E-commerce growth drives demand for warehouses in Russia, with transaction volume up 45%

According to Knight Frank, one of the world's largest real estate consultancy firms, warehouse leasing and sales transactions in Russia (excluding Moscow, St Petersburg and the Leningrad region) grew 45% last year to 851,000 square metres.

According to calculations by Ekaterina Nogai, an analyst at Cushman & Wakefield (a US private real estate consulting firm), the figure is even higher, reaching 1 million square meters, which is a three-fold increase from 2019.

Viktor Afanasenko , regional head of warehouse and industrial real estate at Colliers International, said the main trend in the logistics real estate market in 2020 was the redistribution of demand to various regions. The source of this demand was the formation of additional distribution channels and logistics chains among e-commerce companies and retailers to seize new markets.

Konstantin Fomichenko, regional head of warehouse and industrial real estate at Knight Frank, believes that Russia's e-commerce market will continue to expand to various regions this year, which will continue to drive demand for infrastructure such as logistics warehouses.

Knight Frank data shows that demand for warehouse space comes mainly from Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk, which account for 19.9% ​​and 17.8% of total market transactions, respectively, followed by Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Kazan and Samara, accounting for 8.9%, 6.2%, 5.9% and 5.3%, respectively.

As warehouses in other cities gradually come into use, the utilization rate of warehouses in the capital Moscow will decline. According to reports, 56% of products were shipped from Moscow warehouses in 2019, and this indicator fell by 12 percentage points in 2020. Correspondingly, St. Petersburg and other regions of Russia increased by 17% and 38% respectively.

Due to the spurt in demand for online shopping during the pandemic, the logistics industry is also experiencing high demand. Wildberries, Russia's largest e-commerce platform, said that last year, a warehouse in Moscow refused to accept sellers' goods due to heavy workload, and limited the warehouse's inventory by charging a warehousing fee, suggesting that sellers store goods in a new warehouse in Tatarstan.

Russia