![]() ![]() In the first quarter of 2020, Wildberries doubled both turnover and sales year on year to Rbs75.3bn and 60.5m orders respectively. That shift has helped fuel more growth for Wildberries. With most Russians confined to their homes under strict lockdown measures, the pandemic has drastically changed consumption habits: in the first week of quarantine, food delivery orders rose 78 per cent, pay TV doubled its revenue and transactions at educational platforms increased 64 per cent, according to online payments service Yandex.Checkout. You just need to grab the growth.”īakalchuk runs the business from its Moscow headquarters © Petr Antonov/FT “All of us are too small . . . so none of us can hurt anyone. He thinks market consolidation is inevitable. That’s not sustainable,” says Daniil Fedorov, chief financial officer of Ozon. “Even the top players are 50 per cent of the market. This compares with the US, where Amazon controls almost half the online retail market. The industry still accounts for just 5 per cent of total retail sales, according to consultancy Data Insight, while even the sector’s biggest companies have yet to emerge to dominate the entire ecommerce market. Russia’s ecommerce market is just getting started. Online bank Tinkoff has won plaudits worldwide (though the US is seeking its founder’s extradition for alleged evasion of American taxes). Video streamer ivi has attracted investment from all over the world. Classifieds site Avito was sold to Naspers, the South African-based internet group, at a $4bn valuation. Russian job site HeadHunter successfully went public in New York last year. Most of the self-made entrepreneurs have done so online, the closest thing to a space for open competition there is in Russia’s state-dominated business landscape. Wildberries staff prepare purchases for shipment © Bloomberg That approach has helped Bakalchuk lead a new wave of wealthy Russians who have made it rich without the friends in high places, questionable privatisation and generous state bank loans so common among the country’s oligarchs. “We didn’t even work with banks at the start - the first loans we took were just because our chief financial officer told us to do it even if we didn’t need it, because we needed to earn a good credit history.” ![]() But we told them we didn’t understand why we needed to take them in. “Investors came to us all the time, back when almost nobody knew about us, and made us offers. This was mostly just a challenge for us,” Bakalchuk says in an interview with the Financial Times. “We were never out to make money for something. Wildberries’ turnover grew 88 per cent in 2019 to Rbs223.5bn ($3bn), with net profit increasing from Rbs1.88bn to Rbs7bn, confirming Wildberries’ leading role in the Russia’s fast-growing $30bn ecommerce market. Customers made 750,000 orders a day, double the total in the previous year.īakalchuk, who processed her first orders herself at home, now runs a business with no external investors and 48,000 employees, including 12,000 extra staff hired to cope with surging business during the pandemic.Īlong the way, she has turned down some serious financing offers, including one from Russian private equity house Baring Vostok and the venture capital arm of oligarch Vladimir Yevtushenkov’s Sistema, which co-owns Ozon, Wildberries’ biggest competitor.īakalchuk owns 100 per cent of the company but says its success owes much to a collective management team in which her husband, Vladislav, a former computer salesman, and Sergei Anufriev, a family friend, have played leading roles from the outset. The company's logistics net reaches across Russia He was sacked by the Kremlin a decade ago and died last year.īy contrast, Bakalchuk, 44, has become rich by reaching deep into everyday Russian life, even if Forbes estimates her $1.1bn fortune has dipped below Baturina’s $1.3bn in recent weeks, as the Covid-19 pandemic has hit the Russian economy. To ordinary Russians, the shy former English teacher is far less familiar than the celebrity she temporarily dethroned this year at the top of Forbes’ list of Russia’s richest women - Yelena Baturina, the widow of Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s longtime strongman mayor.īaturina, who led the Forbes list from its inception in 2004, made her fortune amassing a construction empire while her husband was in office. ![]()
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