MINSK, 9 February (BelTA) – The Belarusian Universal Commodity Exchange (BUCE) and the Export Support Center of the Udmurt Republic of Russia held a videoconference on 8 February to discuss ways to increase trade between Belarus and Russia's Udmurtia with the help of BUCE's trading platform, BelTA learned from BUCE's press service.
Taking part in the videoconference were representatives of Udmurtia's government, the Belarusian Embassy in Russia, and the Trade Representative Office of the Russian Federation in Belarus. The participants took stock of the trade and economic cooperation in 2020 and outlined priorities for 2021. Special attention was given to cooperation in exchange trading, which has the potential to become one of the key drivers of the bilateral trade growth, BUCE's press service noted.
“Belarus-Udmurtia trade amounted to $184.5 million in 2020, up by 12.5% over 2019. However, there is still untapped potential, including in exchange trading, which might become an effective instrument for increasing trade and expanding the range of supplied products that are in demand in the markets of Belarus and Udmurtia,” BUCE's press service quoted Head of the Belarusian Embassy Office in Ufa Artur Karpovich as saying.
Trade Representative of Russia to Belarus Yury Zolotarev was also in favor of using the commodity exchange. “Over the years of its existence, BUCE has proved to be an effective cross-border trade mechanism, which is used by thousands of Belarusian and Russian companies every day. Every tenth company accredited at BUCE is from Russia, which demonstrates the high level of involvement of the Russian business. Unfortunately, companies from Udmurtia do not have a strong presence on BUCE, but I believe that our joint efforts will help put Udmurtia in the lead in terms of trading on BUCE. Everything is in place for this,” Yury Zolotarev stressed.
Deputy Chairman of the Udmurt Republic Government Mikhail Khomich also confirmed the interest in advancing cooperation with BUCE. He expressed readiness to help raise awareness of BUCE's advantages among companies of Udmurtia. “Over the past two years, Udmurtia has become one of the most export-oriented regions of Russia and is currently first in terms of the growth rate of non-energy products export. As for cooperation with Belarus, we still managed to increase both export to Belarus and import of Belarusian products in 2020 despite the downturn in business activity. We would like to perform even better this year and we hope that the Belarusian Universal Commodity Exchange will help us achieve this goal. For starters we should inform Udmurtia's companies about BUCE and its advantages, and they will decide for themselves how and to what extent to use it,” Mikhail Khomich noted.
