Ozon will launch a competitor to Yandex.Lavka and Samokat

Ozon Express, Ozon's fast delivery service, plans to launch a new format for delivering groceries, food and other goods in 15 minutes by the end of the year, a told RBC. source in the e-commerce market

According to him, Ozon Express will deliver only about 3,000 items: mainly food, prepared food, private label products and non-food items. The format will be launched this year in Moscow, he said. The company will open mini-darkstores with a size of 250 sq. m.

The plans were confirmed by an Ozon representative: the format is a test for the company, the results of the pilot "will determine the further development of the project." He did not name investments in the project, as well as the number of planned mini-darkstores. The direction will be developed by Marya Dey, a former member of the board and director of supply chains at Magnit, he noted.

• Ozon Express, with a base delivery time of one hour, was launched in 2019. Initially, he worked in Moscow. This year he began to expand the geography. Now the service works in the capital, the Moscow region, St. Petersburg, Tver and Rostov-on-Don.

• The cost of one dark store with a kitchen can cost Ozon about 7–9 million rubles, Mikhail Burmistrov, general director of INFOLine-Analytics, estimated. According to him, the foodtech market is expected to grow rapidly in the fourth quarter amid tightening restrictive measures, non-working days and the introduction of a lockdown in some regions. Now is the optimal time for Ozon to enter the segment, given the quarterly doubling of sales of Ozon Express and the growth in demand for ultra-fast delivery, he notes.

• Ozon's entry into the fast delivery market in 15 minutes cannot but affect other companies, Raiffeisenbank analyst Sergey Libin emphasizes. At the first stage, the company will certainly introduce discounts and various bonuses, so Yandex.Lavka and Samokat will probably have to respond - for example, by waiving paid delivery, he argues. Konstantin Belov, senior analyst at Uralsib, agrees that the appearance of Ozon will provoke some kind of response from other players.

• Due to the high level of capital intensity of the market, Ozon will have to “seriously invest in the development of dark stores” in order to get closer to other competitors in their number in the near future, Libin notes. He called the move "the right move if a company wants to position itself as the #1 player in the e-commerce market."