LARGE BUSINESS IN THE COASTAL ZONES OF RUSSIA: FEATURES AND FACTORS OF LOCALISATION

Russia’s evident ‘turn to the sea’ as regards the economy, the infrastructure, and population distribution patterns is very much in line with the interests and projects of large businesses. This change manifests itself in the development of port and logistics complexes, the port industry, the construction of offshore pipelines, more active offshore oil and gas production, the growing demographic potential of coastal cities, etc. This article aims to explore the localisation of large businesses in Russian coastal zones and to analyse the ‘coastalisation’ of the country’s largest companies. It is shown that ‘coastalisation’ has taken place in forty-two of Russia’s top 100 companies, as rated by the Russian Business Channel. Another objective of the study is to identify large businesses’ industrial and regional priorities in the maritime economy and investigate how they are transformed under the influence of geopolitical and geo-economic factors. Amid active Eurasian integration, which includes the Greater Eurasia project, big businesses are spurring the development of maritime economic complexes and the formation of sea-land economic structures, including cross-border ones. The study identifies which national coastal zones are most attractive to Russian large businesses. Special attention is paid here to the Baltic Sea and the exclave of Kaliningrad where both local (Sodruzhestvo and Avtotor) and interregional/transnational companies (United Shipbuilding Corporation, Gazprom, LUKOIL, etc.) are benefitting from the coastal factor in the socio-economic development.


Introduction
With their resource potential the oceans have invariably exerted and continue to exert a fundamental influence on the development of mankind and its spatial organization, and this phenomenon is fully accentuated and comprehended by Russian social and geographical science [1][2][3][4][5]. The post-Soviet period saw not only a large-scale reformation of Eurasia [6; 7], but also a transformation of the global positioning of Russia herself, a permanent adaptation of the country and her regions to new geo-economic and geopolitical realities being the result of increased maritime activity. This "turn to the sea", apparent in the economy, infrastructure and settlement systems in the Russian Federation [8; 9] observed in the recent years is not only supported by a generally consistent state policy 1 , but also correlates directly with business interests, especially those of the largest enterprises. The conceptual analysis and assessment of the "sea orientation" of Russian large-scale companies, the identification of factors, features and formats of their localization and activity in coastal zones are the main goals of this study.

Large business in contemporary Russia: marine attraction and interests
'Large business' as a special phenomenon with its peculiar national (Rus sian) features has been the subject of quite a few studies since the late 1990s [10; 11]. In conceptualizing largescale enterprises formed in postSoviet Russia but responding to global economic realities, the researchers note the presence of a fairly stable grouping of influential business structures, record their dynamics and variability [12], emphasize the spatial character of their functioning and their strongly marked localization priorities [13; 14]. The continuing awareness of the nontrivial nature of attributing an economic agent as 'large' [15] is combined with the desire to develop statistically reliable criteria for identifying business as such 2 , and with the established practice of delimiting large companies based on numerous (inter)national rankings (RBC, Forbes, Expert, Kommersant).
