Russia to implement foreign express parcel New deal, fear to protect local trade

Russia's new deal on express packages from abroad will benefit local internet retailers, not the global e-commerce giants such as ebay and Alibaba, Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment bank, reported in Saturday.

Kommersant, a business newspaper in Moscow, reported that, starting this month, Russia began to step up inspections of imported goods for personal use. In view of this, including DHL and FedEx and other international express giants have ceased to send express to ordinary Russian residents, and the United Parcel Service Company (UPS) said that the delivery time to the Russian residents will be postponed.

"In this case, global Internet stores such as ebay and Alibaba Group will be the losers because the companies have been increasing shipments to Russia," said David Ferguson, David Ferguson Capital analyst. Local Russian internet stores, including ozon.ru and Lamoda, will benefit in the short term. ”

Russia's Cross-border E-commerce market was likely to grow by one-fold to nearly 3 billion trillion last year, according to statistics from the market research firm, and the country's online retail market grew by only 26% to $15 billion. "Many Russians who buy goods at overseas online stores are not in a hurry to switch to domestic internet stores, and they may opt to buy more goods when they go abroad," says Boris Ovchinnikov, co-founder of Data Insight, Boris Off Ovchinnikov. ”

Tax issues

In his 2013 State of the Union address last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin said it would tax e-commerce and support housing infrastructure construction with income tax payments. Russian President Belausov said that the country will not set harsh conditions on E-commerce, but to further standardize the e-commerce environment. E-commerce should be taxed like a natural person's daily shopping, while Russia's e-commerce neither pays tariffs nor pays VAT, which is an unfair competition. Therefore, the next step will be on the basis of serious research to promote the relevant work.

The Russian Treasury is now planning to reduce the free entry threshold for E-commerce to € 150 (about 206 US dollars) from the previous € 1000. At the same time, Russia also launched a new document for personal use of courier services.

In ane-mail statement, ebay said that DHL and FedEx's decision not to send express to ordinary Russian residents will not affect the company's performance, because the number of packages ebay sent by the two express companies is not very large. So far, a spokesman for Alibaba Group did not comment on the report.

Satis Kindel Satish Jindel, chief executive of SJ Consulting Group, a logistics industry expert in the United States, said Russia's new deal to express companies had limited influence because more than 90% of the country's international parcels and documents were of a business-to-business nature.