In December 2021, American Forbes named Tatyana Bakalchuk, who owns 99% of Wildberries, the leader in wealth growth dynamics among all the world’s billionaires – her business grew by more than 1000% in a year.
According to Forbes, the company itself then estimated its real value at $30 billion.
The jump in the value of the company and, accordingly, the fortune of its owner was mainly due to the successful entry into the IPO of a competitor, the Ozon online store, which took place in November 2020. Ozon is the first public domestic marketplace, the listing of which allows you to evaluate the value of non-public companies like Wildberries. Both players work on a “mixed” model, their income consists of direct sales of goods, as well as sales of goods through sellers (third-party sellers).
In early February 2022, when Forbes was preparing a rating of the 30 most expensive Runet companies, Wildberries was valued at $ 7.6 billion. The decrease occurred as a result of a systematic deterioration in the state of the global investment market: the high-tech Nasdaq-100 index showed a drop of 13% since November 2021 year, the shares of Russian Internet companies lost about 50% in price over the three winter months. A year ago, Ozon was worth more than $10 billion, in February 2022 its capitalization fell by half, to $4.7 billion. Last week, the trading of the Russian company on the American NASDAQ was suspended. Since going public, Ozon shares have fallen more than 70% to $11.6.
As Forbes calculated using Ozon Holdings PLC quotes as of February 25, 2022 (since that date, trading on the marketplace on NASDAQ has been suspended), Tatiana Bakalchuk’s fortune has decreased to $4.2 billion. depend on current market factors and may change depending on volatility, ”Forbes told the Wildberries press service. For the company and its founders, a high score “is not an end in itself,” they added.
The largest Russian marketplace was created by Tatyana Bakalchuk (99% of the company’s shares) and her husband Vladislav (1% of the shares). They own and manage a company with a turnover of 844 billion rubles. In 2021, the company has approximately doubled in size, with clothing, footwear and accessories accounting for nearly 40% of sales. The purchasing audience (MAU) in 2021 reached 113 million people per month. The company operates in 19 countries, including the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
“Now our main focus is precisely to support sellers and buyers,” the Wildberries press service notes. The company unscheduledly initiated a special sale campaign from March 1 to March 10, investing over 7 billion rubles in it. The marketplace also provides discounts to its sellers for the use of logistics services and storage of goods in warehouses and encourages partners with high sales dynamics.