What Wildberries probably is a Russian version of an earlier Amazon, when Amazon was not worth much and was struggling to find its way to become a major business, but in a much smaller, sanctions-plagued market like Russia
Thinking that if you take down Wildberries all Russian retail trade will collapse is wrong. No, it will not. Retail is one of the fastest-recovering, most flexible, and most fluid industries. Russia can live without it. It did so only a few years ago.
The main conclusion from Ukrainian strikes, sanctions, and all these sources of pressure is that the pressure is working. The cracks are visible. Ukrainian strikes are adding fuel to the fire, significantly and visibly exacerbating the crisis
The article also goes into more details related to the June partnership between Wildberries and VTB (“Foreign Trade Bank"), one of the biggest Russian players and second-biggest bank after Sberbank, and how big of a whole it is for them
They weren’t attacking it as a retail business. They attacked it because putin was using its contacts to buy military supplies for the army, labeling them toys, and bypassing sanctions.
They sold fiber optic spools for controlling drones, body armor and helmets. They are a military supplier now.
Why is there a never ending line of these kind of posts, pretending they are still just a retail business?
I don’t trust anything on Nazi-loving Substack, nor should you.
Shite. Now I need to find a replacement for substack.
A lot of people, especially aspiring writers trying to make a buck don’t know substack is a shit company, so I get it.
Alternatives: Patreon, Curated, Medium, Beehiiv, Ghost and Kit top the list for writers.
Added info on Ghost, it’s part of the fediverse. I’m not sure their level of integration, but I recall ghost accounts being able to post onto mastodon. Supposedly, they have a much better fee structure than patron or substack too.
Definitely verify what I’ve said, I’m going based on recollection and its been a while since I checked it out.
just to let you know, i’ve just migrated to self-hosted ghost. thank you!
Hurray! Docker or flat? Regardless, you’re in control and don’t have to pay anyone for access, especially nazis, which is always a relief. Congratulations!
Indeed. And thank you :)
I’ll use it as a showcase for my cloud architecture ideas, so right now it’s a basic single-vm with a plan to gradually optimise it into the oblivion (way beyond docker if l get my way) and document/blog the process.
Honestly, Ghost self-hosted sounds like a far better solution for you than nazi-stack was anyways. Way to own it! Have an amazing day!
Thank you. You too!
“The big hole in VTB’s balance sheet is, I think, the number one troubling factor in the Russian banking sector right now.”
The more important story than even the direct material damage is the way the damage is dragging down VTB’s business, which is the real big beast. VTB is a big, important creditor and player. Nobody else compares to VTB in terms of aggressively financing a lot of adventuristic industrial and infrastructure projects in Putin’s new wartime economy.
I can believe that this is a problem for VTB, I don’t really understand how VTB getting into trouble is a particularly serious problem for the Russian economy in aggregate, though.
If I understand the article aright, VTB’s idea was that it would use Wildberries to get the lion’s share of the banking market. If Wildberries is literally going up in flames, that plan has fallen through. Okay. So…VTB doesn’t get that market share. Sucks to be VTB, no doubt, but VTB’s loss is the gain of other Russian banks whose marketshare they wanted to horn in on.
If the Russian government wants to bail out some portion of the banking sector, it can do that. I wouldn’t expect that the Russian government would care much which bank is doing badly and what bank isn’t. Who has more marketshare is just shuffling lines around on a board that the government controls.
