Ozon.ru celebrates 10 years and grows, grows, grows

On Tuesday, the company Ozon.ru gathered journalists for the traditional annual press conference. This time the occasion is special: the online store celebrates its first round date - 10 years since its foundation. General Director of Ozone, Bernard Lukey, Director of Operations Tatiana Schors and Elena Ivashentseva, partner of the main investor of the company, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, told about the past year and plans for the current year. And they had a lot to tell: a new logistics center, a section of private announcements and the beginning of sales of electronic books.

Financial results Ozon.ru frankly impressive. Despite the usual development dynamics for successful IT companies, business growth by almost 100% in a year after 10 years on the market is serious. Moreover, at last year’s meeting with the press, a growth of “only” 65% was predicted. To date, the company's turnover is $ 66.1 million.

150,000 people visit the store site daily, making 5,000 orders. Books are still the main product for Ozone and make up 35% of all sales. However, they are rapidly catching up with a variety of electronics, the share of which is already 28%. New categories of gifts, products for children and products for the home and interior are growing even faster. Sales of the latter jumped to quite an indecent 630%. DVDs are presented in the store in all the legally available assortment in Russia, so their sales are growing directly along with the market. Last year, a psychologically important number of discs were sold - 1 million units.

Mr. Luke, not without pride, shared the results of a brand awareness study: among people who already bought something on the Web, 83% know that you can buy books on Ozon, and every second of them has already done so. Over the year, a little more than 1 million orders were sent to customers, and only 3% of them were returned for one reason or another.
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More and more orders are sent to the regions. In the million-plus cities, “Ozone” grew by an average of one and a half times the year (from 55% in Krasnoyarsk to 330% in Yekaterinburg). In large cities, a system of courier delivery and self-pickup through partners has been established, which has reduced the time of ordering on the way to 4-5 days. Although more than half of the store’s customers are still Muscovites. 17% live in St. Petersburg, while the share of all other regions is 28%.

Delivery of orders across the country for a domestic online store is the most serious headache, since it is simply impossible to rely on the existing public (and private) infrastructure. Therefore, in the development of logistics Ozon.ru in the near future will invest significant sums. $ 20 million will be spent only on the construction and equipment of the new logistics center in Tver. It will open in May 2009 and will increase the flow of orders by 5 times compared with the current one. It will move 300 employees employed in the already existing Tver company warehouse, and 150 more people will be hired. The center will be built according to the technologies that are still almost not mastered on the Russian market, including electronic document management systems and automatic warehouse management using wireless communications and radio tags. Advising in construction will be foreign experts from Swisslog and DOCdata. Software, as before, is developed by its own IT department "Ozone".

In addition to qualitative and quantitative growth, "Ozone" literally from day to day will begin to explore new directions for itself. First of all, this is the section of private announcements. In it, users of the service will be able to put up for sale books, CDs and other products that were or remain presented in the store, so that they can use the descriptions from his catalog. Thus, there will be no direct competition with universal network flea markets like Molotok.ru. Bernard Luke believes that by the end of the year about 50 thousand goods will pass through this section.

In addition, Ozon is now actively negotiating with book publishers: in May this year, the store will begin selling e-books. Books will be available both in whole and in parts. In addition, there will be works on sale that have not reached the printing press and exist only in the form of an electronic layout. Prices and licensing terms are still being discussed and most likely will be their own for each specific publisher.

In September, a book about the history of Ozon.ru will be published, which in general is not surprising. The only thing left for the company is the early emergence of strong competitors. Which will help to quickly master the world experience in our open spaces and develop their own, unique, without which we can not do any undertaking. And they will help the company not to slip into narcissism and keep young enthusiasm, which is perhaps the most important thing.