Mechanical engineering

The first production units of machinery and equipment for mining appeared on the territory of Kuzbass almost 200 years ago. The oldest city of Kuzbass, Novokuznetsk (1618), did not receive its name 'Kuznetsk' ('smiths' town') accidentally: the local population was very good at blacksmithing: a large sovereign's smithy was built there to process iron.

The formation of engineering industry in Kuzbass took place in the 1930s - early 1940s. At that time the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR adopted a resolution on the construction of the Yurga machine-building plant.

By the end of 1942, significant human and material resources were concentrated in Yurga due to evacuated equipment and specialists from the territories captured by the Nazis, and as early as in February 1943, the first guns manufactured at the plant were tested and immediately sent to the front.

During the Great Patriotic War, due to merging with evacuated factories, small mining equipment repair plants in Anzhero-Sudzhensk, Prokopyevsk and Leninsk-Kuznetskiy, and electromechanical works in Kemerovo, Kiselevsk and Belovo  grew into large enterprises: "Kuzbasselement", "Kuzbasselektromotor", and "Electromashina". During the war years, more than 20 types of mining machines and mechanisms were mastered at the mining engineering plants of Kuzbass.

Today mechanical engineering is one of the basic branches of the Kuzbass economy. It includes a wide range of various types of products:

• mining equipment.
• transporting and handling equipment
• road construction and communal equipment
• agricultural equipment
• chemical equipment
• instrument making and weighing equipment
• fulfillment of the defense order

Engineering industry accounts for almost 10% of the volume of shipped products of Kuzbass manufacturing industries.