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378519
Thu, 08/27/2015 - 15:05
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Decrease in trade turnover between Russia and China not critical - ambassador

BEIJING, August 27. /TASS/. Trade turnover between Russia and China has decreased because of crisis in the global economy, but the task of reaching $100 billion in 2015 is not out of question, Russia’s Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to China Andrey Denisov told a joint press conference with Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Chen Gopin on Thursday. "Talking about our bilateral relations, the crisis has, of course, affected them. In the first half of 2015, trade turnover has fallen by a third, that is by 30 percent, and stood at slightly more than $31 billion. First of all, similar situations happened, relatively recently, in 2009, due to same reasons - because of crisis in the global economy. I would like to note two peculiarities here. Over the last 10 years, the volume of our bilateral trade has grown by 23 percent per year in average. This is a rare case in world trade. Last year, it reached almost $100 billion. This is a very considerable sum for the Russian economy. Secondly, the physical volume of goods from China to Russia and from Russia to China has not changed. The decrease happened because of falling global prices, first of all for raw materials and most importantly, for oil. The physical volume stayed the same and even grew on several positions," he stressed. The diplomat said the structure of bilateral economic cooperation is in its transition period. "Both China’s imports in general and Russian-Chinese trade are going through certain transformation, you can even say a revolution. We are transitioning from trading goods to trading projects and large-scale investment cooperation. We have several dozens - around 60, to be precise - investment projects at different stages of readiness. Discussion of different investment projects has significantly increased in the first half of this year. In general, we state considerable revival and activation of contacts between business circles of the two countries, companies, enterprises, entrepreneurs both on the bilateral basis and in the framework of different international forums. In general, we do not cancel the task put forward by our leaders to reach $100 billion in trade," the envoy concluded. "I think that next year, we will be able to reach $100 billion in trade turnover," Chen Gopin said. Read more

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