In the first half of this year Sber, the state-controlled financial and digital giant (previously known as Sberbank), invested some 73 billion rubles (around $1 billion) in its digital ecosystem, a company representative told business daily Vedomosti. These investments account for 11.5% of Sber’s net profit for H1 2021 (630 billion rubles).
Sber’s investments in this field are accelerating dramatically: the company spent as much money on developing its digital ecosystem in H1 2021 as it did during the three preceding years — and it intends to spend 300-350 billion rubles (at least four times more) in the next three years, according to Sber’s financial director Alexandra Buryko, cited by Vedomosti.
During the same period, according to Sber’s IFRS statements cited by Vedomosti, Sber’s digital ecosystem (non-financial services) generated 74.7 billion rubles in revenue — three times as much as in H1 2020, 4% of total company revenue — with 200 billion rubles expected for the whole year 2021.
E-commerce activities accounted for almost half of these digital revenues: they generated 34.8 billion rubles in GMV (gross merchandise value) during the first half of this year, up 12.9 times from the same period of last year, said Buryko.
Meanwhile, the O2O joint venture (co-owned by Sber and Mail.ru Group, covering foodtech and transportation services) brought 22.9 billion rubles ($313 million) in revenues in H1 2021.
The Sber digital ecosystem still makes considerable losses: these reached 19.2 billion rubles ($263 million at the current exchange rate) in the first half of the year, up 2.7 times year-on-year, with a 14.3 billion ruble ($196 million) negative EBITDA.
Sber’s former ally and new competitor Yandex intends to invest no less than $650 million this year in e-commerce activities, industry publication E-Pepper reports. Half of this amount will be used to improve the company’s logistic infrastructure. The company expects the GMV of its e-commerce activities to grow threefold this year.
In 2020, Russian e-commerce recorded one of the world’s highest growth rates. Domestic sales of physical goods amounted to 2.7 trillion rubles (some $37 billion at the average exchange rate of the year), up 58% from 2019.
