Ozon, a Russian e-commerce company, has made a comeback with its first profit in 20 years

According to the preliminary operating data released by the company in 2020, Ozon's turnover in 2020 reached 195 billion rubles, an increase of more than 140% over 2019. Ozon also stated that by the end of last year, the company's operating cash flow had reached the break-even point and achieved profitability.

Ozon 's previous prospectus showed that it lost 5.874 billion rubles and 18.612 billion rubles in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Ozon CEO Alexander Shulgin once said that Ozon might not be profitable in the next few years. But Ozon's performance explosion in the fourth quarter of last year seemed to save the situation.

In the fourth quarter of last year, Ozon's turnover (including services other than e-commerce) exceeded 74 billion rubles, nearly 2.5 times more than the same period in 2019. At the same time, Ozon's e-commerce sales accounted for 52% of the company's total GMV in the fourth quarter, doubling from the same period in 2019.

The data also showed that the number of orders completed by Ozon in 2020 reached 73.9 million, a year-on-year increase of 132%; the number of orders completed in the fourth quarter reached 29.6 million, a year-on-year increase of 137%. Although offline retail has gradually recovered, the number of sellers and order volume on the Ozon platform continue to grow.

Ozon plans to announce specific financial data on March 30.

Unexpected profit

In 1998 , Dmitry Rudakov and Alexander Yegorov launched a Russian online bookstore modeled after Amazon. At first, they dropped two letters from Amazon and named the store Azon, but eventually settled on Ozon.

At the time, few people in Russia knew about e-commerce, and Ozon found its first buyers abroad. In the first few years, Ozon made money by selling Russian books to Russians living abroad, and exports accounted for 40% of total purchases.

In the following decade, Ozon was no longer limited to selling books, but gradually began to sell CDs, gadgets, home appliances, clothing and household items. Today, Ozon has become a comprehensive e-commerce platform .

As the number of sales categories increased, its sales also increased simultaneously, but Ozon has not been able to make a profit. Therefore, it is unexpected that Ozon made a profit in 2020.

Ozon still needs to work hard on its e-commerce journey

Although Ozon is one of the oldest e-commerce companies in Russia, it is not the largest one. Currently, the largest "leader" in Russian e-commerce is still Wildberries (founded in 2004). Public data shows that Wildberries' turnover in 2020 reached 437.2 billion rubles (a year-on-year increase of 96%), more than twice that of Ozon.

In addition, Wildberries also "crushes" Ozon in terms of orders and platform sellers. Data shows that the number of orders completed by Wildberries in 2020 reached 323.8 million, a 2-fold increase from 2019. The number of platform sellers has recently exceeded 100,000, while the number of Ozon sellers is less than one-fifth of that.

Russia

Ozon