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Financial times: Российский интернет-рынок очень специфичный, здесь национальные сайты популярнее своих мировых аналогов
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Financial times: Российский интернет-рынок очень специфичный, здесь национальные сайты популярнее своих мировых аналогов


The first week of September marked the 199th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, when Napoleon’s invading forces lost tens of thousands of men to the Russian army. Although the Russians bore more casualties, they held back the advancing French – a pivotal moment in Napoleon’s ultimately doomed campaign.Two centuries later, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Groupon might sympathise with the diminutive Gallic emperor.

Russia remains one of the few European internet markets that has not fallen to the global advance of the US’s technology giants. Local heroes such as Mail.ru, Russia’s largest web portal, and Yandex, the country’s leading search engine, have both gone public at eye-popping valuations during the last 12 months, holding their line against Google, Yahoo and Facebook. Now a fresh wave of fast-growing Russian e-commerce companies are rushing behind them towards the front line.

“I don’t think the big guys like Facebook or Amazon have done anything wrong,” says Leonid Boguslavsky, founder and chief executive of ru-Net, a Russian technology investor with $700m under management, who invested in Yandex in 2000. “I think the dynamics of our market support local players.”

Last week, Ozon.ru – Russia’s answer to Amazon – raised $100m from ru-Net and others in the country’s largest venture-capital round for an online retailer. Already a leader in books and CDs, with revenues of $137m last year, Ozon is now moving into higher-ticket items including Expedia-style holidays, children’s goods, homeware, cosmetics and clothing. For many customers, its range of items can only be found online. “In the regions, having access to 1.5m [products] is paradise because you can get things that you never knew existed,” says Maelle Gavet, Ozon chief executive,

Ozon’s round topped KupiVIP’s $55m funding earlier in the year; a “flash sales” or private-buying company along the lines of Gilt Groupe or Vente-Privee, which allow luxury and fashion brands to offload unsold inventory at a discount without the embarrassment of having to do it through their own stores.

At the same time, classified site Avito is busy seeing off US rival Craigslist, while Molotok, a site part backed by Mail.ru, is giving Ebay a run for its money. In the voucher segment, several competitors are giving Groupon a tough ride in spite of its partnership with Mail.ru, including KupiKupon, Biglion and Vigoda, some of which are already generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue after just one year in business.

Russia is rising up global technology companies’ agendas as broadband penetration tops a third – reaching 60m people in 2010, according to comScore, and growing at 15 per cent a year – putting the vast country on track to overtake Germany as Europe’s largest internet market within the next two years. As consumers outside Moscow and St Petersburg come online, GP Bullhound, a technology-focused financial advisory, forecasts 93m Russian broadband customers by 2013, with 71m using 3G mobile phones.

With the market snowballing, foreign players are rushing to catch up with domestic champions who not only have the incumbent position but a better grip on the language algorithms, allowing them to produce more accurate search results in Cyrillic than their foreign competitors.

“It’s not just the [sophistication] of the technology at this stage,” says Konstantin Belov, an analyst at Uralsib Capital in Moscow, explaining how search engine Yandex has managed to maintain an edge over Google. “Local expertise and understanding the local is more important. The same is true for e-commerce.”

Foreign investors are catching on. In the past five years, a host of companies including Index Ventures, Balderton Capital, Accel Partners and Tiger Global, the US hedge fund, have moved into the market.

“Investors are seeking out opportunities in what has historically been seen as a very difficult market to invest in,” says Hugh Campbell, partner at GP Bullhound. “Investors are focusing on who is going to take the other 60m users who are outside Moscow and St Petersburg, on the quality of [start-ups’] social networking partnerships and their regionalisation strategy, rather than relying on the language to be a block for the big international firms.”

The biggest bulwark that Ozon and KupiVIP have against international invaders is their own distribution networks. Unlike Amazon, which has succeeded in other markets largely by using existing postal services or courier companies such as DHL, Russia’s local networks are either too limited or too expensive – prompting Ozon and KupiVIP to build their own networks to handle millions of daily orders.

“We have this major competitive advantage of having the only real delivery network in Russia,” says Ms Gavet. “To compete with us on that, you are going to need a lot of money.”

Of course, that also means heavy investment by Ozon. Its O-Courier network operates in 97 cities across Russia and has 959 delivery points. It also offers the service to 60 smaller e-commerce companies.

Payment systems are also unusually complicated in Russia. Ozon accepts 13 payment methods, but cash-on-delivery accounts for 80 per cent of all sales. This corresponds to urbanites’ preference for payment terminals scattered across the big cities, which allow city dwellers to pay phone and internet bills with cash instead of making payments online with credit cards. “They don’t want ‘The Man’ to know their details,” says Mr Campbell of Russians’ reluctance to enter their personal details to the web.

On the flip side, he says, Russians are more trusting of online friends’ recommendations than in other countries. “There is a very, very active blogging environment and social networking is very important.”

Perhaps in recognition of these various logistical difficulties, Russia’s e-commerce market remains relatively small. GP Bullhound estimates about 1.5 per cent of total retail spending goes online, compared with the European average of about 6 per cent, and 11 per cent in the UK.

“If you look at the number of unique buyers in the context of the whole of Russia, it’s peanuts,” says Marco Jo Rodzynek, founder and managing director of Noah Advisors, an internet-focused corporate finance boutique. “The player who will get fulfilment, payment and expansion into profitable product segments right will become the Amazon of Russia. It is not obvious that the current players will necessarily be the leaders in 10 years’ time.”

Pär-Jörgen Pärson, partner at Northzone, a Sweden-based venture investor in Avito, admits the group is dipping slowly into the market. But he adds that any concerns are about picking the right companies, not the market itself. “Being so new on the ground in Russia, we’d rather take our time to really get to know the players in the market before we put our second chip down,” he says. “It’s very difficult in a different culture to read which teams are really racing and those that aren’t.”