Russia’s largest online retailers have registered booming demand for sporting goods in the first half of 2022, as they start to return Western brands to the local market. In parallel they are to dealing with fears of counterfeiting.
Moneyplace, a St. Petersburg-based service specialized in analyzing retail trends, estimates that sales of sporting goods on Russia’s largest e-commerce platforms, Wildberries and Ozon, jumped by a factor of 2.6 in the first half of 2022 to 26.2 million units.
Sportswear was Russia’s fastest-growing sales category
The two Russian online retailers saw their combined turnover triple in the sports equipment and sportswear categories, reaching 32.60 billion rubles (€493.06m). Sportswear was the fastest growing category, with sales soaring by a factor of 5.4 to 2.6 million units in volume and by a factor of 5.3 to RUB 3.3 billion (€56.5m) in monetary terms. Sales for recreational goods and tourism tripled to 1.9 million units worth RUB 3.1 billion (€54.3m).
Russian online retailers have acknowledged a rise in demand for sporting goods. In the first five months of 2022, Ozon sold 3.5 times more sporting goods than in the same period of the previous year, a spokesperson of the company said. In monetary terms, he added, the category’s turnover nearly tripled.
A spokesperson for Wildberries said that market demand for sporting goods nearly doubled in the first quarter of 2022. In monetary terms, this segment secured a turnover of RUB 11 billion (€192.8m).
Another Russian major online platform, Yandex.Market, said that its turnover in the sporting goods segment jumped by a factor of 2.8 in the first quarter of 2022.
Wildberries and Ozon with measures against counterfeits
Both Wildberries and Ozon reported in June that they had started selling goods via a parallel import mechanism. They also took steps to ensure that no counterfeit products would appear in their catalogs. Ozon said that parallel imports expand the range of products available to Russian consumers, but that it was working to prevent counterfeit items from appearing on its platform, requiring sellers to provide proof of origin for their goods.
A Russian law passed in June has enabled Russian retailers to import and sell products without the trademark owner’s permission if that owner has severed ties with the Russian market. Several Western sporting goods companies – among them Nike, Adidas and Decathlon – stopped doing business in the country in 2022.
On July 7, Vladislav Zaslavsky, deputy director of the Russian Industry and Trade Ministry’s digital marketing department, criticized Wildberries, claiming that the company had begun selling counterfeit products. Zaslavsky said that the Ministry had received complaints from customers and from business organizations. He added that steps had been taken to ensure that counterfeit products were not landing in Ozon.
Wildberries, however, dismissed reports of its involvement in the sale of counterfeits.
“The information about the sale of counterfeit products is not true. We effectively weed out low-quality products. We are developing a special automated counterfeit detection system based on artificial intelligence. If any violations are detected, Wildberries applies sanctions – from blocking the goods to completely blocking the seller on the site,” said Anfisa Ronzhina, the company’s public relations manager.
