With fixation on the Emirates – Newspaper Kommersant No. 231 (7432) dated 12/13/2022

With restrictions on international expansion, Russian companies are more actively considering business opportunities in the United Arab Emirates. The Fix Price chain of fixed price stores also has similar plans, Kommersant found out. According to experts, the chain, which purchases most of the goods in China, should not have problems with logistics in the UAE.

The Fix Price chain of stores plans to enter the UAE market. This follows from the vacancies published in the company profile on the Headhunter portal for managers, the head of the retail sales department, and logistics specialists. Their responsibilities include managing a group of stores in the UAE, developing and maintaining an assortment and pricing policy, placing and tracking orders with suppliers in the country.

Fix Price told Kommersant that they are always considering options for development. However, the company declined to comment further on entering the UAE market.

Fix Price has been around since 2007. Initially, the network was developed by the founders of Kopeyka and co-owners of Tsentrobuv Sergey Lomakin and Artem Khachatryan. In December 2016 the newspaper Vedomosti announced that top managers, including CEO Dmitry Kirsanov, the structure of VTB Capital, as well as the Baltic fund Quadro Capital Partners (QCP), became the new shareholders of Fix Price. Subsequently, QCP withdrew from the shareholders.

As follows from the SPARK-Interfax data, the parent company Fix Price Best Price LLC is controlled by Meridian Management Ltd (British Virgin Islands). The beneficiaries of this structure are unknown. In 2021, Fix Price held an IPO.

Fix Price Group’s revenue in the third quarter grew by 21.2% year-on-year, to 70.1 billion rubles, net profit – by 36.7%, to 7 billion rubles, according to the company’s report.

Now Fix Price has more than 5 thousand stores in Russia, as well as Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. In the last four countries, the stores of the chain operate only on a franchise model, follows from the Fix Price reporting for the nine months of 2022. In the third quarter of 2022, of all new store openings, 17.9% were in overseas markets, according to the company. The share of such stores in the total number of the network increased by 0.9 percentage points over the year, to 9.7%, as of September 30, 2022.

The growth of the Fix Price network is mainly due to its own stores, franchising in the structure of new points of sale does not exceed 15%, says Franshiza.ru expert Anna Rozhdestvenskaya. Only 29 of the company’s 195 stores that opened in the third quarter were franchised, according to financial statements. Therefore, it can be assumed that the chain, entering the UAE market, will open stores without involving partners, Ms. Rozhdestvenskaya believes.

The format of the Fix Price retail chain stores can be called promising and competitive, including for the UAE, especially for Dubai, says Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of Infoline-Analytics. Now a large number of Russian-speaking population lives in this emirate, the expert notes. According to Mr. Burmistrov, Fix Price’s main imports come from China, so there should be no difficulties in establishing logistics with the UAE.

In the conditions of limited international markets in 2022, many Russian chains choose the UAE for expansion, says Anna Rozhdestvenskaya. According to Mikhail Burmistrov, top managers of several Russian retail companies have moved to the UAE. Therefore, he does not exclude other market players from entering this country. In particular, the expansion in the UAE was announced by the Life March supermarket chain, as well as the Russian furniture and accessories brand Dantone Home. Russian companies from other segments also have plans for development in the country, including Dodo Pizza pizzeria chains, Osteria Mario restaurants, Pioneer and Samolet housing developers.

Alina Savitskaya, Konstantin Kurkin