A new assembly plant for Iranian- designed cars has been inaugurated by Iranian Minister of Industries Ali-Reza Tahmasbi in the Belorussian capital of Minsk, the official IRNA news agency reported on Saturday.

The assembly line for "Samands," a model of passenger car of Iran's Khodro Industrial Group, the biggest automobile manufacturing company in the Middle East, was inaugurated in the Unison Company in Minsk on Friday.

The plant will assemble up to 1,000 Iranian-designed "Samands" car by year's end, and up to 6,000 by next year, according to the report.

Khodro, which "had mapped out plans for entering East European markets since five years ago," picked the Belorus's Unison Company to carry out the project "taking into account the country's valuable car manufacturing experience", Tahmasbi was quoted as saying.

The Iranian minister also predicted that the car assembly line would boost the annual volume of trade exchanges between Iran and Belarus to 100 million U.S. dollars, the report said.

Belorussian Minister of Industry Anatoly Rusetsky, who also attended the inaugural ceremony, hailed the importance of bolstering economic relations with Iran and noted that the two countries were cooperating on several joint projects.

Source: Xinhua