January 24, 2017 — Peering into the mid-morning darkness from his sixth-floor office on Russia’s Kola Bay, Vitaly Orlov strains to see the new factory he’s just built across the water, his view obscured by a creeping cloud bank that shrouds the Arctic seascape in impenetrable gray.

The $30 million structure is the crown jewel of Orlov’s Murmansk-based Norebo Holding JSC. Set amid rows of aging tenements and a wooden church, it was built to service Norebo’s fleet of fish trawlers that together hauled in almost 11 percent of the 4.75 million metric tons (5.24 million U.S. tons) the Russian Federal Fisheries Agency says were caught by Russian fisherman last year.

“I’ve only ever been sure of one thing — that my life will always be tied to the north and the fishing industry,” Orlov, 51, polite and deliberate, pocket square tucked into a tailored suit, said in his first foreign media interview.

From that modest goal, Orlov has built a fortune that the Bloomberg Billionaires Index values at $1 billion, benefiting from the colliding forces of global trade and sanctions that today define Vladimir Putin’s Russia. While his business derives as much as 60 percent of its sales from outside the country, it’s also seen a surge in domestic consumption as sanctions limit food imports.

Arctic Calling

In the Nov. 8 interview, Orlov explained how the plant fulfills a lifelong aspiration to create a fully integrated global fishing operation. Imported Icelandic equipment will process 15,000 of the more than 500,000 metric tons of cod, haddock and other bottom-dwelling fish Norebo catches, packages and ships annually across the country’s 11 time zones and beyond.

Read the full story at Bloomberg News