In some Russian regions, consumer activity in the sporting goods market has nearly doubled thanks to snowy winter conditions during the current winter season. It has been particularly strong over the online channel.
Ilya Titarenko, director of the distribution department of Sportmaster, the country’s leading sporting goods retailer, confirmed that the demand in the Russian sporting goods market was stronger than in 2020, owing to favorable winter conditions, adding that inventories are being depleted as a result.
Sportmaster puts the total value of the Russian sporting goods market in 2021 at about 690 billion rubles (€7.9bn-$8.9bn), up by almost 9 percent from 635 million rubles in 2020 and up by 7 percent from 645 billion rubles in 2019.
A Russian online marketplace, RedExpress, said that its sales of sporting goods jumped by 21 percent in 2021 against the previous year, noting that the strongest rise in demand took place in the winter sports segment.
Another Russian online retailer AllInstruments, stated that the demand for sporting goods climbed by 30 percent across the country last year, with exceptionally strong sales in the last few months. Since the beginning of the winter season, sales of sports products went up by 275 percent in St. Petersburg, by 100 percent in Nizhniy Novgorod, and by 56 percent in Moscow, it said.
According to the Russian online marketplace VseInstrumenty, the demand for products for winter sporting and outdoor activities went up by 30 percent in December as compared to the same month of the previous year. Russians were primarily interested in buying snowboards, sleds, ski bindings, children’s skis, snow scooters and ice rinks, it said.
On the other hand, research conducted by the Russian IT firm CloudPayments found out that Russians spent 18 percent less money on sporting goods in November and December of 2021, presumably online as well as offline, compared with the same period of the previous year. The analysts suggested that Russian citizens started planning their budget more carefully during the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic and avoided spending much on non-essential goods.
