Yandex, the NASDAQ-listed Russian digital giant, yesterday announced the launch of its express grocery delivery service in Paris.
“Leveraging its own advanced technologies and backed by its unique and vast expertise and experience in the e-grocery market. Yango Deli has started operating with four warehouses (also known as ‘dark stores’), which will cover approximately 1 million people, with delivery within 15 minutes on average,” the company stated.
The service currently serves, in full or in part, 10 city districts (the 2nd, 3rd, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 14th, 15th, 17th and 19th ‘arrondissements’) plus neighboring cities Boulogne-Billancourt, Issy-Les-Moulineaux and Montrouge. This just a fraction of the Paris urban area, which hosts nearly 11 million inhabitants. Yandex says the service will be expanded to cover the whole city, without specifying any date.
Delivered orders by couriers on electric bikes and scooters, Yango Deli claims to offer in Paris “around 3,000 products that everyone needs on a daily basis, such as fresh foods and cupboard staples, baked goods, alcohol, pet supplies, housewares and more.”
Customers may even order fresh hot coffee through the Yango Deli app — which the company touts a unique offer in the Paris e-grocery market.
The company partners with local suppliers of food and grocery products — from local bakeries (‘boulangeries’) which provide freshly baked products, to international brands.
High-tech operations
Yango Deli says it uses exclusively in-house technologies. These include “a tech-forward collection system that takes only 8 seconds per item and around 2–3 minutes per order” as well as an order picker “with special software” to go directly to the right items and place the goods in bags in a certain order.
The route for couriers is determined optimally, with pickers collecting the items for each order “as quickly as possible in one circle.”
Coming in addition to manual quality control, “telematics technology and an automated system [are used] to monitor expiration dates.” Special algorithms help minimize food waste by “calculating various complex factors related to the demand and supply of inventories in warehouses.”
Yango Deli has hired local staff in Paris to serve in logistics, purchasing and other functions, in addition to its international team.
The Russian company has to face competition from a variety of local and international players. Since early 2021, according to Le Monde, some 20 express delivery services have launched in the French capital. Among the foreign contenders are British-American Dija, German Flink and Gorillas and Turkish Getir — which received dozens or hundreds of million US dollars from VCs to fuel their international ambitions.
From Russia, to Israel, to Paris, to London
Yango is the name of the international arm of Yandex Go, the firm’s taxi aggregator and food tech business. It launched its first grocery delivery service in Israel in 2020. After Paris, the first targeted European city, the firm has plans to launch in London as well.
Initially, Yandex similar service has been operating in Russia since 2019 under the Yandex.Lavka brand. The domestic online grocery delivery market surged 3.6 times to €1.71 billion in 2020, boosted by covid-related lockdowns, and could reach as much as €3.31 billion by the end of 2021, according to Infoline research cited by Yandex.
In Q2 2021, the annualized GMV run rate of Yandex Lavka / Yango Deli reached approximately €300 million, up 2.3 times year-on-year.
Russian e-commerce in Western Europe
Very few Russian players in the e-commerce and related fields operate in Western Europe. Among them are Ozon, which works more and more with French suppliers and logistics companies, and Wildberries, which recently launched sales in Germany as well as France, Italy and Spain.
Last year in the UK, a Russian team founded Jiffy, aiming to launch an ultrafast delivery service in London. The startup has just raised $6.6 million, mostly from Eastern European investors.
The international successes of JOOM are also noteworthy. This company, whose mobile apps sell Chinese products at cut-rate prices, did not start from Russia, but it was founded in 2016 by Russian entrepreneur Ilya Shirokov. France is among its main markets.
