Chinese expansion does not scare Russian retailers

It is obvious that 2015 in Russian e-commerce will be marked by China. So, in mid-May it became known that the second largest and the first in terms of turnover Chinese online retailer JD.com was entering the market, and its plans are impressive: by 2020 the company intends to occupy 20% of the market and bring its turnover to $ 10 billion. competitor - AliExpress - found the first partner in Russia back in 2012, since then this platform controls the lion's share of cross-border online commerce in the country. About 200 thousand parcels travel from AliExpress warehouses to Russia every day, and on peak days their number reaches 2 million.

In 2014, the share of Chinese retailers in Russian e-commerce has doubled: now the share of Chinese online stores accounts for 70% of all purchases of Russians on foreign sites. Experts believe that this figure will only grow - both because of geopolitics and because of currency surges. Even with the current ruble exchange rate, goods from China, unlike Western ones, remain available to the mass buyer.

Last year, 15 million Russians used the services of Chinese online stores, they ordered about 50 million parcels. In monetary terms, the PRC share in the cross-border trade market reached 50%. Based on a market estimate of $ 5 billion in the 2014 year, we are talking about a minimum of $ 2,5 billion.

It would seem that such a rapid expansion from China should alert domestic players. But Russian online retailers are in no hurry to sound the alarm about this.

"There is nothing wrong with the emergence of a new Chinese Internet retailer on the Russian market. The structure of foreign and Russian purchases is different, and what is bought in China is not bought in Russia," says Fyodor Virin, an Internet marketing specialist and co-owner of the Data Insight research agency. - Therefore, JD.com can only be a threat to those Russian online retailers who are engaged in the resale of Chinese goods.

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“In order to achieve the declared market share of 20%, JD.com will have to surprise Russian buyers with really low prices and short delivery times, including to the regions,” muses Ekaterina Stepanenko, business development manager at FM Logistic.

So any global changes due to the Chinese expansion are not worth the wait. Russian e-commerce will change, as will Russian retail as a whole. And the entry of new players from China to our market is due to the fact that their economy is changing too.

In the summer of 2015, the third large e-commerce project from China is to start working in the Russian Federation - the little-known TradeEase platform from the Heilongjiang province, which is near the border with Russia. The task is ambitious: to replace the traditional "shuttle" trade of border regions with online trade. The volume of trade between Heilongjiang and Russia over the past year is estimated at $ 23 billion, which is only slightly less than the estimate of the entire e-commerce market in the country and is equal to a quarter of trade between the countries. The capital of the project will include Yandex.Money, Bank of China, the provincial finance ministry, the Suifenhe city government and PayEase. It is expected that by the end of 2015 about a thousand companies will join TradeEase.