According to the Federal Service for State Statistics (Rosstat) 3 , there are more than 4.5 million enterprises and firms registered in Russian. Yet if rankings (such as the RBC ranking of the top 500 Russian companies) are to be believed, only 195 companies have an annual revenue of more than 60 billion rubles and thus can be described as large. According to the author's calculations, by the end of 2017 their share in economy accounted for more than 36 % of the total output of goods and services in the Russian Federation, with the top ten companies of the ranking providing almost 44 % of the gross revenue of all large enterprises (Table 1). 1 The priorities of state policy are recorded in such normative acts as the Federal Oceanwide Federal Target Program (1998), the Russian Marine Doctrine for the Period until 2020 (2001), the Strategy for the Development of the Russian Federation Maritime Activities until 2030 (2010), and the Federal Target Program "World Ocean" for 2016-2031 (2015) et al. 2 Two decades ago, Y. Sh. Pappe [10] proposed considering structures with a sales volume of more than $ 1 billion as large and this approach is believed to remain relevant [16]. 3 Regions of Russia. Socialeconomic performances. 2017. Moscow, 2018 There are relatively few large business entities in Russia. All of them are fun damental to the economy, often integrated among themselves (often, through complex business partnership arrangements [12]) and substantially affiliated with the state or with public economic entities (Gazprom, Rosneft, Sberbank, etc.). A significant number of them is transnational (LUKOIL, for example, operates in 30 countries, Rosneft in 25) and is therefore dependent on foreign economic operations and access to global markets. Of the top hundred companies, 17 are oil and gas producers, eight specialize in metals, five operate in chemical and pet rochemical industry. This corresponds to the current structure of Russian export, where almost 65 % of total output falls on fuel and energy products, 10.1 % -on metals and 5.2 % -on agricultural raw materials, primarily grain). One and a half decades ago N.V. Zubarevich [13] clearly showed in her analysis how these companies formed in purely 'intracontinental' territories, but then following the logics of both market and globalization they gradually developed as integral parts of 'ocean economies' (to borrow a concept from P.N. Savitsky), having carried out expansion campaigns into the coastal regions and having engaged in crossborder transcontinental exchanges. While only two of the top 100 companies can be righteously classified as marine economic 5 ones (United Shipbuilding Corpora tion and Sakhalin Energy, the operating company of the Sakhalin2 Project), the analysis allows us to emphasize a significant and multi-aspect marine orientation of the leaders of Russian business (Table. 2). Compiled by the author on the basis of RBC data (500 Largest Russian Companies in 2018. RossBusinessConsulting. URL: https://www.rbc.ru/rbc500/) and resources of the leading Russian companies.
The proposed structuring is an expert evaluation accounting for logistics pre vailing for particular sectors of the economy, the actual activity of the largest Russian companies in the maritime sector, their real and potential focus on in vestment and consumer demand concentrated in coastal zones. It can serve as a framework and is conceptual in its nature, since fullformat differentiation ac cording to the degree of marine orientation of any kind of economic structures (especially big companies with their multiple divisions, each having their distinct profiles and assets) is very complicated. The 58 most identifiable and statistically dominant business structures are characterized by insignificant or moderate ori entation to the marine factor. Only 12 out of top 100 companies have very deep (shipping companies proper) or deep marine factor orientation, yet they are the true leaders of big business in Russia: stateowned companies that set the general trend. Their spatial behavior activates the economic dynamics of coastal zones, turning said zones (along with globalization, crossborder regionalization and socioeconomic concentration) into a priority area of localization of interests and activity of other business structures.

Localization of big business in the coastal zones of Russia: factors, features, trends
Coastal zones are social-geographical taxa of a special kind, confined directly to the sea coast and characterized by a pronounced projection of the marine factor on the residential and economic structure [17; 18]). The activity of large enter prises in these zones is selective and determined by the resource and positional characteristics of a territory. Generally, this activity correlates with postSoviet trends in maritime dynamics, globalization, European integration and geoeco nomic and geopolitical changes in Eurasia.
Since the mid1990s, when Russian economy was rapidly gaining openness and at the same time developing a pronounced raw material and comprador pro file, it has primarily been the port industry that attracted marine interests of the emerging Russian big business; cargo turnover of Russian seaports grew more than 8fold from 1998 to 2018, having exceeded 948 million tons. It gained its highest progressive dynamics amid extremely favorable conditions on global energy markets in the early 2000s, when cargo transshipment in the country's seaports increased by 25 % almost annually. By building logistics focused on port terminals, large enterprises became marinedependent, and their strategies at the time were Eurooriented to the extreme. Probably the best example of the trend is UstLuga Port, now the largest in the Baltic, realizing export interests of leading companies such as Rosneft, NOVOTEK, SIBUR, Uralkali and others [19]. Still, the investments concentrated in the most important logistic centers and transport corridors, so this generally led to clustering of coastal divisions of large business and, in turn, resulted in a significant enhancement of the status and attractiveness of a few coastal regions with developed foreign trade infrastructure (in the form of new regionalization of Russia [20]). The only exception to the rule was commissioning of an oil terminal in the Barents Sea near the village of Va randey in 2000 by LUKOIL, though the terminal is still exportoriented. Against this background, stevedoring companies were incorporated into larger business structures (like Rosneft, provider of more than 40 % of all Russian oil production and controls the terminals in the ports of Tuapse, Nakhodka and Murmansk 6 ), a move complemented by the consolidation of port assets within separate special ized corporations, such as UCL Holding, for example, a company that takes its 92 nd position in the RBC ranking and incorporates Sea Port of St. Petersburg, Container Terminal St. Petersburg, Universal Transshipment Complex, as well as Tuapse and Taganrog Seaports.
