Roman Chekushov, State Secretary and Deputy Head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation, announced a set of measures to promote products with the status of "Goods of the Union State" both in Russian retail and abroad. The statement was made at the Eastern Economic Forum in an interview with TASS.
""We will also work on online platforms in the form of highlighting in the search, or a separate button for "goods of the Union State,"— Chekushov said.
The status of "Commodity of the Union State" is assigned to industrial products created as a result of joint work of enterprises of Russia and Belarus using components from both countries. The purpose of the status is to create preferential conditions for such products in the common market of the two countries.
In offline trading, a similar logic is planned to be implemented through special labeling and placement in priority positions on shelves. The specific sites that will be included in the program and the timing of its launch have not yet been announced.
For the export direction, the Ministry of Industry and Trade proposes to create joint Russian-Belarusian service centers for the maintenance of equipment from both industries. According to the deputy minister, this will reduce the costs of companies entering foreign markets: a single service infrastructure eliminates the need to build separate after-sales service chains for each country.
For suppliers whose products claim this status, the initiative opens up the opportunity to gain a significant competitive advantage on marketplaces without additional advertising budgets by algorithmically highlighting them in search results. How significant this effect will be depends largely on which sites will join the program and what the mechanism for verifying the origin of the goods will look like. The criteria for status assignment and the procedure for its confirmation remain an open question for market participants.
