MOSCOW: Russia’s Techsnabexport (Tenex) has said that it expects the value of its exports this year to outstrip that of 2014 by $500 million. The Rosatom subsidiary’s preliminary results for 2015 indicate that its revenue from the global market will be worth about $2.7 billion.
This year, Tenex has made 65 deliveries of uranium products to customers in 14 countries and signed 19 new contracts with 13 customers from nine countries. The total volume of its long-term orders portfolio “at constant prices” is estimated at nearly $20 billion.
The company this year started regular use of a new uranium product transport route to the Far East via Primorye Territory’s Vostochny Seaport. It implemented six shipments of uranium products to customers in the region. As part of the development of transport and logistics in its “western sector”, in July it made a pilot shipment of enriched uranium to Germany and Sweden via the seaport of Ust-Luga.
In order “to address enterprise-wide challenges”, the company this year raised a “pre-export” syndicated loan of $300 million over three years from Deutsche Bank AG, JSC Nordea Bank and Société Générale SA.
Another highlight this year was its takeover of affiliate Internexco GmbH “to optimize the distribution network”, it said. Tenex said in June that it expects to increase its share of the global market in products for the front-end of the nuclear fuel cycle by 10% in the next 15 years, thanks to the integrated nature of Rosatom’s subsidiaries.
Tenex general director Ludmila Zalimskaya said the uranium enrichment company could not only draw on its 40-year history, but also work closely with uranium miner ARMZ and nuclear fuel manufacturer TVEL. “The sum contribution of each company will lead us to the desired result – a market share of 40% by 2030,” Zalimskaya said.
She added that, at the end of 2014, the total volume of Tenex’s portfolio of long-term orders was estimated to be nearly $23 billion. It completed 51 deliveries of uranium products to customers in 17 countries – 14 from the Americas, 10 from Europe and 13 from the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and Africa.
The new Far Eastern transport route has reduced the number of transit points, as well as the delivery time for uranium products to Japan and South Korea to three to four weeks, Zalimskaya said, compared with two or three months using traditional routes through the USA.
