[THE INVESTOR] Hotel Lotte on Nov. 5 announced that it has started operating a new five-star hotel in Samara, Russia.

Lotte Hotel Samara has 193 rooms and its suite room spans 145 square meters, the biggest in the area. It also has a banquet hall with a capacity of 1,400 people.

“With this launch, we plan to expand our business of operating hospitality units for foreign proprietors,” Hotel Lotte CEO Kim Jung-hwan said in a statement.

This is the third project that Hotel Lotte is running for hotel owners overseas. In 2013, it began operating Lotte City Hotel Tashkent Palace‎ for an Uzbekistan owner and started operating Lotte Hotel Yangon in Myanmar last year.

The company also signed a hotel management agreement in 2014 with a local operator in China to be in charge of all operations and provide its brand for a commission. The first hotel in China is under preparation to open in 2020.

Meanwhile, Hotel Lotte also has some hotels overseas that it fully owns. It has three hotels in Russia, including Lotte Hotel Moscow, Lotte Hotel St. Petersburg and Lotte Hotel Vladivostok.

By Song Seung-hyun (ssh@heraldcorp.com)