Itelma scientific development and productionsubsidiary IVK in Gorodets (a town 80 km from Nizhny Novgorod), plans to invest more than 1 billion rubles ($41m) to produce automotive wiring harnesses.

In September the company commissioned the first production stage and plans to commission the other four and to increase production capacity up to 500,000 wiring harness sets a year by the end of 2010.

The factory is fitted with modern equipment supplied by Komax (Switzerland), Telsonic (Switzerland), Mecal (Italy), Divmac (Portugal) and currently produces 80,000 sets of a year. The products manufactured are delivered to AvtoVAZ for use in assembling its Lada Priora.