Russians look for gains from major expo

The resilience seen in trade flows between China and Russia amid the pandemic disruptions has boosted confidence among Russian enterprises looking ahead to a major import-export expo in Shanghai.

With the bilateral trade having held up well over the past year, more Russian business people have flagged their intentions to showcase their businesses at the fourth China International Import Expo, or CIIE, a Russian senior official said on Wednesday. The event will be held from Nov 5 to 10.

Alexander Dianov, director of the Department for Bipartite Cooperation Development at Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development, said the country’s trade with China had maintained a high-level of development, with strong investment flows, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

He expressed confidence in the negotiations between the two governments for a Roadmap for the High-Quality Development of Sino-Russian Trade in Goods and Services by 2024 to achieve a target of $200 billion in annual bilateral trade by then.

Dianov was speaking during an online promotion for the fourth edition of the CIIE.

Thousands of exhibitors and hundreds of thousands of buyers from across the globe have descended on Shanghai for the expo for the past three years.

With its growing exhibition space and influence, the CIIE is becoming a must-attend event for many Russian businesses every November.

For those Russian companies in the field of intelligent industry and information technology that are looking to tap the huge Chinese market, the expo has become a prime opportunity, participants in the promotional event were told.

Alexei Dakhnovsky, Russia’s trade representative in China, said industry cooperation is one of the most important elements in bilateral cooperation, noting that industrial products make a huge contribution to the trade flows between the neighbors.

“Russia and China have deeply pushed the cooperation in the long-range wide-body aircraft, heavy-lift helicopters and car manufacturing, and there is potential in cooperation on machine manufacturing and high-tech innovation,” he said.

Dakhnovsky said Russia sees the CIIE as an important platform to advance industrial cooperation with China.

According to China’s Ministry of Commerce, trade flows with Russia in 2020 reached $107.77 billion, slipping by just 2.9 percent from the year before despite the upheavals caused by the coronavirus. Two-way trade in agricultural trade reached a record $5.55 billion that year.