Volgograd, 13 June 2023 – X5 Group (“X5” or the “Company”, LSE and MOEX ticker: FIVE), a leading Russian food retailer, announces the opening of its first hard discounters under the Chizhik brand in the Volgograd Region, as well as a new distribution centre to serve Chizhik stores. On Tuesday, the retailer opened two stores in Volgograd, on 18 Tsiolkovskogo Street and 18 Gremyachinskaya Street, and one store each in Volzhsky, on 107A Lenina Avenue, and in Kalach-na-Donu, on 1A Chekmareva Street.
The product assortment at each store features approximately 750 SKUs, including over 400 private label items that have already become popular with Chizhik customers. These include Svetaevo, Verner, Shchedry God, Greenola, Axl, Tafo, and others.
Chizhik’s business model is based on offering a small but sought-after selection of products at attractive prices. The retailer delivers low prices for its customers thanks to business process optimisation and relentless in-store cost cutting, while the large share of private labels in its assortment enables Chizhik to offer only those products that meet its high standards of quality and charge fair prices and markups. Chizhik also stands out for its unique Nado Uspet (“Catch the Price”) zone that highlights the best deals in household, kitchen, garden goods and other products – all in one place.
The new stores will be supplied from Chizhik’s distribution centre in Volgograd with shipments from both nationwide and local suppliers. The 8,800 square metre distribution centre has enough capacity to serve up to 150 stores in the retail chain across the Volgograd Region and will also be used to supply stores in the Saratov Region going forward. The logistics centre is slated for refurbishment in 2024 to boost its capacity to serve up to 200 stores in the chain.
Chizhik has already created more than 250 jobs in the Volgograd Region and expects to bring the total number of new jobs created for local communities to more than 630 by the end of the year. The Volgograd Region is the 12th region in the retail chain’s footprint. Chizhik plans to open twenty more stores in the region before the end of June, aiming to bring the total store count in the region to up to 55 stores by the year-end.
Currently, Chizhik has more than 700 stores across 12 regions of Russia [1], with plans to open more than a thousand stores in 2023.
[1] Moscow, the Voronezh, Volgograd, Sverdlovsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Chelyabinsk, and Yaroslavl Regions, the Republic of Tatarstan, the Republic of Bashkortostan, the Republic of Udmurtia, and the Perm Territory.