Khabarovsk / Russia

Khabarovsk can be found on the bank of the Amur River, in the middle of the Russian Far East. The city has become important to the Russian economy and is the Far East's largest administrative,industrial, transport and cultural center, with a population of 617.8 thousand people.

The Khabarovsk Krai has about a hundred steel and saw mills, shipyards, foodprocessing and light industry factories. The region as a whole covers 787,600km2 and about two-thirds of this area is covered with forests, making the timber industry among the most developed here. Of the forests in the Far East, 90% are exploitable and of high market value. The Khabarovsk Region is also rich in ores, such as gold, platinum, tin, copper, lead, and zinc; in addition, the area's coal mining and pipelines for crude oil and natural gas attract a great deal of interest. Khabarovsk is one of Russia's main transport centers, with the region's biggest railroad as well as the ports of the Amur River. In recent years, the city of Khabarovsk has been developing rapidly as the Russian economy as a whole continues to be stable.

In April 1990 Marubeni opened a liaison office in Khabarovsk, to cope with the Russian economy's regional diversification. Since then, the Khabarovsk Office has played a major role in foreign trade activities between the Russian Far East and Japan. The core business fields of the Khabarovsk Office are the export of saw logs and coal to Japan and the import of construction machinery. Our main customers are timber producers, who constantly need machinery for timber provision. As the quality of Russian produced machinery still has not reached the high technical level of that produced in Japan, our clients greatly appreciate the Japanese vehicles supplied by Marubeni Khabarovsk.

The Khabarovsk Office took part in some of the large-scale projects that have made a positive contribution to the development of local industry in the region. One of those projects is the procurement of equipment for the production of dairy products, realized within the funds provided by JEXIM (currently JBIC). For this project, the Khabarovsk Office worked together with the Industrial Plant Section-I. Consequently, a baby-food plant was opened in Khabarovsk in 1999 with equipment supplied from Japan and Denmark that was arranged by Marubeni Headquarters. Originally this project was based on the Russian state program "The children of Russia," which intended to provide people with fresh milk products to improve infant health. During this time, when economic reforms brought inflation and instability, many people in Russia were suffering great hardship, and the establishment of this dairy product plant for infants brought a sense of pride to all the staff involved.

Another memorable achievement of the Khabarovsk Office was equipping a newly built Medical Diagnostic Center in the city of Irkutsk, which is situated near the famous Lake Baikal. The hospital has become a modern center of advance technologies and equipment, brought over from Europe and Japan. This project was also funded within the JBIC program. The Irkutsk Diagnostic Center became a symbol of business cooperation between Japan and Russia when the leaders of the two countries shook hands with the doctors of the Diagnostic Center during the historic meeting in March 2001 between Yoshiro Mori, then Prime Minister of Japan, and Vladimir Putin, the Russian President.

The Khabarovsk Chamber of Commerce building where the Khabarovsk Office is located The work area inside the Khabarovsk Office The beautiful circus newly built in Khabarovsk

Established:

Main Businesses and Products:p>

Saw logs, coal, construction machinery and pipes

Businessg Areas:

Far East of Russia, Japan

Employees: 2 local staff (as of April 2003)