Newspaper continent

Pavel Gusev promises to facilitate press access to chain supermarkets

Newspaper publishers are looking for a direct route to the shelves of large supermarkets. At the end of last week, the Moskovsky Komsomolets publishing house and Sedmoy Continent OJSC announced the creation of a joint venture, RetailMediagroup, on a parity basis to distribute printed products in the stores of this famous retail chain. The founders of the joint venture do not hide that the impetus for the creation of the retail company was the conflict between the publisher of the TV-Park TV guide, Media-Park CJSC, and the wholesalers who supplied the press to chain stores - at the end of March, the parties were unable to agree on the financial terms of cooperation. At the same time, after hawkers with newspapers were forced out of the areas of the Moscow metro, shops turned into very tempting markets.

Attempts to move the main points of sale to places of “mass gathering of buyers,” that is, to grocery stores, cost publishers a lot of effort and money. In an effort to get into supermarkets and hypermarkets, publishers and distribution companies are faced with the need to pay for access to a good retail network, for prominent shelf space, and also pay extra if the publication has low turnover. “We negotiated with a number of trade associations,” says MK General Director Pavel Gusev, “but it worked out quickly and in a businesslike manner with the Seventh Continent.” By teaming up with a chain of supermarkets, the MK publishing house kills two birds with one stone: it ensures the sale of its own products in a large chain and receives part of the retailer’s profit, including from the sale of space in the store to other publications. “Space in a supermarket can be sold at a much higher profit,” says Mr. Gusev.

True, the general director of MK, it seems, has not yet decided how to combine the interests of the publisher of the daily newspaper and the retailer, who, by and large, does not care who gets the shelves. As the publisher of MK, he complained that today the glamorous gloss, which has taken up almost all the “magazine spaces” in supermarkets, has practically squeezed out the business and socio-political press. And as a retailer, Pavel Gusev advocates that the publications customers need are determined by the market and daily monitoring of sales.

The supermarket chain has its own reasons for merging. Printed products, including the press, according to Vladimir Karnaukhov, Chairman of the Board of Directors of JSC The Seventh Continent, today occupy third place in the non-product assortment of retail chains after hygiene products and music and video products. Mr. Karnaukhov claims that in working with MK he saw “a new approach to creating demand for printed publications.” At the same time, he assured that the emergence of a new retail company does not mean the network’s refusal to work with old partners - press distributors. However, most likely by September the terms of cooperation with suppliers of printed materials will be revised.

Yulia KHOMCHENKO