Even as the market was still responding to the shock of Lamoda.ru’s enormous round of financing, Ozon Holdings’ CEO Maëlle Gavet said during an interview yesterday with The Next Web, in partnership with East-West Digital News, that her company aims to control directly or indirectly 80% of the Russian online retail market within ten years.
Regarding Lamoda’s $130 million capital injection, Gavet said she is not worried though, assuming that Lamoda will be using a large part of the money to expand into countries like Kazakhstan and Ukraine. “It’s the right market to focus on, but we intend to go into those countries through Ozon.ru, not through Sapato.” (1)
“I would be way more worried if a foreign company said ‘We’re about to spend this much money to develop Russia’, that would be a bigger worry for us,” she continued.
This, however, seems to be precisely the case, as a source close to Lamoda’s investors told EWDN that Russia remains the site’s main target and that “bulk amounts [of funding] would not go to non-primary markets.”
Not much worry about Amazon
Gavet is not too worried either about Amazon’s first steps in Russia. “When you look at what (Amazon) have been able to do outside the US, they’ve been extremely successful in countries where they could pretty much do a copy-paste of what they’ve done in the US. When you look and China and Brazil, the picture is slightly less clear. They don’t publish their numbers by country but it doesn’t seem like it’s been that easy in these countries like it’s been in the West. When it comes to China or to Russia it requires a very different business model.”
Any big rival would have to build a fulfilment and logistics network from scratch, given Russia’s deficient infrastructure in this area. Launched fifteen years ago and fuelled by a $100 million round of financing in September 2011, Ozon has built unmatched order fulfillment capacities across Russia and has even started to deploy its network in Kazakhstan.
Gavet said that things are “going well” in this country, with Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania standing as the next destinations on Ozon’s roadmap.
IPO or acquisition?
Gavet did not comment on whether or not Ozon – which reached $492 million GMV and $250 million net sales in 2012 – is profitable yet. She is “thinking about” going public, even though an IPO is “not a target in itself.”
The alternative, of course, would be for someone to come along and acquire Ozon. Would Gavet be interested in being acquired by Amazon? “It would be cool,” she said, with a laugh. However, she made clear the agenda right now is not to sell the company, it is to grow it.
“Our target is that in ten years time whenever you do online shopping in Russia, 80% of people will do shopping through an Ozon type of shopping, or using Ozon services. What I mean by that is that either you will go to one of our B2C website like Ozon.ru, Ozon Travel or Sapato, or you would go to a website that would be powered by the Ozon group, or your parcel would be handled by O’Courier,” Gavet explained to EWDN.
Gavet said that the company board is trying to figure out how much money is needed to achieve that lofty goal of 80% market share – compared with just about 3% today.
(1) One of Lamoda’s main rivals on the Russian online footwear and apparel market, Sapato.ru was acquired by Ozon in early 2012.
- Read the full interview on The Next Web.
