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Leaders
May 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 11
ing into account only physical goods), its growth is accelerating, as witnessed by the performance of many players listed in Data Insight’s ranking.
In October last year Morgan Stanley predicted that the market could exceed $50bn by 2023. But Boris Ovchinnikov, the Data Insight analyst who conducted the ranking, believes online retailers could do even better.
“Over the past year or two, the performance
of many players, including both large and medium-sized sites, has been so impressive that forecasts may have to be revised upwards,” he told East-West Digital News.
Growth will be pushed by massive investments made by big players. Sberbank, the state-con- trolled financial giant, has put half a billion dol- lars in an e-commerce joint venture with Yandex, while Mail.Ru Group has teamed up with Alibaba to develop an “ecosystem” that would encompass e-commerce, social communications and gaming. (Yandex and Mail.Ru Group are listed on Western stock exchanges LSE and NASDAQ, respectively.)
Meanwhile, Ozon is investing massively in infra- structure. Its fulfilment capacity, currently at 100,000 sq. m., will “at least double in 2019 and could even reach or exceed 1mn sq. m. in 2025,” the compa- ny’s PR director Maria Zaikina told EWDN.
Facebook and Twitter given nine more months to comply with Russian data-localisation law
Roskomnadzor’s head Alexander Zharov expressed “hope” that the two companies will comply with Russian legislation on personal data storage, and that the authorities will not end up having to block access to their sites, Interfax reported.
Adopted in 2014 and applicable since September 2015, this legislation requires companies operating in Russia to store Russian users’
or clients’ personal data on servers physically located in the country. Numerous foreign and domestic players were concerned, including global players who tended to store their users’ data in borderless clouds (see white paper by EWDN and EY).
While many businesses – including Alibaba, AliExpress, Apple, and Google – have managed to transfer user data from foreign data centres to Russia, others refused or failed to comply.
In December 2018, Roskomnadzor formally requested Twitter and Facebook –, which so far had sent both positive and negative signals on the matter – to provide substantive information on their compliance with the law.
The two companies did send answers in January, but Roskomnadzor judged them to lack “concrete elements on factual compliance with the law or deadlines to apply its provisions in the future.”
As a consequence, Facebook and Twitter faced administrative charges and, earlier this month, were sentenced by a Moscow court to pay small fines.
Ultimately Facebook and Twitter, should they violate the law, could be blocked in Russia – as was the case with LinkedIn in 2016, following two court decisions.