AfterOzon, Sber, Yandex and Auchan, a new big capital injection was announced earlier this week in the Russia e-commerce space. AliExpress Russia, the cross-border e-commerce leader and a major player on the domestic market, will receive $60 million from Mail.ru Group, one of its shareholders.
The fresh funding will support AliExpress Russia’s “ongoing active expansion into the local market [as well as] its leading cross-border e-commerce business in Russia and its overall growth ambitions,” Mail.ru Group stated.
Some of the company’s other shareholders will bring additional, but yet-to-be-specified, funding.
In a separate move, MegaFon — which participated in the creation of the AliExpress Russia JV in 2019, receiving a 24.3% stake — announced it sold its shares to USM. In an exchange with business publication RBC, the mobile operator stated: “Initially, when entering the capital of AliExpress Russia, we sought to implement a number of synergies with this platform. We are satisfied with this cooperation as our joint projects will continue developing in the future.”
“We believe the new ownership structure is more adequate for the company in a further development perspective,” the MegaFon press service added.
Boosted by the pandemic, Russian e-commerce recorded one of the world’s highest growth rates in 2020. 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.
Last year saw AliExpress Russia almost triple (+171%) its online sales volume, according to Data Insight. However, as reported by RBC, the company’s losses are growing: they reached 967 million rubles ($13.1 million at today’s exchange rate) in H1 2021, up from 533 million in the same period of last year.
An adapted version of this story appeared in ThePaypers, a leading international industry publication and a partner of East-West Digital News.