Gazprom, the 40 th company in the Forbes global ranking, which provides 12 % of the world and 69 % of Russian natural gas production introduced such transport and transit policy at the turn of the 21 st century that allowed marine economy of Russian Federation to gain new momentum thanks to system of offshore pipelines often perceived as the most important tools of 'gas diplomacy' [21]. The total throughput capacity of these facilities in the Baltic and Black Sea regions, representing the configuration of the country's main export-import corridors and equally oriented to Europe, since 92 % of natural gas is exported by Gazprom to European consumers, is 157.5 billion m³ per year, which is equivalent to 65 % of the supply of Russian natural gas to foreign markets in 2018. It is symptomatic that in 2008 Gazprom also launched a partially offshore gas transmission project in Pacific Russia, which resulted in the organization of natural gas supply via the Sakhalin -Khabarovsk -Vladivostok pipeline launched in 2011; the design capacity of its first start-up complex being 5.5 billion m³ of gas per year.
Since the early 2000s, the attractiveness of coastal zones for all large busi nesses, not only marinedependent ones, has been increasingly determined by the lengthy and still ongoing [22; 23] processes of 'pulling' the demographic and economic potential into several leading urban centers. Spatial organization of contemporary Russia is such that the centers of 31 constituent entities of the Federation are localized on the coast (up to 50 km from the sea), in the coastal zone (up to 200 km), as well as in the zone of direct, or efficient, transport and economic accessibility from it (up to 500 km). Together, these territories account for almost 27 % of the population of all regional centers (including the federal one). From 2002 to 2019, the population of St. Petersburg grew by 15.5 %, So chi -by 11.8, Kaliningrad -by 10.5; and the entire population of coastal cities of the country saw an overall growth of 8.1 %. The capacity of these and other nodal coastal settlements (Table 3) predetermine an additional incentive to 'shift' a particular business (including large) to the sea and the most highly developed segments of coastal zones. There are 17 'thalassocentered' regions in Russia, that is, those characterized by a shift to the sea coast of their most important nuclei of socioeconomic ac tivity [24]. About 20 % of the country's population is concentrated there, and by the end of 2017, 23.9 % of the total new housing commissioned in Russia was constructed there. Almost 21 % of the country's retail trade accounts for these territories. This proportion, with a distinctive shift towards urban agglomerations, is essential for large retail, construction and development companies, and leading financial institutions. It is characteristic that large retail chains Lenta and O'KEY originate from St. Petersburg, and that the largest coastal cities are quite attractive for other leaders of network trade (Table 4).  (1) Compiled by the author on the basis of corporate websites.
The increased effective demand complemented by good logistics capabilities predetermines the reinitialization of coastal zones started by large enterprises through the location of car assembly plants (Toyota Motors, Hyundai Motor CIS, etc.) and food industry companies (like the Sodrugestvo Group in the Kalinin grad region). The establishment in 2007 of the United Shipbuilding Corporation, which included four dozen enterprises, design and research centers, including those located in the east of the country, was one significant aspect of marine-ori ented reindustrialization. The overwhelming majority of large business entities continue to focus their interests on a limited set of coastal urban centers, mainly in the European part of the country [16]. Even Russian retail giants such as X5 Retail and Magnet, ranked 7 th and 9 th in the RBC500 list, respectively, do not have divisions in Pacific Russia. Apart from Auchan, largest Russian retail chains are not represented in the Crimea, where 96 % of the territory is coastal [19]; the branch network of leading transnational banks with Russian headquarters (Sber bank, VTB, etc.) does not operate in this area either, and there are no Perekrestok superstores in Dagestan.
Geoeconomic and geopolitical reasons determine attractors and the frame work of coastal localization for big business and modify its spatial priorities 8 contributing to the formation of a multivector geostrategy (especially so in state owned corporations), multiplying the number of poles, or points, of growth in coastal zones in Russia, expanding their influence into the Arctic, as well as to the coast of the Russian Far East. This megatrend is driven by a motivated shift of emphasis of oil and gas production in favor of the offshore both through the localization of energy resources and geopolitical interests, as well as the develop ment of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) market.
