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Sergey Shishkarev - The Azov-Black Sea basin became key transport and logistics hub in European part of country
The Azov-Black Sea basin became the key transport and logistics center in the European part of Russia due to timely investments in port and logistics infrastructure, increase of ferry services and launch of new sea routes. On October 21, Sergey Shishkarev, Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Delo Group, spoke at the panel session of the "Made in Russia" international forum, organized by the Russian Export Center.
In his opinion, it was caused, on the one hand, by the decrease of cargo turnover in the ports of the Baltic basin, and on the other hand, the Azov-Black Sea basin proved to be infrastructurally prepared to receive the increased cargo flow. “In the Northwest, the volumes are stagnating, they have decreased significantly since the beginning of the year, we are already facing a decline of more than 50%, particularly in container turnover.
It would be a great achievement to stabilize the volumes in the south of Russia and maybe even increase them slightly.
Our container terminal NUTEP in Novorossiysk not only maintained its throughput at a level of 2021, but its share in the total container turnover in the country increased by 2.8 percentage points to 12.7%," - said Sergey Shishkarev.
The Azov-Black Sea basin must constantly develop at an outstripping pace regardless of crisis situations. Given an example, Sergey Shishkarev turned to KSK Grain Terminal. Reconstruction of this terminal was completed in 2021 with the launch of the most high-capacity and deep-water berth №40A. It is equipped to accept grain-carrying vessels with a capacity of over 100 thousand tons. The investment decisions made by the Group several years ago have provided additional annual handling volumes of up to 6 million tons of grain.
According to the Head of the Board of Group, it is impossible to operate reliably in sea basins, relying only on foreign sea cargo carriers. This year the Group acquired the Sakhalin Shipping Company (SASCO) and actively develops new sea routes: “Today the Group operates 28 vessels; we have organized our own routes to three ports in Turkey and India. We have reached Israel and we work with the Emirates and Saudi Arabia in a test mode via Istanbul.
I hope in the next few months we will launch a service to Vietnam,” he said.
Sergey Shishkarev emphasized the importance of the project to intensify the freight ferry service between the Republic of Turkey and Russia via the port of Novorossiysk. He called it “an alternative route for the road freight delivery to the Russian Federation”.
It provides for responsive delivery of heavy vehicles with export and import goods, avoiding queues at overland checkpoints.
Thanks to the outstanding organization of the test ferry processing at the NUTEP terminal, with the support of the Russian Export Center, the Ministry of Transport and Rospotrebnadzor, the Group intends to increase the number of processed trucks: “All bottlenecks are identified, and we aim to process 1 ferry with 100 cars per 1 day”, the Founder of the Group said.
In addition, according to the Head of Board of the Delo Group, the launch of such a route is a reason to “raise to a new level the operations with automobile freight” and to think about the development of piggy-back transportations, at least for distances over one thousand kilometers. This will reduce wear and tear on road infrastructure and the environmental footprint of trucking.
Sergey Shishkarev stressed the importance of the Novorossiysk transport hub integrated development – both the road and railway infrastructure, where “the decisions to increase the throughput capacity of the Novorossiysk transport hub from the current 25.7 million tons to 60 million tons are actively and promptly made”.
Considering that 70% of cargoes are delivered to the port by road transport, the project of building the bypass road “Tsemdolina - Portovaya street” is of particular importance: “The Delo Group is ready to be participants of the public-private partnership and to act as a beneficiary of this project together with Gazprombank. We expect that in the near future the Government decides on this project, and we will start an active implementation phase of this project”.
Previously, on September 6, 2022, the Delo Group, Bamtonnelstroy-Most and Gazprombank signed an agreement of intent to participate in the “Tsemdolina-Novorossiysk” port road construction. Concluding his speech, Sergey Shishkarev highlighted the role of the international transport corridor “North-South” under the current conditions and proposed to consider Novorossiysk as a “route zero” in it.
About the Company
Delo Group is Russian transportation and logistics holding, operating its own fleet and managing sea container terminals in the Azov-Black Sea, Baltic and Far Eastern basins, a network of railway container terminals, a fleet of containers and fitting platforms. The parent company of the Group is Delo Management Company.
The Group's stevedoring business includes DeloPorts holding and Global Ports, a leading container terminal operator. The transport and logistics business of the Group is made up of the multimodal transport operator RUSCON and the intermodal container operator TransContainer. The shipping business is represented by the Sakhalin Shipping Company (SASCO), is one of the biggest Russian shipping companies.