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April 13, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 11
E-commerce dramatically eats into foot traffic at Moscow’s leading shopping malls
Ben Aris in London
E-commerce has dramatically eaten into the foot traffic at Moscow’s leading shopping malls in the first months of this year as Russians increasingly move online to buy everything from sugar to shoes, according to the latest Watcom Shopping Index.
The Watcom index, which measures footfall in the leading shopping malls in Moscow in real time using face recognition technology and the security cameras in the top malls in the capital, has been falling steadily for several years since its inception in 2014.
The index showed a jump in foot traffic in the run up to the holiday season in December. The week just before the New Year’s Day holidays (a more important holiday than Christmas in Russia)
had an index score of over 605, which was better than the 2016 result (578.63), but still behind the
results of the previous two years (620.25 in 2015 and 629.6 in 2014).
However, since then the results for the first 14 weeks of 2018 have been well below all the results for the last four years, dropping to
a low of 434 at the end of January, its lowest level since the index was launched.
That is despite a recovery in incomes. Retail turnover crashed during the silent crisis years and contracted throughout 2015 and through to 2017 on the back of falling real wages during the period. Real incomes turned positive in the middle of 2016, but the more important real disposable incomes – money left over after food and utility bills – only turned positive at the start of this year. But the improving income dynamics are not reflected in the foot traffic at
malls, which have continued to fall,