Since 1995, LUKOIL has been exploring and developing hydrocarbon depos its in the northern part of the Caspian Sea. In 1999, energy production began off the shore of the Sakhalin island, as of 2007 -under the control of Gazprom. In 2006, the construction of the first Russian LNG production facility launched off Sakhalin, and in 2018, its share amounted to 4.8 % of the total LNG demand in the Asia-Pacific region and about 3.6 % of the global LNG demand 9 . Offshore gas production centers are formed by Gazprom in Kamchatka, as well as on the shelf of the Sea of Okhotsk and the Kara Sea; Gazprom also began oil production at the Prirazlomnoye field in the Pechora Sea, and a project for the LNG plant in Vladivostok is also in the pipeline. Rosneft, which currently holds 55 licenses for plots in the Arctic, Far Eastern and Southern seas of Russia, is also demonstrating maritime activity. A large marineoriented project based on LNG technologies is implemented in the north of the Yamal peninsula by NOVATEK: in 2018, the company produced 68.8 billion m³ of natural gas. NOVATEK is also developing the supporting bases for its business, i.e. LNG storage and transshipment termi nals in the Murmansk region and in Kamchatka.
The real proportion of the offshore oil and gas production in Russia is still insignificant. Thus, in 2018, Gazprom extracted 0.73 billion m³ of gas and 3.19 million tons of oil on the shelf, compared to the company's total gas and oil pro duction of 497.6 billion m³ and 40 million tons, respectively 10 . Offshore develop ment for less than 3 % of Rosneft 11 total oil production. Nevertheless, according to the sometimes contested [28] estimates, by the middle of the 21st century the Arctic shelf alone will provide from 20 to 30 % of all Russian oil production. Mo tivated by the dynamics of global energy markets and geopolitics, offshore proj ects of the Russian business (especially those in the Arctic zone) are longterm, costly and carry high risks. On the one hand, their promotion is achieved through state participation, with the government not only boosting the development of the Northern Sea Route [29], but also initiating additional localization of military and other infrastructure throughout the country's coastline; on the other, it can be attributed to the established practice of transnational partnerships including the involvement of such significant geo-economic actors, as Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Eni, Statoil, Total and others, which has led to the internationaliza tion of most important segments of Russian marine economy.
Energy projects, the perspective of which directly correlates with the ca pabilities of maritime transport [29,30], are aimed at the development of new shipbuilding centers in the coastal zones. Thus, together with Rosneftegaz and Gazprombank, Rosneft is implementing a project for the production of largeton nage vessels in the city of Krasnyj Kamen in Primorsky Krai; and a specialized shipyard is being built by NOVATEK in the Murmansk region. This process de termines the possibility of increasing the material and technical base of Russian fisheries within the framework of the investment quotas mechanism. Against this background, the contours of the largescale companies (and alliances) generated by the national and transnational structures of aquaticterritorial complex forma tion are becoming more prominent, as is the further clustering of priority areas of maritime activity; most consistently so -on the Russian coast of the Baltic Sea.

Maritime activity of large companies in geopolitical and geoeconomic turbulence: the Russian Baltics
Only 7 % of the coast of the Baltic Sea, or about 500 km [31], are under the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation; this small segment of the coastal zone is not only the most densely incorporated into the European integration processes (including the format of the Baltic region [32]), but it is also densely populated in comparison with other coastal territories of the country: 12 urban settlements are located directly on the coast with almost 6 million population, which constitutes 43 % of population living on the country's coasts. As this area is economically and infrastructurally developed, it is attractive to people and businesses. Being integrated by the water area in the status of the 'open sea', in spatial terms it is bistructural, where the westernmost Kaliningrad region has developed its specif ic economic conditions and practices by virtue of being an exclave since 1991. Apart from being bistructural, the area is also asymmetric and almost monocen tric, with a pronounced dominant of the St. Petersburg coastal region [41], the country's secondlargest focus of socioeconomic activity and migration attractor (in 2017, the absolute migration value was only half that of the Moscow region). It is here, within the Russian Baltic, that the headquarters of the 14 out of 200 major Russian companies are located, which is significantly inferior to the 'intra continental' Moscow and Moscow region (119 and 15, respectively), but at the same time much higher than for the other coastal areas of the country (3).
