World meat industry news

In the first three months of 2024, the market for the delivery of groceries and everyday goods grew by 55% year-on-year, to RUB 310 billion. This became possible not due to Moscow and large cities in the European part of Russia, where supply is already saturated, but due to regions, such as Siberia and the Far East, where online delivery began to actively develop from the beginning of this year. Experts expect that market growth is still possible by the end of this year, but then the pace will gradually slow down.

In January-March, the market for online sales of food products (e-grocery) grew by 55% year-on-year, to 310 billion rubles, according to the Infoline review, which Kommersant has. Data Insight has almost similar data, according to which this segment in the first quarter grew by 40% in orders, to 185 million, and by 58% in money, to 293 billion rubles. At the same time, the share of online sales in total retail sales still remains small - 5.2%, although the figure in January-March was 1.3 percentage points higher than a year earlier, Infoline notes.

At the beginning of the year, a trend towards the accelerated development of online sales in the regions began to clearly appear, notes General Director of Infoline-Analytics Mikhail Burmistrov. This is due to the low base effect and partly to the growth of consumer incomes in a number of regions, the ABC of Taste network explains.

Large players in the segment, due to the slowdown in the growth of the online delivery market for FMCG (daily consumer goods) in Moscow, began to increase the density of orders in the regions and continued expansion into new cities, adds Mr. Burmistrov.

The expert cites the example of the Magnit chain, which already has 80% of online orders coming from regions outside of Moscow, the Moscow region, St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region.

The e-grocery segment is now growing noticeably in Siberia and the Far East, notes Igor Karavaev, Chairman of the Presidium of AKORT. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the volume of online sales of products in the first quarter year-on-year increased by only 30%, and in the regions of Siberia and the Far East - several times, agrees AKIT President Artem Sokolov. Lenta also noticed an increase in interest in delivery in the Urals and talks about the saturation of the market in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Now in the regions the cost of attracting new customers is much lower, so the focus of e-grocery market growth is moving there, says Olga Pashkova, senior analyst at Data Insight. According to Ms. Pashkova, in Moscow and large cities, almost all buyers who use online orders closely interact with existing delivery services, and in order to attract new users, market players have to “entice them from their competitors.”

Before the pandemic, customers rarely ordered groceries online, mostly for future use and for large sums, but now they have switched to regular purchases, recalls Samokat’s director of brands and communications, Lisa Emert.

At the beginning of the year, the situation on the market changed somewhat - now, according to Mikhail Burmistrov, express delivery of up to two hours is beginning to prevail, although before this, buyers ordered groceries online for future use and pick-up. At Sbermarket, for example, every second order is with express delivery in up to 30 minutes, says Olga Makarova, director of marketing for the service. Other market players have also begun to create services for faster delivery of popular everyday goods, such as Ozon, which recently launched such a service.

Mikhail Burmistrov predicts that by the end of the year as a whole, the e-grocery segment will grow by 57%, to 1.45 trillion rubles. Igor Karavaev expects that this year the share of delivery in the total turnover of the food market will exceed the 10% threshold. In non-food retail, including sales of clothing and equipment, this figure is about 20%, so for now FMCG has a fairly high growth potential, notes Artem Sokolov. However, X5 Digital commercial director Evgeniy Chechetkin believes that in the next five years the growth rate of the segment will gradually decline.