Page 18 - RusRPTMar19

· These measures are only the initial batch from a demographic support package, and might be extended in future.
2.9 Russia gets second female billionaire, Wildberries becomes the new Russian e-commerce poster-child
Moscow has more billionaires per square kilometre than any other city in Europe, but they are almost all men. Almost. But not quite.
Until this year Russia has had only one female billionaire – Elena Baturina, who made her money in Moscow’s construction sector in the wild 90s.
An impressive figure and astute businesswoman, but an odd coincidence her husband was Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who also was in charge of handing out building permissions in the capital and managed a city budget the size of New York for more than decade.
Luzhkov was replaced by Sergei Sobyanin in 2010 and has since retired to Latvia where he keeps bees.
Now there is a second female billionaire, who has needed the sort of luck that made Baturina rich.
According to the calculations of the Russian issue of Forbes, the owner of Russia’s largest online store of Wildberries Runet Tatyana Bakalchuk has seen her fortune rise from $600mn last year to break the magical barrier and top $1bn this year.
It should be emphasised that the valuation is only an estimate by the magazine as Wildberries is not a listed company (yet) and so the writers at Forbes are still guessing. But it is unlikely they are far off the mark.
The online retailer is doing very well indeed in Russia’s burgeoning e- commerce sector with an audience of over 60mn people a month, $1.7bn in revenue, and is investing into a 150% expansion of its pickup point network in 2018.
Founded by Bakalchuk in 2004 with her husband Vladislav, the company has ridden the wave of Russia’s ballooning volume of online sales. Last year Wildberries was the biggest online retailer in Russia for the third year in a row.
18 RUSSIA Country Report March 2019 www.intellinews.com