Shareholders of “AliExpress Russia” refused to finance the company

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 monthsdelivery, by 2017 the store had taken off so much that domestic Russian retail began to sound the alarm due to the flow of noticeably cheaper goods from China. As a result, in 2019, a separate company from the Chinese company, AliExpress Russia, appeared, the shareholders of which were the parent Alibaba from China (47.85% of shares), Alisher Usmanov’s holding USM (24.3%), VK (15 %) and the Russian Direct Investment Fund (12.8%). The plans included the construction of new logistics terminals in Yekaterinburg and the Moscow region, which, together with other measures, would reduce delivery time from China to a week.

However, these plans were dashed by 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 of employees, and many offices have been subleased. Advertising campaigns and marketing have almost completely stopped, and management is looking into the future without any optimism. The store’s audience is actively falling: from 8.5 to 7 million visits per day. Moreover, according to the results of the second quarter, the store turned out to be unprofitable by almost 11 billion rubles. And although “the company will not fold, close or be sold”, the prospects for “AliExpress Russia” in the current circumstances are becoming increasingly unclear.

© Vladimir Kovalev.

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