Russia
„Dancing requires total concentration. As a buyer, I also have to keep my goal in focus.“
METRO Cash & Carry Russia
„Dancing requires total concentration. As a buyer, I also have to keep my goal in focus.“
As a purchasing assistant at the head office of METRO Cash & Carry Russia in Moscow, Julia Polotseva focuses on her customers. In her free time, however, her heart belongs to traditional Russian dance. She feels that music and movement give her soul wings. She has been dancing since she was seven and her passion has led her to stages in her homeland and abroad. Julia Polotseva would still love to fulfil one very special dance dream: a performance at a METRO Cash & Carry Russia event.
Russia’s sunny south is characterised by fruit and vegetable cultivation. There is high demand for regional apples, berries and plums as well as lettuce, cucumbers and onions. Until recently, however, METRO Cash & Carry Russia had a difficult time offering these products in good quality and at a reasonable price to its nine stores in southern Russia. Due to a lack of local logistical infrastructure, the goods had to travel through the central distribution centre in Moscow – a distance of up to 2,000 kilometres that not only affected costs but also impacted the freshness of the produce. Hence, the availability of local goods in the METRO Cash & Carry stores in southern Russia was limited. But this abruptly changed in August 2013 with the opening of a new logistical platform in Aksay. Here, in a space of around 700 square metres, orders are taken for more than 100 different kinds of fruits and vegetables, which are then distributed to the nine stores. This now enables many more regional fruit and vegetable suppliers to provide goods to the METRO Cash & Carry stores. And thanks to the substantially shorter delivery routes, the costs for logistics were drastically reduced. This allows the stores to offer their customers more fresh fruit and vegetables from the region at reasonable prices – a win-win situation for everyone involved.
2,000 km to the stores
New logistics platform
Shorter delivery distances, lower costs
From the Baltic Sea across the Urals and on to the Pacific Ocean – with over 17 million square kilometres, Russia is the world’s largest country in terms of area. It extends across almost 10,000 kilometres and eleven time zones from west to east and is home to nearly 143 million people, most of which live in the cities and the urban industrial areas in the central and southern regions as well as in western Siberia. Moscow and St Petersburg are Russia’s major economic and cultural centres. About twelve million people live in the greater Moscow area alone.
As the largest consumer market in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia is an attractive growth region for national and international companies. Retail revenue accounts for some 70 per cent of private consumer spending here, which is comparatively high. However, the retail landscape to a great extent remains shaped by tradition; the five largest retail companies only achieve a market share of under 20 per cent. In contrast, a consolidation of the market has taken place in recent years in the major cities of Moscow and St Petersburg.
Anyone taking flowers as a hospitality gift should take care that the bouquet contains an odd number of flowers. Bouquets with an even number of flowers are reserved for funerals.
Since the turn of the millennium, Russia has proved to be one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. METRO Cash & Carry identified this potential very early on, opening up its first two wholesale stores in Moscow in 2001. Today, METRO Cash & Carry Russia operates 73 wholesale stores. In the space of just a few years, METRO Cash & Carry Russia established itself as one of the strongest growth drivers within METRO GROUP, with annual sales of around €4.3 billion.