The Ministry of Industry and Trade wants to oblige electronics stores to sell Russian equipment

The government wants to introduce a mandatory minimum range of Russian electronics in offline and online stores, market participants told Kommersant. The Ministry of Industry and Trade clarified that specific groups of goods have not yet been determined, but we are talking about products that are “produced in sufficient quantities in the country.” According to market participants, these are primarily large household appliances. Offline retailers are not worried about the officials’ ideas; experts say it’s mainly the marketplaces that could suffer.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade plans to oblige large chains of electronics stores to “dedicate a shelf” for Russian goods, an interlocutor at one of the manufacturers told Kommersant. This information was confirmed by two Kommersant sources in the market. According to one of them, large marketplaces are already beginning to enter into agreements with domestic electronics manufacturers to place their goods on the sites. It is quite possible, he believes, that “there will even be some requirements for a minimum share in the assortment.”

The fact that deputies from United Russia had developed a bill on the “Russian regiment” became known in early May, Izvestia reported. Then it was assumed that the Ministry of Industry and Trade would determine the names of goods produced in the Russian Federation and their required share in the assortment of retailers. Later, the bill added an obligation for marketplaces to give the first 50 lines of search results to Russian or Belarusian goods—household chemicals, cosmetics, etc. . If adopted, it would take effect on March 1, 2024.

Mr. Evtukhov clarified to Kommersant that the bill does not indicate specific groups of goods, and the “volume of quotas” will be determined by experts of the industry community, including manufacturers and retailers, “the number of sustainable domestic brands and their ability to scale production will be significant factors.”

According to Anton Guskov, a representative of the Association of Trading Companies and Manufacturers of Electrical Household and Computer Equipment, retailers, after the departure of Western vendors, have already begun to actively conclude contracts with domestic manufacturers; Russian goods are already in demand. “Therefore, we do not see the need for such regulation,” he notes.

Fplus supports “the idea of ​​creating a unified system of measures to support Russian brands; domestic manufacturers are ready to fill the need for consumer electronics in many segments.” But their competitiveness is lower than that of China, the group admits, so not only administrative action is needed, but also cashback programs, co-financing of marketing costs and other measures.

As M.Video-Eldorado clarified, Russian technology is most widely represented in large-sized goods for the home and kitchen in the basic and mid-price segments – in refrigerators and freezers, stoves, washing machines, “in addition, the country is actively developing local production is carried out by Chinese and Turkish players; in the categories of large household appliances, the influence of imported goods is small.” They added that in the laptop segment in the third and fourth quarters, the share of foreign-assembled Russian brands in the network was about 10%, which is three times more than a year earlier.

The current version of the bill is, first of all, an attempt to interfere with the search results that an online store generates at the request of a buyer, says Artem Sokolov, president of the Association of Internet Trading Companies (including Wildberries, Ozon, Yandex Market, etc.), and this is significant a negative factor for the marketplace.

“If a client wants to buy an iPhone, and the first 50 search results offer him not what is specified in the request, but something that will comply with the requirements of the law, the client will simply leave the site,” he added. Mr. Sokolov believes that it is necessary to give market participants the opportunity to choose the best methods of promotion themselves, without destroying marketing and advertising business models. One of the ways he calls filtering products by their origin and creating special sections on websites.

Timofey Kornev