Page 19 - bne IntelliNews magazine February 2025

bne February 2025 Companies & Markets I 19
Pick-up points most popular in CIS countries
Pick-up points are particularly popular in Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia, where urban residents often
live in large apartment complexes, while rural delivery infrastructure remains underdeveloped. Wildberries, a top e-commerce player in the region with sales equivalent to
$25 billion in 2023, operates about 50,000 pick-up points
in Russia, Belarus, and Central Asia. The company’s story began 20 years ago when English teacher Tatyana Kim started selling clothes and shoes online through European mail-order catalogues. She uploaded product listings online, allowing purchases without prepayment.
As the platform grew rapidly, it became essential to ensure delivery across a vast territory. National postal services were unreliable, and private delivery operators were too expensive. As a result, Wildberries focused on creating its own network of pick-up points.
These are not just collection windows but small, branded spaces with fitting rooms where customers can try on clothes and return items that don’t fit. This model helped popularize online shopping in Russia and neighboring countries, where consumers initially lacked trust in e-commerce. Many Wildberries pick-up points operate under a franchise model, driven by local entrepreneurs. Today, over one million sellers
list their products on Wildberries, with the company running its own warehouses and offering free delivery to pick-up points.
Emerging markets join the trend
Other emerging markets have turned to pick-up points as an alternative to home delivery to meet local challenges, including poor road infrastructure, security risks and long distances for deliveries. Mercado Libre, Latin America’s equivalent to Amazon, operates pick-up points even in pet shops, stationery stores, and petrol stations – wherever is most convenient for customers.
In Southeast Asia, Shopee has established a network of parcel collection points by partnering with convenience stores and individual residents interested in operating these points service within their neighborhoods. Its rival, Lazada, is also developing collection points through partnerships. Urban pick-up points help reduce delivery costs and are popular among customers who are not at home during delivery hours.
Globally, pick-up points and lockers are becoming an increasingly important alternative to home delivery. In some countries, logistics companies drive the development of these services, while in others, marketplaces themselves lead the way, recognizing logistics and delivery as key competitive advantages.
RuNet sees its second big outage since January bne IntelliNews
Russia’s internet, or RuNet, experienced its second significant outage of the year, with users unable to access most websites and online services for approximately 30 minutes on January 14.
The disruption was attributed to a failed system update by the state telecommunications regulator Roskomnadzor, but there has been speculation that the Kremlin is getting ready to be able to cut Russia’s internet off from the World Wide Web and run its own autonomous network as part of
its “Internet sovereignty” policy.
Reports of the outage began circulating around 17:10 Moscow time, with network functionality restored by 17:40. During this window, major platforms including Russia’s largest operator, Rostelecom, government services portal Gosuslugi, and popular taxi-hailing apps were inaccessible. However, messaging platforms Telegram and WhatsApp, alongside social media network VK, were largely unaffected or only partially disrupted.
The incident is reminiscent of a similar shutdown earlier this month on January 6, although that had a small impact
as it occurred during Russia’s New Year’s holidays. A much more serious incident happened in February last year during pre-election reconfigurations of Roskomnadzor’s traffic- blocking systems, which disabled almost all services, including the normally robust social media and messaging services, such as Telegram, YouTube, and VK for about an hour.
State interference in the internet has been growing. Last year YouTube slowed to a crawl as the state reportedly experimented with cutting off access to the popular video sharing site. YouTube’s download speeds were reduced again this January, but to a lesser extent.
“Last year YouTube slowed to
a crawl as the state reportedly experimented with cutting off access to the popular video sharing site”
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