Kraz

Kraz was founded on 31 August 1945 when the People's Commissariat for Transportion Routes issued a warrant to build a mechanical bridge plant in Kremenchug. The first brick was laid in the plant foundation in 1946 and during the next 8 years it produced about 600 bridges with the total length of about 27 km for use on the Dnieper, Moscow, Dniester, Volga and Daugava rivers etc. In 1956 the plant has manufactured combine harvesters and other farming machines. The Kremenchug combine plant has produced 11,000 agricultural machines in the first two years of its existence.

On April 17th, 1958 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to build a plant for heavy-duty vehicle production in Kremenchug. Heavy-duty truck manufacture was transferred from the Yaroslav automobile plant or YaAZ. the first two KrAZ-222 dump trucks were assembled from imported units and components on 10 April 1959, and by 1961 the plant exported over 500 hundred vehicles in 26 countries of the world such as Argentina, Afghanistan, Bulgaria, China, India, Vietnam etc. KrAZ was awarded the Order of Lenin in January 1971 for completion of the five-year plan ahead of schedule and successful developments of new truck models. On January 15th, 1976 the plant became "AvtoKrAZ".

By 1986 the company's yearly production output totalled 30655 vehicles. The Kremenchug automobile plant was registered as an Open Joint Stock Company in 1996. The holding company "AvtoKrAZ" was registered in 1999. 2002 witnessed the start of privatization with the "AvtoKrAZ" block of stock being purchased by a joint Ukrainian-German enterprise "Mega-Motors". In 2003 AvtoKrAZ opened vehicle assembly plants in Russia and Vietnam. In 2004 "AvtoKrAZ' was awarded an order for 2200 KrAZ vehicles to be delivered to Iraq. AvtoKrAZ received an ISO 9001:2000 for quality control.

In January 2006 the 800,000th truck was assembled at the KrAZ main assembly plant. In October of the same year HC "AvtoKrAZ" won the first prize among 100 Ukrainian companies with the best rate of development according to the net profit growth pursuant to the results of rating "Top 100 Most dynamic companies"