The official retailers of Apple technology, which are represented by re:Store and iPort in Russia, have begun closing stores that are suffering losses, to send gadgets that are in demand to outlets that are experiencing higher traffic.
According to the Kommersant newspaper, some stores in Moscow and a number of other Russian cities are temporarily out of operation. At the same time, as Kommersant specifies, the stores will be temporarily closed for a period of three months. Last weekend the store in the Festival shopping center in Moscow ceased operations. A week earlier, the doors of the brand-name equipment store on Kutuzovsky Prospekt closed. Apple's website reports that eight outlets in Moscow are temporarily closed, as well as some stores located in St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Chelyabinsk, and Krasnodar.
It became known that it is now decided to close the stores for 3 months to change the logistics during this time. At the same time, the official suppliers of branded gadgets hope that during this time it will be possible to establish parallel imports.
Retailers re:Store and iPort are only negotiating with the owners of the premises that they rented for trading activities to suspend trade. As it became known, only those retail outlets, where it is not possible to agree on lease vacations or discounts, are being completely closed. Meanwhile, according to media reports, citing the consultant of Jos De Vries The Retail Company Irina Bolotova, it is currently quite problematic to reach an agreement with the owners of retail premises.
At the beginning of March, Apple stopped selling gadgets and related products in the Russian online store. New shipments of the Apple gadgets also stopped coming to Russia. According to Eldar Murtazin, a leading analyst at Mobile Research Group, the company's equipment has only temporarily stopped coming to our country.
Back in March, the leading analyst said in an interview with Radio Sputnik that the resumption of deliveries or their absence would be directly related to the conditions of the trade blockade that has begun to operate against Russia. Specifically about the delivery of goods, as Murtazin explained, the online store cooperated with the international express delivery company DHL, which is currently no longer operating in Russia. The conclusion of new contracts will take time. At the same time, according to the analyst, those Russians who have purchased and are using Apple technology should not worry about the work of their gadgets. In addition, Murtazin underlined that they cannot disable sold products such as iPhone, MacBook, etc. because there have been no such precedents in world practice.
The Ministry of Industry and Trade promptly responded to the blockade of many products that are currently not supplied to Russia. Back in March, Apple equipment was included in the list of products that are allowed to be imported into our country without official permission from the manufacturers. The list of parallel imports includes 50 different product groups and almost 200 brands. The main part in this list are cars, as well as parts for them, equipment for mining and wood processing, as well as agricultural machinery, various types of transport, including shipping, and much more.
Meanwhile, Gazeta.ru previously reported that Apple announced a reduction in production due to the current lockdown in China.
The fact that sales of Apple smartphones have declined is also crucial. As reported by Kommersant, citing retailers, sales of Appl dropped by almost a third in Russia in April this year. Buyers began to buy more budget Chinese models, which included Realme, pushing Apple to the 4th place. According to Denis Kuskov, CEO of Telecom Daily, quoted by Kommersant, to register a separate company with a change of brand and then sublease its stores to it is one of the options for re:Store.
As we can see from the conclusions of experts and analysts, there are options for sellers of branded goods.
It simply takes time to set up logistics and solve other issues related to the delivery of goods to Russia and directly to consumers, who prefer to buy the goods they like in online stores. Then there are so many goods in the world that it is possible to find a full-fledged replacement for them. Most importantly, no one will turn off the Apple smartphones that have been already purchased.