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Leaders
June 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 10
Sales of Czech internet giant Seznam.cz soar to record- breaking CZK4.12bn
Leading Czech e-commerce portal Seznam. cz saw sales increase by 11% y/y to a record- breaking CZK4.12bn (€160mn) in 2017. The operating profit Ebitda expanded by 17% y/y to CZK1.89bn, the company’s vice-chairman Pavel Zima said on June 13.
“We will have at least the same results in 2018, but our ambitions are, of course, higher,” said Zima. Content services, news service and also a programmatic advertisement through services like Sklik or RTB all posted good results.
Seznam bought a controlling stake in two regional radio stations – Expres FM and Classic
Praha – and the company wants to create new broadcasters to cover the whole country. Part
of these radio stations will be Seznam.cz news service subsidiary Seznam Zpravy and news TV station Televize Seznam as well as the advertising division of Seznam.cz.
Another plan of Seznam.cz is to be the leading player in the online automobile and motorcycle news market with the acquisition of the website garaz.cz.
Seznam is the biggest internal portal in Chechia founded in 1996 by Ivo Lukacovic, who is still the owner. It has approximately 7.8mn of real users.
Russia could levy cross-border online purchases in 2020
The Federal Customs Service (FTS) will introduce a levy on any purchases in foreign online stores and delivered to Russia starting in 2020, Vedomosti daily said on June 17 citing two unnamed sources with knowledge of FTS proposal to the Finance Ministry.
Russian e-commerce is dominated by cross-bor- der trade, which beat the 13% market growth and expanded by 24% in 2017, while domestic online shopping lagged behind with 8% growth. In mone- tary terms Russians e-shopped the most in China (53%), the EU (22%), and US (12%).
The move could reportedly bring RUB25bn ($0.4bn) to Russian budget annually and make local e-commerce more competitive. Currently foreign
online purchases of less than €1,000 per one consumer or below 31kg in weight ate not taxed.
The Finance Ministry already suggested to lower this ceiling to €500 and to €200 in longer-term, which was not approved by the government.
However, the measure is not likely to have impact, as according to the FTS, 95% of online purchases are below €30. The data by the Post of Russia shows that in 2017 out of 283mn parcels shipped from abroad only 0.02% cost more than €200.
Now the FTS proposes to abandon the ceiling and cut the import duty for e-commerce from 30% to 20% by 2020.