News / Maersk set to debut TradeLens in St Petersburg after signing MoU with Russian government

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Maersk and the Russian government have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to launch the carrier’s blockchain it has developed with partner IBM – TradeLens – in the country.

In a signing ceremony yesterday involving Maersk chief executive Soren Skou and deputy transport minister and head of Federal Maritime and River Transport agency Yuriy Tsvetkov, said the MoU included “Port of St. Petersburg, Russia’s main container gateway, as part of the pilot launch”.

The introduction of TradeLens to Russia is aimed to introduce a digital documentation flow to a market that remains largely paper-based.

“The platform aims to significantly facilitate the interaction between shippers and various regulatory and administrative bodies in the country, ultimately increasing the speed of cargo clearance and movement of goods across borders,” a statement from Maersk said.

Mr Tsvetkov said: “The main result of the implementation of TradeLens, according to our expectations, should be an increase in the transparency of the contracting procedure by distributing information about supply and demand, conditions and operations between many participants of the transport and logistics processes.”.

Mike White, chief executive and head of TradeLens for Maersk, added: “TradeLens offers unprecedented benefits to all parties involved in the transportation process by bringing full transparency of cargo moves, while enabling seamless, secure sharing of real-time actionable supply chain information to all involved participants.

“The TradeLens platform fosters collaboration and trust while improving user experience and lowering costs through digitisation. We are pleased to now start this journey in Russia, to expand the reach and value of our platform and its data to all participants, comments.

Last week CMA CGM and MSC announced that they were also joining the digital shipping platform, “which will result in data for nearly half of the world’s ocean container cargo shortly available on TradeLens”, Maersk claimed.

It added that there are more than 100 participants on the platform today, and it is already processing over 10m “discrete shipping events and thousands of documents each week”, providing shippers, carriers, freight forwarders, customs officials, port authorities, inland transportation providers, and others a common view of transactions, which can build trust.