Early November export/import developments on Russia's seafood market

One of them is connected with changed prices for bottomfish species. More specifically, making use of weak USD exchange rate Norwegian traders have slightly increased their bottomfish prices, which has led to some embarrassment among the UK and European traders who have failed to offer competitive prices in USD equivalent. At the same time, in the first days of November 2009 the Norwegian krone has been gradually weakening as compared to the USD dollar, therefore some traders forecast that the prices will level out again. In view of soon exhaustion of capture quotas for bottomfish species the market has been showing emerging boom but that will hardly lead to large price increases, because the main buyer of cod less than 2.5kg is China and due to the long way to China the fish products are sometimes delivered to the country within more than one month after the purchase thus preventing from dramatic fluctuations connected with short supply of fish.

As for pelagic fish, the supply on the Russian market has been represented by herring only. Herring has approached the Norwegian shores and the Norwegian wetfish purse seiners have been landing a lot of herring for onshore processing so that the Russian vessels producing sea frozen herring could hardly compete with them. However, that seems to be no problem in Russia where the demand for herring is feverish so that in Murmansk herring is sold out when it is not yet landed to the port.

Foreign traders have been showing interest in purchasing blue whiting in Russia, but active fishery of the species has not year taken off and the practice of the recent 3-4 years shows that they will be hardly able to offer prices higher than those of domestic traders.