A leading Russian crab exporter is planning direct marketing campaigns in China to further drive its sales.
A spokesperson for the Russian Crab Company – which ships to traditional distributors rather than using online portals – told SeafoodSource the company is looking beyond the COVID-19 crisis to grow sales in its biggest market for live product.
A marketing campaign is “our next step,” according to Vladimir Touloupov, an advisor to Russian Crab Company’s marketing and sales arm.
Consumer-facing marketing campaigns have long been used by exporters – most prominently, by the Norwegian Seafood Council – to raise the profile and thus the pricing power of premium seafood products in the Chinese market. But the B2C push from Russian Crab Company will mark a departure for the Russian seafood sector, which traditionally operates on a B2B basis.
China took 64 percent of the Russian Crab Company’s live product in the first three quarters of 2020, while the U.S. is the main market for the firm’s cooked-frozen product, Touloupov said. The firm is updating its website “specially for our customers” and will participate at Seafood Expo North America, Seafood Expo Global, and the China Fisheries and Seafood Expo next year, he said.
The firm ships its crab by railway from Russian ports Zarubino and Slavaynka to Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, which border Russia, where live crabs are temporarily stored in water and later delivered to buyers in major cities.
The shipment of live crabs has grown by 80 percent year-on-year in 2020, even though access to China was locked off for several weeks, when the country closed its borders in January to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Trade has been stymied somewhat by the coronavirus situation, with Chinese authorities now giving “serious concern” to frozen products and also frozen product packaging or sea containers and vessels with port calls to China, Touloupov said, echoing similar complaints about a slowdown in Chinese Customs processing times. But he said while the company’s products are checked on arrival at the border, not a single issue related to COVID-19 has been noted. The Russian Crab Company’s “responsible attitude to product quality and contractual obligations gives us a reputation as a reliable partner,” Touloupov said.
On the subject of COVID-19, Russian Crab Company has spent USD 500,000 (EUR 427,000) on weekly testing of all employees and equipment including thermal imagers, Touloupov noted.
In the future, the company also wants to expand sales of live crab in South Korea and Southeast Asia, while also looking to Europe, Singapore, and Australia for cooked and frozen sales, Touloupov said.
Photo courtesy of Baloncici/Shutterstock
