Baltic, Construction, Estonia, Forum, Good for Business, Latvia, Railways
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Friday, 26.04.2024, 18:35
Rail Baltica will essentially affect the construction market - experts
(From the left) Kaspars Pacēvičs, Eneli Liisma, Rene Vinkler, Raimonds Jansons. Photo: Andri Püvi / Arvamusfestival. |
“Because of
its immense size, Rail Baltica is on
the radar of large international contractors, primarily from Europe and maybe
even from China, because they are very active in the field of infrastructure
projects. Also recent acquisitions of Estonian building sector companies may be
preparations for the tender phase. The question is what the local, Baltic
companies will get and what others”, Eneli Liisma, Head
of Quality Management Department at AS
Merko Ehitus Eesti, said in the discussion panel organised by the construction
materials company Sakret.
Liisma
added that for the time being, Estonian companies are mostly interested
earthworks and resources in the quarries have been marked and logistics
prepared. But signal works and other specific tasks may be for larger companies
from Europe and the question is what kind of cooperation there would be.
Rene
Vinkler, Sales
Manager, Sakret OÜ noted that many
new quarries will be opened to provide sand, limestone and other materials for Rail Baltica. “I’m more concerned that
with opening new quarries, we are laying a burden on our natural resources and
therefore we should use more recycled materials, especially wood and concrete.
Estonia doesn’t have much experience of it, but in Western Europe recycled
materials are used and we should explored, to have consistent characteristics
and quality, the panellists found.
According
to Raimonds Jansons, Ambassador of Latvia in Estonia, Rail Baltica is an ongoing, real project
with tenders and preparations going on. “It’s not only a high-speed railway,
it’s a new economic corridor and will offer massive opportunities”. In the same
it poses a challenge to the job market when 13,000 construction workers are
needed for the project in the Baltics. The panellists found that Rail Baltica may be a driver to attract
labour force back from Finland, UK and other countries, to find employment at
home.
When the
moderator Kaspars Pacēvičs, CEO of Sakret OÜ, raised the topic of the planned tunnel between Helsinki
and Tallinn, Ambassador Jansons noted that the tunnel would be of course a
natural prolongation of Rail Baltica,
as it makes a whole corridor available for Finland and will be inevitably done
sooner or later.
The
discussion panel “Building trends in the Baltics in 2038” was held at the Opinion Festival in Paide in Swedbank’s Baltics stage. The panellists
discussed building sector’s upsides and downsides from “good times” to crisis
and assessed the outlook for the next decades.