ST. PETERSBURG, October 28. /TASS/. About 10 to 15 trade and logistics centers for the Northern Supplies will be created in the Arctic regions to offer better prices to end user. A similar system, working in Yakutia, has proven to be effective, and the experience will be used in other districts, Vostokgosplan's Director Mikhail Kuznetsov told TASS at the 12th Management of the Future conference.

"Yakutia has an excellent example of trade and logistics centers. The region has been building them together with the Far East and Arctic Development Corporation. They work as big wholesale and logistics hubs, offering good conditions to store products, and local small businesses buy them to deliver to villages. We will scale up this experience to create another 10 to 15 centers of the kind throughout the North," he said.

According to him, it is realistic to create new centers the Arctic within a year. The specialist stressed it would be necessary to upgrade the worn-out logistics and port infrastructures, to conduct dredging in certain waters, as well as to have modern fleet, as currently used vessels sometimes are 45-50 years old.

Another effective measure could be long-term low-rate budget infrastructure loans to ensure the supply of goods to the Arctic's hard-to-reach areas, he continued.

"Not everyone knows, that in the Arctic, goods may sometimes travel two years to a destination in a number of hard-to-reach areas. They are overloaded, and then companies have to wait to another rise in water to move on. This is a long budget cycle, and at the rate of 25% it is very expensive. One of the measures we propose is long budget loans at a low rate - to cut logistics costs," he said.

About the conference

The Management of the Future conference ran at the St. Petersburg State University on October 24-26. The event is a platform where can communicate best management students from Russia's different regions and representatives of the country's leading companies.