Mining haul truck major BELAZ hosted a delegation from the Kemerovo region on April 10 at the factory in Zhodino. It included representatives of the Kemerovo Region government,  managers of CJC Siberian Business Alliance and BELAZ service centre, KuzbassBelAuto. During the visit, General Director Petr Parkhomchik revealed that the company is well along the road of completing a mining haul truck with a 450 t payload capacity, which would dwarf the current largest trucks on the market such as BELAZ’s own 360 t 75601, plus the Liebherr T282C and Caterpillar 797F, both at 363 t. The company plans to assemble the first 450 t model in 2013.

The delegation also saw in the factory a BELAZ 75600 320 t truck that is to be exhibited in Las Vegas at MINExpo, after which it will be shipped to a coal operation in Colombia. BELAZ also states that it continues to work on product promotion for new markets and is scheduled to supply equipment to both Peru and Brazil in 2012 in addition to continuing exports of BELAZ trucks to Chile.

Finally, the president of Russian holding company Siberian Business Alliance, Mikhail Fedjaev, stated that a production line of BELAZ dump trucks with a payload capacity of 90 t in the Kuzbass is under consideration. The reason for the move would be to allow the large demand for smaller capacity trucks for coal mining in the Kemerovo Region to be met by the new capacity, thereby freeing up more production capacity at Zhodino for larger dump trucks of 130 t and above. At present the Russian market demand in this class amounts to some 150 -200 units per year.