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bne May 2018 Companies & Markets I 25
equipment in Russia and China,” says Dumikyan, who also set up Sberbank’s SME online portal that cut the time needed to open an account online from days to 5 minutes.
The site has no target country, but as it offers English, Chinese and Russian language translation for all its listings the
“We even have some Georgian companies making business with Ukraine that have nothing to do with Russia”
majority of participants remain Russian for the meantime, although people from other counties have signed up too.
“We even have some Georgian companies making business with Ukraine that have nothing to do with Russia,” says Dumikyan, who built and released the BBP site in only two months. “That was the idea: to create a cross border tool that anyone anywhere can use.”
Dumikyan says that he will build on more functionality as the site grows in popularity – and if you type in “VED” in Cyrillic, the Russian acronym for trade and logistics, it already comes up at the top of the search list on the first page.
“Currently you can filter the results by, say, country of origin or type of services, but as it gets bigger it will add options like the value of the deal so that big business can find other similar businesses,” says Dumikyan.
One of the ways the site is already being used is by existing companies that are trying to solve specific problems. A logistics manager has a smallish, but important machine part that is
stuck in Beijing and needs to get to Moscow to fix a broken compressor? Then Sergei Yugutov is your man. He offers a truck delivery service that will ship anything from the Chinese capital to the Russian capital starting from 30kg and costing from $1000.
Or there is Almig Industrial Equipment based in Germany, a Mittlestand maker of compressors. The contact there is Anatoly Tabakov and his name suggests that he is an ethnic Russian. Although the firm is clearly German, all the marketing materials are in Russian. He has had 452 views and 4 offers so far.
And “I will pay your customs duties” is an extremely large category with a lot of people providing that service who have had a lot offers. For many logistics service companies the ability to hire someone to stand in line and deal with the paperwork that comes with bringing goods over the Russian border is clearly very appealing.
The rest is what is becoming standard online marketing. Dumikyan has also set up a YouTube channel where they make short videos explaining their service.
“We covered all the obvious topics but we also look at the frequency of incoming search requests and then make videos to match the most popular,” says Dumikyan. “These videos are also the most popular in their category.”
The whole thing is produced in-house and Dumikyan has four developers, who between them speak Russian, English and two are fluent Chinese speakers. Dumikyan is trying very hard not to dictate to his audience. Before they start on each next stage of development he holds a vote on the company’s Facebook page to allow the users to say what they want to see improved next.
“We are a customer driven service. We don't make the decisions on where to go next. The users do.”
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