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Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which encompasses 11 of the former Soviet republics. The order is said to ban the sale of software to governments and government-owned enterprises across the region. “While we are clarifying the possibility of further work, we are not excluding the possibility that the company will make a separate product for the private sector,” Andrei Petrenko, the distributor’s CEO, told Kommersant. However, TrueConf, Russia’s domestic videoconferencing rival to Zoom, has claimed that the decision may prove to be a political one. The firm’s development director, Dmitry Odintsov, said that, “given the US is Zoom’s main market the company is trying to rule out anything that could be used as an excuse to undermine its image.”
Russia’s total children's goods online market surged 76% y/y in monetary terms and 2.1x y/y in quantitative terms in 2020, according to Data Insight. The exact numbers were not disclosed, but the agency mentioned it to be a record high, as sales were up 21% y/y in 2019, while the number of orders increased 40% y/y.
Offline operations on the children's goods market were pressured by the pandemic-related restrictions. Detsky Mir, the overall market leader with a 22% share, had 12% of its stores in Russia temporarily closed between April and mid-May. In order to compensate for the pressure on the offline, the company focused on developing its e-commerce sales, raising online turnover 2.4x last year to RUB34.8bn (accounting for roughly a quarter of the company’s total sales).
This allowed Detsky to become one of the top-three online retailers, while the competition in the segment has intensified, particularly from marketplaces. Wildberries, the largest marketplace in Russia, has recently become a category leader in the online children's goods segment, with a 41% market share in 2020, benefitting from its larger exposure towards digital sales, which were boosted by the growing demand during the pandemic. This is going to put pressure on Detsky Mir’s overall stance, as it had traditionally been the market leader and saw limited offline competition.
E-commerce sales still represent the most dynamic channel and Detsky Mir has scheduled a medium-term target of 45% of the total (we forecast it increasing with a CAGR of 25% in 2021-25F).
Roskomnadzor proposed expanding Russia’s law on personal data to ban the cross-border transfer of Russians’ personal information. The idea is that social media, e-commerce, or online booking firms operating in Russia cannot store users’ data on servers abroad.
But experts say that it’s technically impossible for Roskomnadzor to single out what internet traffic moving abroad includes personal data. As a result, the
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