Customs clearance specialist for cars and vehicles, Russian Transport Lines (RTL), says it no longer considers its home country as emerging, although it concedes some infrastructure issues still remain to be resolved.
RTL operates at several ports across Russia, including St Petersburg, Ust-Luga, Novoshakhtinsky and Zarubino in the country’s Far East, as well as a network of transit warehouses.
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“As for Russia, we are not emerging any more at all,” Russian Transport Lines chairman, Konstantin Skovoroda, told last week’s Automotive Supply Chain Magazine conference at the Silverstone racing circuit in the UK.
“Now, OEMs working in Russia choose several terminals very well equipped with IT systems. It [Russia] is a rather flat structure of sales…even a little bit down.
“On the other hand, we are not a market of imported vehicles any more compared with other years. Now we have finished vehicle production in almost all parts of our country, for example, St Petersburg, Kalingrad, Kaluga, Togliatti, Vladivostok.”
Part of that shift to a country that has very much emerged from its past was emphasised by Skovoroda, who highlighted the need to develop infrastructure in the vast Russian Federation that can take a lorry driver two weeks to make the journey to Novosibirsk in winter.
“For very many years, we talk about these infrastructure problems we have from the point of view to develop, develop, develop,” said the RTL chairman.
“Maybe we can be a growth market compared to Europe.”
That infrastructure will need to address the subtle change from less reliance on imported vehicles to domestically manufactured models, with Skovoroda noting official Russian forecasts were predicting such a development.
“Whatever we are doing now is changing the structure of our fleet and really trying to establish service in new areas,” he said.
