PrimCrab, a company partnered with the Russian Fishery Company – which recently moved its headquarters to Vladivostok – is hoping to snag a larger portion of the shellfish market in China, despite the logistical challenges faced by the company.
According to Petr Podllesnyi, sales manager for PrimCrab, the company has already seen 100 percent growth between 2016 and 2018, and expects that number to increase in the coming years.
“I think the next year it will also grow maybe 50 percent,” Podllesnyi told SeafoodSource.
Currently, PrimCrab has a significant market for snow crab inside China, but since the company acquired additional quota through Russia’s quota auctions – up to 13,000 tons of king crab – the company hopes to begin fostering the market for that product as well.
“Now it’s mainly snow crab, but for next year we will also have the king crab, blue king crab, brown crab, and some different kinds of snow crab,” Podllesnyi said.
The market for crab in China is robust, Podllesnyi said, but overcoming the logistical difficulties of moving product into the country is a major difficulty for the company. Only a few overland routes exist between Russia and China, greatly limiting the amount of product that can be moved into the country, he said.
“This border, per day, can pass only 12 cars with live crabs,” Podllesnyi said.
The majority of PrimCrab product, he added, is sold in Hunchun, the nearest city to the difficult border crossing between the two countries.
“We know all the customers in Hunchun,” Podllesnyi said.
Currently, PrimCrab does not have any method of shipping the product overseas, aside from its current vessels which are used to catch the crab. With the increases in quota the company recently gained, however, using those vessels to transport crab won’t be possible.
“The vessels are not enough to catch a lot of crab, so we prefer our catching vessels to be catching crab, not transporting it to other cities,” Podllesnyi said. “We need to catch all the quota – if you don’t catch all the quota, maybe next year they cut it.”
Even with all of the challenges, the market has so far been so positive that he predicts the company will continue to focus on developing new methods of getting product into China.
“We’re very optimistic,” Podllesnyi said. “The Chinese market demand year by year grows.”
Photo courtesy of Chris Chase/SeafoodSource
