Philip Morris, leader of the Ukrainian cigarette market, plans to inaugurate its new facility in the vicinity of Kharkiv in May 2006, said Leo McLoughlin, CEO of PM’s subsidiaries in Russia and Belarus and former head of PM Ukraine.

The investment in the project that has been under way since December 2003 has amounted to US$ 101 million to date, reports Ros Business Consulting news agency. The plant with a production capacity of 30 billion cigarettes per year has been constructed from scratch in the village of Rohan near Ukraine’s second largest city Kharkiv and is meant as a new production site for the former downtown facility owned by PM International since 1994. (vt)