August 25 - Kuehne + Nagel has opened a new facility in Sochi, Russia and anticipates that the new facility will be directly involved in providing logistics and transportation services to official contractors of the Olympic Winter Games 2014.

As a forthcoming host of the Winter Games, the city of Sochi has embarked on the construction of venues and local sports facilities along with the modernisation and expansion of hotels, residential areas and businesses in the area. A total of 63 publicly funded projects are planned for completion in 2012 and require some 100 million tons of infrastructure materials to be transported, which includes a good deal of heavy and over-dimensional project cargoes.

Located in the district of Adler, in close proximity to Sochi International airport and a new sea-river port which is currently under construction, the Kuehne + Nagel facility is positioned at the hub of all construction and logistics activity.

"We have been in contact with the Russian Olympic Organising Committee since early in 2008 and consequently became aware of the first companies to have been awarded the official contracts," comments Perry Neumann, managing director of Kuehne + Nagel Russia. "We have appointed a dedicated Olympics Executive, Irina Erokhina, who understands the challenges faced by Sochi City in detail." Irina is tasked with coordinating worldwide shipments for the project and also manage the time-critical site construction logistics.

* In the next issue of Heavy Lift & Project Forwarding International, we take a comprehensive look at the handling of OOG and heavy cargoes in the Russian marketplace.