Moscow, 15 April 2020 – X5 Retail Group ("X5" or the "Company"), a leading Russian food retailer that operates the Pyaterochka, Perekrestok, and Karusel retail chains (LSE and MOEX ticker: "FIVE"), announces the early launch of its fourth Perekrestok.ru dark store. Located in Vidnoye, Moscow region, the darkstore has brought around one thousand new jobs to the local community.
The new facility has a total area of 18,000 sq m and can handle up to 30 thousand SKUs. The dark store was launched on 10 April. Currently 200 employees operate the facility using 15 trucks, handling about 500 orders a day. By the end of the week, this number will increase to 1,000.
When the new facility reaches design capacity, it will be able to process 5,000 orders a day and will employ 1,000 employees with a fleet of 150 trucks. This will boost Perekrestok.ru’s total capacity by 30% and its Moscow capacity by 40% to more than 10 thousand orders per day in the current situation with increased average basket. In times of normalized demand, our online supermarket infrastructure in Moscow will be able to fulfil about 15 thousand orders per day.
The new facility’s ahead of schedule launch was driven by the surge in demand due to the challenging epidemiological situation. During the peak days in March, Perekrestok.ru’s average number of orders per day exceeded 16 thousand, and the average ticket rose to almost RUB 6,000. This is nearly twice as high as the average check in December 2019. The number of goods per order also soared 1.5–2 times in March.
In 2019, the number of orders delivered by Perekrestok.ru exceeded 1.3 million, growing more than threefold year-on-year. Net revenue in 2019 increased threefold year-on-year to RUB 4.3 billion, net of VAT.