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Comment by maxglute | Hacker News Reader

Trend of PRC exports to RU still increasing MoM, occasional pause i.e. current hiccups to figure out system to evade threat of secondary sanctions. Many new PRC/RU traders still new to process / being cheap / lazy thinking they can skip middle men.

As for ball bearings, one would hope 2 years is enough for RU to setup their own plants. PRC not just selling them inputs, RU getting capita equipment to build their manufacturing base.

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There appear to still be some ball bearing shortages in Russia. The key bottleneck is in skilled manufacturing labor. Their educational system has been a disaster since the collapse of the USSR. They had been relying on foreign experts to manage their factories but those people have left. Obviously Russia can rebuild that capacity eventually but it will probably take a few more years to get back to where they used to be.

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-sanctions-ukraine-war-fuel-t...

Article is analysis from April last year. A lot can happen in 1+ year. They're on war time production now, settling for lower quality / easier to manufacture components considering hardware attrition levels. The $$$ involved for barings in this post also looks pretty small, 3m per month of barings is in line with reconstituting some domestic capability. Military will get priority, plenty of Chinese manufacturing expertise to draw from to setup plants if RU willing to pay. Shortfall is going to be born by civilian sectors - I think that will take a years to catch-up.

I don’t fully understand the words you’ve used, but it feels that RU market is too small to justify building plants?

PRC selling RU machines (capital equipment) to build their own plants.

This is the right answer.

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