Russia’s top container firm eyes Asian trade

MOSCOW: As Russian trade flows dry up in the west, TransContainer, the country’s largest freight container operator, aims to invest more than US$300mil (RM1.35bil) in the east as China leads a recovery in Asian imports and exports.a

TransContainer plans to spend around 20 billion roubles (US$330mil or RM1.48bil) this year on rail cars, containers and terminals to account for growing trade in eastern Russia, said the company’s first vice-president Victor Markov, said on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.

“Over nearly the last three months – June, July and August – we were seeing a recovery of export-import flows, and at the moment flows are more or less balanced,” said Markov.

“The last two months have shown convincing growth,” he said, pointing to August volumes of 94,000 20ft equivalent units (TEU), a measure of container capacity, at land border crossings and far eastern ports, 50% more than the same month last year.

The shift in trading patterns follow a collapse in Russian imports after Moscow sent troops into Ukraine on Feb 24, with a combination of sanctions and a mass corporate exodus crippling trade. Moscow calls its actions in Ukraine a “special military operation”.

But imports from China have since recovered, rising 22% year-on-year (y-o-y) in July in US dollar terms after four straight months of declines.

Russia’s exports to China jumped 80% in May, 56% in June and 49% in July, compared with the same months of 2021.

In the first seven months of the year, exports at Russia’s northwestern ports fell 51% y-o-y and imports dropped 46%, Markov said.

But in the far east, he said, imports were up 7.5% in that period and exports had risen 38% y-o-y. At the Zabaikalsk border crossing with China, imports were up 28% and at border posts with Kazakhstan they grew by 141%.

“Imports are now the main driver of growth and we look at volumes for eight months, then import volumes have grown 12.5% last year.”

Exports are being partially redirected to countries in the Asia-Pacific region, he said.

TransContainer in March predicted that the exit of container shipping companies would result in a shortage of containers, expecting about 30% of containers on the Russian market to be withdrawn from circulation. — Reuters