Russian Post could lose up to 30 bln rubles in revenue in 2020 due to fall in online trade
MOSCOW. April 9 (Interfax) - JSC Russian Post CEO Maxim Akimov has estimated the fall in the national postal service's revenue this year within the range of 18-30 billion rubles due to the existing reduction in business for delivery of goods sold online.
"Yes, we are planning for a serious fall in revenue this year. For trans-border trade, I'll remind you, we deliver a million [packages] a day around the country and we estimate [the losses] at somewhere around 18 to 30 billion [rubles] per year in different scenarios," Akimov said during the online summit Business after the Pandemic.
"Although everyone thinks e-commerce is a winning sector, we are expecting a huge contraction of demand. We are all experiencing this: ourselves, Wildberries, and Yandex ," he said.
Akimov said that in the e-commerce sector, Russian companies were capable of competing with the world's leading players, but that in conditions of the current pandemic the sector was in need of support. "A conversation about volumes of support must, at last, begin [...] What if whole important tracks of business die, for example, certain dispatchers? Are certain irreplaceable services going to be lost? We are in serious need of close dialogue with the state," Akimov said.
Akimov said at the beginning of March that the coronavirus situation was putting pressure on the company's revenue and earning power. He said on Thursday that even the presented forecasts were premature, as "the key point now is uncertainty, and we don't know how long it is going to go on for."
The company is not presenting its revenue result for 2019 due to reorganization. In Q4, it was 60.06 billion rubles, of which 47.54 billion was income from mail service, which is the company's main area of business. From January-September 2019, the enterprise earned 146.8 billion rubles.