Parcels are taken out of parcel lockers – Business – Kommersant

Having failed to cope with financial difficulties, a major player in the PickPoint delivery market decided to stop working in Russia. According to Kommersant’s sources, the company told its partners that it would deliver all previously accepted shipments, and unclaimed cargo would be returned to customers by the end of April. In turn, experts note a general decline in the popularity of logistics companies among buyers, forcing the latter to reduce their investment programs.

Logistics service PickPoint notified partners of the completion of the company’s operations, two sources in the logistics market told Kommersant. In her letter to partners, PickPoint CEO Nadezhda Romanova (Kommersant has it) reports that the decision is due to financial difficulties. In particular, the departure of Western retailers, which made up the bulk of PickPoint’s client portfolio, as well as the impossibility of financing from a Western investor, led to a decrease in the service’s turnover, writes Ms. Romanova.

The letter also notes that from April 4, PickPoint will stop accepting new cargo from legal entities and individuals. At the same time, all undelivered and unclaimed cargo will be returned to PickPoint customers from April 6 to April 30.

The PickPoint press service declined to comment.

According to its own data, the PickPoint self-delivery network has 6,000 parcel terminals and 4,500 pickup points in 657 locations across the country. In 2021, LLC Network of Automated Pick-up Points, which manages a network of pickup points and parcel lockers, with a revenue of 3.5 billion rubles. received a loss of 234 million rubles. The ultimate beneficiaries of the network are unknown: according to SPARK-Interfax, the company belongs to the Cypriot PickPoint Delivery System Ltd.

Difficulties with customers and contractors the company had at the end of last year. So, since the beginning of 2023, claims have been filed against the network for more than 433 million rubles.

The total amount of claims for all claims against the company reaches almost 730 million rubles, Kommersant calculated based on data from the filing cabinet of arbitration cases.

In addition, as Kommersant wrote, in February, on the website and in the application of the service, it was not possible to accept applications for sending parcels from most settlements in Russia, and customers complained about extended delivery times and non-working parcel terminals (see Kommersant dated February 17). At the same time, PickPoint told Kommersant that the pickup network had been restored in all regions of the country. However, users continue to complain on the company’s social networks about the difficulties in receiving parcels.

Executive Director of Oborot.ru Ivan Kurguzov calls PickPoint a significant player in the logistics market, which was able to introduce the culture of using parcel terminals in Russia.

At the same time, the company’s withdrawal from the market opens up opportunities for the development of other players in this segment, says Denis Petrushevsky, Managing Director of Khalva parcel terminals. According to him, for the past few years, the Halva parcel lockers have been part of the PickPoint network. However, since the fall of 2022, Halva has been developing its logistics and delivering for several large companies, including with the possibility of using installment services and paying for goods in installments.

Over the past year, many companies selling consumer goods have left Russia, so the B2C delivery market has also significantly decreased, Ivan Kurguzov points out. At the same time, the expert says, the role of marketplaces operating with their pickup points has grown, which has increased competition in the market.

Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of Infoline-Analytics, confirms that it is becoming more difficult for independent players in the logistics market to compete with marketplaces, as well as with Yandex. Delivery”, “Sberlogistics”, 5Post and others. So, according to Data Insight, in 2022 the number of orders that logistics companies fulfilled decreased by 14% instead of growing by 10-20%. This forces logisticians to reduce investment programs and save money, the analysts report says.

In general, over the past year, the number of delivered orders increased by more than 56%, to 2.55 billion units, calculated in Data Insight. At the same time, the share of delivery through logistics companies decreased by 12 percentage points over the year and amounted to 13%, the report says.

Alina Savitskaya