China-Russia

SPB Exchange, Russia's second-largest bourse, said on Monday that it would include an additional 35 Chinese shares for trading, bringing the number of Chinese companies on the exchange to 115, according to media reports. 

Experts said the move showed strengthened financial cooperation between the two countries.

The additional Chinese shares are also listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and include energy firms and manufacturing companies, according to Reuters.

Russian bourses are expanding trading in shares from friendly markets as an alternative against Western sanctions. SPB in December said it plans to offer trading in more than 500 Hong Kong-listed Chinese shares in 2023 and expand to markets such as India, Brazil and South Africa, Reuters reported in December. 

The move marks a pragmatic measure to further expand China-Russia economic and trade cooperation and deepen the connectivity of the capital markets, Chen Jia, an independent analyst on international strategy, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Chen noted that in recent years, Russia has been increasing its efforts to deepen capital market connection with China.

Russia resumed foreign currency interventions with the sales of the yuan starting on January 13, a move signaling that the Chinese currency is playing an increasingly important role in helping stabilize the ruble and Russia's domestic financial stability amid closer bilateral trade connections, experts said.

The yuan became the most traded currency on the Moscow Stock Exchange for the first time on October 3, with trading turnover in the yuan-ruble pair reaching 70.3 billion rubles ($993 million), surpassing 68.2 billion rubles for the dollar-ruble pair, according to a report from Russian informational agency RosBiznesConsulting (RBC).

These developments showed that the yuan's internationalization process has entered a new stage, and also marked a milestone in the de-dollarization of Russian reserves, Chen said.

"It is expected that China's currency and capital market will play an increasingly important strategic role in China-Russia bilateral relations," Chen added.

Strengthening China-Russia economic and financial cooperation is part of deepened bilateral relations and efforts to realize the potential of the economies' complementary and bilateral trade ties, Dong Dengxin, director of the Finance and Securities Institute of the Wuhan University of Science and Technology, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

China-Russia bilateral trade in 2022 rose 34.3 percent year-on-year to a record high of 1.28 trillion yuan ($180.37 billion) in yuan-denominated terms, the first time that bilateral trade surpassed the 1-trillion-yuan threshold, Chinese customs data showed.

Global Times