A week-long lockdown ordered by the Russian government to slow down the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic forced Russian sporting goods retailers and others to shut most of their outlets, but it doesn’t seem to have affected the market to a major extent.
As Russia has become the European country most heavily affected by the pandemic, with some 40,000 new cases of infections per day and more than 8.7 million cases and 240,000 deaths since the start of the health crisis. President Vladimir Putin declared a holiday period from Oct. 30 to Nov. 7, with all stores selling non-essential goods ordered to stop operations. Some regions were allowed to introduce the lockdown earlier, on Oct. 25, or to extend it beyond Nov. 7.
Not all the Russian regions aked sporting goods retails to temporarily cease operations. As reported by Maxim Vinogradov, director of the Russian sporting goods retailer Kant, for example stores in Sochi, a major winter sports resort, remained open and even managed to improve their sales thanks to a high inflow of tourists during the lockdown period.
Retailers whose stores were closed continued to operate as pick-up points for goods ordered online. Anyhow, Vinogradov agreed with a product manager at Sportmaster that the new lockdown was relatively short, and there is still a lack of sufficient data to judge whether or not it would cause any change in sales dynamics.
Evgenia Telicheva, product manager of Sportmaster, also noted that in some regions of Russia such as Tatarstan and Bashkiria, local authorities introduced a regime of limited customer service, allowing only customers with a sanitary pass to enter non-food stores.
On the other hand, the lockdown apparently gave a further boost to a new emerging resale market for sporting goods and other products through online marketplaces such as Yula, Avito and VKontakte, according to the Russian newspaper Vedomosti.
Mikhail Burmistrov, general director of the Russian Infoline-Analytica agency, said that Russians are likely to massively sell off certain products purchased during the last year’s Covid-related lockdown. “In periods when access to gyms is limited, people buy sporting goods, and then, having lost interest or a need for it, they sell it - this trend is becoming more and more popular,” he said.
According to AliExpress Russia, within a few days after the announcement of the national holiday week, offers of sporting goods by private individuals jumped compared with the previous week. The company added that the demand for training footwear tripled, while the overall demand for athletic apparel jumped by 50 percent, as compared to early October, as Russians are also preparing for a new period of epidemiological restrictions.