Since 2008, the operating conditions of large business structures in the Russian segment of the Baltic coastal zone have undergone systemic changes, accompa nied by the effects of turbulence increasing in its amplitude. Following the rules of economic cyclicality [37], the volatility in the primary commodity markets, which are the most important for Russia and its coastal transport corridors, has deepened; the markets are changing, and access to them is complicated, which requires more and more investments. The crisis in the RussiaWest relations sys tem crucial for the transboundary territories of the Baltic borders of Russia, es pecially for the Kaliningrad exclave, erupted in 2014 and has manifested itself ever since, not only generating geopolitical demarcation, including the formation of a component of its own autonomous communication structure and life support in the Baltic Sea by the Russian Federation, but also increasingly turning the north-western 'facade' of our country into its 'facade outpost'. Under the influ ence of global and macroregional dynamics, which is intensifying crosscountry and inter-port competition for Russian goods flows [38] and for Chinese transit [39], the entire Baltic region as a whole is gradually losing its former geoeco nomic significance. In 2000 the total share of countries (except Russia) accessing the Baltic Sea in the world GDP at the official exchange rate reached 8.1 %, in 2017 this was only 6.6 %. It is significant that already in 2011 there was a notable In particular, the 'marinedependent' clusterogenesis in shipbuilding and car assembly, which, in turn, attracts tire production, auto glass production, electric steel smelting [40] and food industry, taking place in the region is being sup plemented by the formation of a LNG production cluster: Gazprom complex in UstLuga region, as well as the LNG project KriogazVysotsk implemented by NOVATEK and Gazprombank. Yet, the trend of increasing transshipment capac ity, including the construction of several new ports (universal loading complex in the Primorsky, Leningrad Region; cruise terminal in Pionersky in the Kalin ingrad Region and others) shows signs of path dependency. The creation of a marine economic megacluster with a clear foreign trade orientation localized mainly on the Gulf of Finland by large business structures with significant state support 12 not only strengthens the competitive position of the entire transport and logistics corridor of the Russian Federation in the Baltic, but also more clearly emphasizes the status of St. Petersburg as an absolute 'marine capital' of Russia. Further development of St. Petersburg's portindustrialinnovative complex (the decision to relocate the headquarters of the United Shipbuilding Corporation to St. Petersburg from Moscow made in 2019 is symptomatic in this context) sug gests its conjugation with the Kaliningrad exclave. The latter's turn to the sea is logical [31] and at the same time allows to gain additional functionality oriented directly towards large companies in connection with the government's decision to establish a financial offshore on Oktyabrslij island in the city of Kaliningrad.

Conclusion
As they enter global markets and incorporate into transnational reproduc tion chains, Russian largest companies become more and more marineoriented, which is accompanied by their multifaceted, increasing and, at the same time, selective activity in the coastal zones of the country. The drivers of this trend, to a large extent inherent in shipbuilding, oil and gas production, chemistry and petrochemistry, metallurgy, individual engineering industries and, to a lesser ex tent, retail, construction and financial sectors, are not only the imperatives of lo gistics or the increasing competition for using the resource potential of the world ocean, but also a prolonged concentration of consumer and investment demand in leading coastal centers, acquiring the properties of development corridors. The most significant are the positions of the largest Russian companies in offshore oil and gas production, shipbuilding, and in the port sector -the sectors that are now the main drivers of marine economic complex formation, as well as the for mation of aquaticterritorial economic structures, including crossborder entities. The multivector strategy of localizing production, carried out by leading ener gyresource companies giving impetus to the development of coastal territories, including in the Arctic zone, in Pacific Russia is consistent with the Eurasian geoeconomic dynamics (including the formation of Greater Eurasia) and is com bined with a stable focus on the interests of large businesses on leading urban agglomerations and transport corridors gravitating towards them in the West and SouthWest of the Russian Federation. The coastal areas in the Baltic Sea are of special priority for large enterprises; even in the conditions of increased geopolit ical turbulence post 2014 they retain their communication, market, infrastructure and innovative potential.
The study was supported by the grant from the Russian Science Foundation, Project1918-00005, 'Eurasian vectors of maritime activity of Russia: regional economic projections'.