The AliExpress store has overcome many years of thorny path in Russia. Starting in 2012 as a regular site where customers ordered and waited for months for delivery, by 2017 the store had taken off so much that domestic retail began to sound the alarm due to the flow of noticeably cheaper goods from China. As a result, in 2019, a separate from the Chinese company “AliExpress Russia” appeared, the shareholders of which were the parent Alibaba from China (47.85% of shares), Alisher Usmanov’s USM holding (24.3%), VK (15%) and the Russian Fund direct investment (12.8%). The plans included the construction of new logistics terminals in Yekaterinburg and the Moscow region, which, together with other measures, would reduce the delivery time from China to a week.

However, these plans were crossed out in February 2022. Immediately after the start of the well-known events, all four shareholders of “AliExpress Russia” refused to continue investing in the project. The company has undergone massive layoffs, and many offices have been subleased. Advertising campaigns and marketing have almost completely stopped, and the management “looks to the future without any optimism. The store’s audience is actively falling: from 8.5 to 7 million visits per day. Moreover, in the second quarter, the store turned out to be unprofitable by almost 11 billion rubles. And although “the company will not be curtailed, closed or sold,” the prospects for “AliExpress Russia” in the current circumstances are becoming increasingly vague.

© Vladimir Kovalev. mobile phone

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