TradeLens has begun operations in Russia

Dive Brief:

Maersk and the Russian Ministry of Transport launched the shipping company's blockchain-enabled TradeLens platform in the country on June 5, according to a press release. The partnership will start with a pilot in St. Petersburg, a major Russian port city, where Maersk recently opened a new cold-storage warehouse.
"The main result of the implementation of TradeLens, according to our expectations, should be an increase in the transparency of the contracting procedure by distributing information about supply and demand, conditions and operations between many participants of the transport and logistics processes," Yuriy Tsvetkov, Russia's deputy transport minister and head of the Federal Maritime and River Transport Agency, said in a press release.
In Russia, most of these operations and transactions are currently processed on paper. Now that TradeLens has a foothold in the country, the platform seeks to expand its digitalization and supply chain visibility capabilities to other Russian businesses, thereby lowering trade costs and improving overall efficiency, according to the release.

Dive Insight:

The TradeLens platform currently has more than 100 global participants and processes more than 10 million discrete shipping events and transactions a week, according to the press release. The addition of Russia, a major petroleum and natural gas exporter, and key trading partner of both China and the U.S., not to mention Europe, could go a long way toward establishing better trade efficiency and transparency now that the government is on board.

"All the parties which are responsible for documents flow such as: customs authorities, banks, public authorities will be involved in this platform," Maersk CEO Søren Skou commented, according to the Russian Federal Maritime and River Transport Agency. "The Memorandum which we have signed today grants to us the right to contact the Russian banks and also to connect them to this platform. We would like that all the banks participating in the global trade ideally participate in it."