Russia Increases Share Of South Korea’s Crab Consumer Market

These may be small wins in the overall scheme of Russia’s exports, but its still a lot of crab. Russia exported 9,400 tonnes of crab worth US$177 million to South Korea in H1 2024, according to the All-Russian Association of Fisheries Enterprises, Entrepreneurs and Exporters (VARPE).

Although supplies decreased by 20% in physical terms and by 14% in value terms, that fits in with an overall reduction in South Korea’s crab imports in any event. As a result, despite the drop, Russia actually increased its share of the South Korean crab consumer market in value terms from 78.2% in the first half of 2023 to 79.1% in January-June 2024, it said. “The prices of Russian crabs are even lower than in 2021 and 2022, but the average prices have started increasing gradually. Specifically, the average cost of frozen crab from Russia has increased by almost 2%, and the cost of live and chilled crab has increased by 16% since the first half of last year,” VARP said.

Russian crab catchers not only maintained their share on the Korean live crab market in value terms (91.9%) in the first half of this year, but also increased their share in the frozen crab sector by almost four percentage points to 54.1%, VARPE said.

Russian fishermen lead in the supply of premium sorts of crab, which enables them to maintain a considerable share of the world’s market in monetary terms. The volume of Russian crab exports in 2023 reached US$1.8 billion, which, according to VARPE estimations, is 40% of the world’s trade in this aquatic bioresource,” it said.

Most of the crab destined for South Korean markets is caught in the Russian Far East.