24 Sep 2019 16:00

S. Korea expects trade with Russia to hit $30 bln, names LNG and shipbuilding as promising areas

MOSCOW. Sept 24 (Interfax) - Trade between Russia and South Korea could in time reach $30 billion rubles per year, said South Korean Deputy Prime Minister Hong Nam-ki, who co-chairs the Russian-Korean commission for economic, scientific and technical cooperation.

"We could reach trade turnover of $30 billion. For that I would like to suggest a number of areas for development," he said during the commission's meeting on Tuesday. This concerns traditional areas like natural resources and technology. "We can put in place measures to cooperate in the field of liquefied natural gas and in ship-building, in particular ice-class tankers," he said.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yury Trutnev, the commission's other co-chairman, said there had been robust growth in trade between the two countries: this had soared 29% in 2018 compared with 2017 to $25 billion. Trade grew 16% year-on-year in H1 2019 to more than $14.5 billion.