The founder of Magnit lost $10 billion in four years

The assessment of the fortune of the founder of Magnit, Sergei Galitsky, who left the trading network in February, has collapsed by $10 billion since 2014, calculated Bloomberg . The reason is the loss by the retailer of the first place in the market and a sharp drop in its capitalization - from almost $30 billion in 2014 to $5.4 billion.

• Story. Four years ago, when Galitsky was the largest shareholder of the rapidly growing Magnit, the businessman's fortune was estimated at $14 billion, and Galitsky himself then entered the top three richest Russians for the first time.
• But two years later, the rapid growth of Magnit stopped, and the network began to lag behind its main competitor, X5 Retail Group. At the end of 2017, Magnit lost its leadership in the Russian market to X5. As two acquaintances of the billionaire The Bell told , against the background of objectively poor results of Magnit and the loss of the former positions of the network, Galitsky decided to leave the company. In February 2018, he sold his 29% stake in Magnit to the state-owned VTB, keeping a minor stake for himself. As a result of the transaction, Galitsky received 138 billion rubles. About what happened in the company after, we wrote here .
• Since 2014, Galitsky’s fortune has decreased by about 70% and now stands at $4.1 billion, according to Bloomberg, recalling that the businessman began creating a company at the height of the 1998 crisis by opening a small grocery store in Krasnodar. Now Magnit has more than 16 thousand stores across the country.

Life after Magnit. With the departure from retail, the businessman had more time for his other passion - football. Immediately after the sale of the business, Galitsky said that he planned to focus on FC Krasnodar, which he created in 2008. The billionaire's love for football has been repeatedly confirmed by his spending - since 2008, he has invested more than $ 250 million in his club, the money went, among other things, to the stadium and the sports academy associated with FC.

• Galitsky develops football differently than many other wealthy businessmen do. He does not buy expensive foreign clubs and does not attract expensive foreign athletes to his FC, notes the Financial Times . Instead, he dreams of the victories of the Krasnodar club, consisting entirely of local players. “All these horror stories that we should give away our best players to be looked at not by us, but by foreigners, is an incredible shame,” the businessman said in April this year after the appointment of local coach Murad Musaev.
• As wrote Kommersant earlier, after leaving Magnit, the businessman also created an investment fund. According to the sources of the publication, several food manufacturers in the south of Russia were considered as the first objects for investment.

Liana Faizova