Russian refrigerated fish logistics offers plenty of room for business development

There was a heated discussion at one of the round tables at Expofish concerning future of Russia's domestic fish logistics. The opinions differed widely but it is clear that this field of business needs quite a bit of development while offering potential lucrative gains for a bold investor, according to Russian Fish Insider Report published by http://www.megafishnet.com/.

Representatives of Refservice Company (a major operator of specialized refrigerated railway cars) repeated once again that their rolling stock is outdated, and in 2015 most refrigerated "sections" (sets of 5-9 refrigerated cars and a compressor wagon) will be written off.  They demanded the Government to invest into building of a new park of such cars for them.  The idea was not supported by participants.  Business representatives would not understand why taxpayers should build new equipment for the company, and they even wondered how the company managed to exist at a competitive market for five years, while showing losses only.  Peter Savchuk, Nakhodka BAMR General Director asked why the company stuck to outdated technology surprisingly rejecting the new one, used by the other part of humanity - why the biggest transporter of refrigerated cargo doesn't participate in establishing of a network of standard container logistic in Russia.  No answer was given.

It is worth mentioning that the existing "sections" can't keep temperature lower than minus 15C, with particular problems in summer.  It makes the problem even more acute.

The idea was taken up by Lyudmila Talabaeva, Dalrybport General Director (Vladivostok).  This year her storages used RF containers for 30% of cargo.  She insisted that Dalrybport provides very cheap good quality service, though not everybody agreed.  As Savchuk said, delivery of cargo from Vladivostok to Europe can be done either stuffing containers in Vladivostok, or in Busan/Qingdao.  Business doesn't really care about Dalrybport cost structure, but it well knows that total price of fish delivery via Korea or China is at least US$100 lower.  There are even stranger things.  It is impossible to deliver a RF container from Vladivostok to many places in Russia.  It can't be trucked, but is to be reloaded to another container, or to a truck, what makes logistics even less attractive.

So, the problem of establishing a nation-wide container operator once raised by http://www.megafishnet.com/ received a new confirmation on an important industry forum.