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July 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 9
Chinese Alibaba Group starts online food sales in Russia
Chinese Alibaba Group starts online food product sales in Russia Tmall platform, RBC business daily reported. Reportedly the assortment will initially cover Chinese producers, but could be extended to local producers as well, with the key focus currently being on seafood categories.
Alibaba could start a joint venture with Russia's second-largest bank VTB, which would help the Chinese company to potentially dodge the levy on cross-border e-commerce prepared by Russian government and allow Alibaba to benefit from Post of Russia infrastructure.
"The arrival of Alibaba highlights an additional attempt to gain market share in online food retail- ing, and we anticipate a growing focus of various players on the segment," VTB Capital commented.
"Online retail in Russia reached RUB1.04 trillion
in 2017, representing 3% of the total," VTB
Capital reminds, highlighting robust prospects
for e-commerce development in Russia. In 2017, foreign outlets accounted for 36% of the total in Russia, while goods of Chinese origin represented 53% of total, in value terms.
VTB believes that food retailing in Russia
and globally to be on the edge of a historic transformation: after not having fundamentally changed in the last seventy years the sector is likely to undergo material digitalisation.
Ultimately, VTB anticipates only the ultra-fresh categories and those requiring a personal touch to remain off-line, with the bulk and non-food catego- ries switching mostly online. The bank warns that traditional retailers in Russia are not addressing the changing market conditions enough.
Czech fare aggregator Kiwi.com adds new Nomad function for multicity journey planning
Czech fare aggregator and airline tickets booking company Kiwi.com will expand its services by adding the Nomad function to gain an upper hand over the competition, Czech business daily E15 reported.
The main advantage of the service is that the algorithm can search different flight at different times among multiple cities to find the best deal. The competition has no such function.
“Kiwi is aiming at a narrow group of young travel- lers, who are ready to conform to dates and itiner- ary. It is useful function saving money,” Airway.cz civilian air service expert Tomas Hampl told E15.
Kiwi already has a similar service called Multicity. However, with Multicity, the customer must
choose the order of cities and dates whereas Nomad does it automatically and can thus choose different dates and orders.
“We want to make the planning of multiple
stops easier, for businessman and backpackers, individuals and groups. Just imagine you are going from Prague to London with stops in Parise, Rome and Stockholm for CZK3,500 (€135),” said Kiwi founder and boss Oliver Dlouhy.
Kiwi also expanded its offer customers to include booking transport to and from an airport along with a flight ticket by making a single payment in June.
The market value of Kiwi is between CZK10bn- 15bn. Czech media have speculated that Kiwi could come up for sale in 2018.