AtomEnergoProm and its subsidiary RosAtom Logistics.
In September 2024, Rosatom announced that it was consolidating all of its logistics assets, including projects with the Delo Group and DP World, into a single logistics division. It (as well as FESCO directly) was headed by Pyotr Ivanov, formerly deputy head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service and a top manager of Russian Railways structures.
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