(Source: https://www.wildberries.by/services/punkty-samovyvoza)

Turning Wildberries into a unicorn company makes its sole owner Tatiana Bakalchuk a billionaire.

This year,  Wildberries – one of  the largest online stores in Russia, ranked fourth in the Forbes version of the most expensive Runet companies, receiving an estimated value of $ 1.2 billion.

The sole owner of the company, according to SPARK-Interfax, is its co-founder Tatyana Bakalchuk F 165. The new valuation of the company allows to assess the financial state Bakalchuk at more than $ 1 billion. She becomes the second billionaire woman in Russia after Elena Baturina. A year ago, Bakalchuk first entered the list of the richest people in Russia with a fortune of $ 600 million.



Since Wildberries is not a public company, its value was estimated based on data on sales and profits, as well as on multiples of similar projects and estimates of venture capitalists. In 2018, Wildberries increased the number of pickup points by one and a half times - up to 2,799, and also began construction of a distribution center with an area of ​​145,000 square meters in the suburbs and announced the imminent appearance of a warehouse in Yekaterinburg.

The teacher of English Tatyana Bakalchuk founded her business together with her husband Vladislav in 2004. Initially, the couple was engaged in the sale of women's clothing via German Otto and Quelle catalogs. Today, the site presents various categories of goods, including toys, sports and baby food, electronics, books, etc. Every month, about 60 million people visit the site mainly from Russia (95%), Ukraine, Belarus, Germany and the United States. In 2018, the company's revenue amounted to $ 1.7 billion.

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The interest of foreign investors is clear: Wildberries is almost the only online store in Russia that brings profits to owners. A few years ago, the company's profitability was estimated at almost 20% - a crazy figure, especially for Russia. The same kind Lamoda is still unprofitable, its EBITDA for the first 9 months of 2017 is minus € 76.5 million. At the same time, Wildberries net profit in 2017 amounted to about 350 million rubles.



Today, Wildberries is called a marketplace. “Not in its pure form, - specifies Tatiana Bakalchuk. - The goods are stored in our warehouse and delivered by our logistics. From the supply agreements, we switched to commission agreements. ” For suppliers it is very profitable. So, with the transition to a commission, the Zenden shoe network, which has been working with Wildberries for about five years, expects at least a three-fold increase in sales. “Already now, sales through Wildberries are comparable to the turnover of our two best offline stores,” said Alexander Sarychev, managing partner of Zenden.

Today Wildberries sells everything - from clothes and toys to sports nutrition and gadgets. The site has about 2 million visitors daily, they make 160,000–180,000 orders, and on peaks (sales, holidays) the number of orders reaches 300,000.