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46 I Eastern Europe bne July 2021
In the first retail race the game was to open as many stores as fast as you could to win market share. A new race has started where the game is to get as many people into your app as possible, and this race has pitted the bricks and mortar stores against the e-commerce upstarts.
M.Video-Eldorado Russia's retail lion
Ben Aris in Berlin
"The winner is the lion and takes most of the business.
You cannot do things halfway,” said M.Video-Eldorado Group CEO Alexander Izosimov in an exclusive
interview with bne IntelliNews.
The merger between Russian consumer electronics giants M.Video and Eldorado in March 2018 was a big success. It created not just one of the biggest electronics retailers in Europe, but a top- 10 global player.
It was already the bricks and mortar consumer electronics market leader, but thanks to the pandemic’s catalysing effect on e-commerce the ground is shifting. M.Video-Eldorado Group will have to be the nimble giant if it is going to hang on to its lead and double gross merchandise value (GMV), which retailers increasing use to measure sales, in the next five years, as the company intends to do.
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Most focus on Russia’s huge raw material resources but it has another extremely valuable resource that can make businesses billions of dollars a year: its people. With a population of some 146mn and income levels on a par with the lower echelons of the EU in
up transition to online brought on by the pandemic,” M.Video-Eldorado’s new CEO Alexander Izosimov told bne IntelliNews in an exclusive interview. “The market had been developing quickly in the first half of 2020, but
as it changed it was not clear how
“We already had a head start of several years – which means we can focus on our transformation strategy while the others are trying to catch up”
real terms, Russia is head and shoulders above its emerging European peers as the largest consumer market in Europe.
“The merger worked. We successfully brought two strong brands together and we were ready for the speeding-
the pieces would fall. The pandemic accelerated the emergence of new e-commerce players and ecosystems, but as the leading consumer electronics retailer in Russia, we already had
[a] head start of several years – which means we can focus on our