In the economic literature of the last third of the twentieth century a new approach to marketing has been formed, that is concept of partnership or concept of marketing of relations, according to which long-term relationships between companies are of first priority. To systematize the theoretical and practical knowledge the following main principles should be formulated in order to optimise the company's operations within the concept of partnership: the principle of equivalence, the principle of duration, the principle of availability, the principle of awareness, and the principle of commercial classified information secrecy. These principles of partnership define the possibility of partnership building and predetermine their reliability and duration. From the properties of partnership the following principles are selected that form partner relations: 1. The principle of common needs. 2. The principle of external partnership saving. 3. The principle of continuity of relations. 4. The principle of information accessibility. Optimisation of operations along these principles leads to the growing dependency and, hence, beneficial cooperation is a sign of the long-term character of such relations and the reliability of the partners. From the small experience of successful partnership in Russia six main reasons of transfer to such relations are selected. On the basis of analysis of the main reasons of partnership usage a few criteria of the partner classification were found: by operation size, by operation type, by specialization type, by the region of operation. The existence of the examples of successful partnership experience in Russia gives evidence of the future development of this strategy. The main problem of companies that chose the strategy of cooperation will be to overcome the existing limitations

В рамках систематизации научно-практических знаний сформулированы основные принципы, соблюдение которых позволит предприятию оптимизировать производственную деятельность с использованием отношения сотрудничества, а также принципы, по которым могут формироваться отношения сотрудничества. Из анализа опыта успешного использования сотрудничества в России выявлены основные причины перехода к построению таких отношений и выделены несколько признаков классификации партнеров для построения