- 21. 02. 2019
The total length of inland waterways in Russia is more than 100 thousand kilometers. The potential of the river as a transport artery is great - about 80% of the population and the lion's share of large industries are located along water bodies. It is logical that there should be companies that can take on the role of a carrier of goods. About what specifics exist when working with sea and river freight transportation, about existing problems in the industry, and what investments can raise the Russian shipping business, AN spoke with Nikolai SOCHIN, Director General of ARK Shipping Company.
-Nikolay Viktorovich, how did the history of the company begin?
- The history of the ARK Shipping Company dates back to 1992. Until that time, I worked on the Expedition for Special Offshore Escort of River Vessels — an organization created in the USSR in 1949 to work with the repatriated German fleet. Hundreds of tugboats, barges, bulk carriers, tankers and passenger ships were delivered to the rivers of Siberia and the Far East. In addition, the shipbuilding industry was intensively developing in the USSR, a new Soviet fleet was being designed and built, which helped the country develop. I still gratefully recall the years of work as part of the Ministry of the River Fleet of the RSFSR, where invaluable experience was gained, like-minded people appeared there, who later became partners and the basis for the success of our company. When privatization began, in 1992 we separated from the state organization, and, as it was fashionable then, we tried to engage in private business in the field of sea and river freight transportation. In general, the impetus for development in this area was the order for the transportation of KamAZ trucks from Naberezhnye Chelny to Egypt for the Ministry of Defense. We had to solve a non-standard problem. Initially, the logistics were like this - the cargo was delivered to Odessa, and there it was loaded onto ferries and only then went to Egypt. And our company proposed to transfer this cargo immediately by barges from the factory to Egypt. Then we had to develop a transportation project, develop loading solutions in the port and much more. At the same time, both engineering and creative work. This is how we transported 400 pieces of equipment with barges of 75 KamAZ trucks on each and as a result did not even leave a single scratch on the trucks. This is where it all started. And it continued with the transportation of equipment for the construction of the third transport ring from the port of Antwerp - Belgium to the port of Yuzhny - Moscow, transported equipment for the Ochakovo brewery, for the Kapotnya refinery ...
- It turns out that in dealing with oversized cargoes it is necessary to develop unique solutions with each new contract?
- Yes, the work is not boring, it has its own specifics, and we have our own know-how - of course, this is not a mass market, such as with bulk carriers or tankers, where everything is standardized. Here you need to think and decide: how to load, unload, how to fix, solve the problem with transportation technology. In some cases, our specialists work, in some we connect research institutes to this matter. It can take up to two months to develop one project. But on the other hand, using transportation by barges, we can significantly reduce the route and time of cargo delivery, and most importantly, we do not need additional transshipments in ports. A living example is the modernization of the Omsk refinery. All the equipment for him is made at a factory in Volgograd, and in order to transport it, it was necessary to send goods to St. Petersburg before, then transport around Scandinavia by sea, and then to deliver to Omsk. We proposed in our own way to solve the problem of transportation of goods. Specially built two barges that can pass through the White Sea-Baltic Canal with access to the Northern Sea Route directly, without access to the Baltic Sea, so that further along the Ob and Irtysh the equipment for the refinery can be delivered directly to Omsk. As a result, the cost of transportation has become less than half the minimum.
- Do you have experience working with oil companies?
- Yes, back in 2000, our company was transporting goods for the Italian company Agip. Then in Kazakhstan, a large international project began to develop the Kashagan oil and gas field in the Caspian Sea, in which several leaders of the oil production market took part: Shell, Agip, Total, Exxon Mobil and others. The project planned the complex construction of a number of artificial islands right on this shelf, which were supposed to be interconnected. Here in this project, the ARC had the honor to participate as one of the main carriers. We also worked with BP - transported equipment for the development of the Shah Deniz gas field in Azerbaijan. Recently, we have been cooperating with LUKOIL, also in the Caspian. We carry out unique in its complexity work on the transportation of parts for the future drilling platform at the Filanovsky field.
Such projects required at some point investment in the construction of an additional fleet. And initially there was a desire to invest in construction
