The fact’s not lost on nations as diverse as China and Australia, both of whom are forming ever-closer trading relationships with Russia. In the final quarter of last year, China’s Premier Wen Jiabao visited Russia, and Vladimir Putin made the first-ever visit to Australia by a sitting Russian head of state.<\/p>\n
With China’s speeding growth, its trade with Russia is expected to top $40bn for 2007; it had reached $33bn by September.<\/p>\n
The Australian Trade Commission’s chief economist Tim Harcourt says people often forget that Russia’s a Pacific as well as European country; the Putin visit provided Australians with a chance to learn about the new Russia and the other emerging economies in eastern Europe and central Asia that formally made up the Soviet Bloc.<\/p>\n
“The Russian economy has achieved annual growth of around 7%, and looked beyond its key resource centres in oil and natural gas to build a broader economic base through increased international trade.”<\/p>\n
And increase it has. Mr Harcourt cites comments by Dan Tebbutt, Australia’s Senior Trade Commissioner in Moscow, who says Australia’s two-way trade with Russia grew to be worth A$719m (US$633.4m) in 2006. “Russia’s vast retail market is the tenth largest in the world. Meat exports are booming, with a 14-fold increase in beef, a three-fold increase in lamb, and wine sales up by 40%.” Mr Tebbutt also believes there are considerable opportunities for service providers in energy technology and infrastructure.<\/p>\n
But Mr Harcourt sounds a note of caution to companies keen to win a share of the increasing Russian trade. Though speaking primarily for the benefit of Australian companies his advice is worth listening to globally: “My general advice to exporters is that there are lots of opportunities in the new Russia – especially in mining, energy, banking and consumer goods. It is wise however, to seek government assistance as the ‘government badge’ still matters when doing business in Russia.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Although its easy to think of Russia and Eastern Europe seeking to trade with the west, such a figurative notion overlooks the geographic fact that its also a Pacific country, and therefore equally-well placed to trade with the east.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":6666,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-6665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6665"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6667,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6665\/revisions\/6667"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6665"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=6665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}