Entrepreneurship training and support measures will help SMEs gain a favourable position on the global market
We don’t need to create such academic and practically inapplicable courses that simply take up time, but need to form very clear programmes that literally take an entrepreneur who is ready for such difficult foreign commerce by the hand and answers the question of how to start doing it. [...] When conducting an audit of what exists on the market, we saw that there truly aren’t that many programmes that are really that specific, practically applicable, and can be converted to exports and not just to a diploma or a sheepskin — Veronika Nikishina, General Director, Russian Export Center.
We amended the tax legislation so that a Russian retail exporter could apply a 0% VAT rate. Again, this was all on paper, but actually translated into numbers. Russian Post first integrated with us, then integrated with the Federal Tax Service, Federal Customs Service, and now a Russian exporter can confirm the 0% VAT rate. There have been numerous breakthroughs in logistics, because there was a logistics crisis. In the same way, Russian Post, in very close partnership with us, altered logistics and resolved the local crisis — Ilya Kretov, General Manager Global Emerging Markets, eBay.
I really hope that this year we will launch a preferential programme at Russian Post for exporters, primarily SMEs. We have drawn up a government resolution, there is money for this, and we should launch it in a pilot mode this year. This programme should effectively complement the work that the REC is doing with mail in terms of differentiating digital service items — Vasily Osmakov, First Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation.
We have announced the ‘Open to the Whole World’ programme and have invested a lot of efforts and funds into providing Russian SMEs with the opportunity to quickly enter retail exports. In general, the results were not long in coming. Now we have closed 2020 and saw 41,000 accounts and exporters. They are selling something through eBay to the whole world, an increase of 39% in terms of the number of exporters. When all our countries are closed, they sell to more than a hundred countries around the world. Our top exporter sold to 108 countries even though all the borders were closed — Ilya Kretov, General Manager Global Emerging Markets, eBay.
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