Русский
The cosmetics and perfumery chain Golden Apple (Yekaterinburg) will begin operating in Saudi Arabia, with offline and online stores to be launched in the coming months, the company’s press service said.
“Golden Apple will become not only the first Russian beauty retailer to enter the kingdom’s market but also the first multi-brand retailer to enter in an omnichannel manner [opening a physical store and launching an online store],” Abdulselim Vagabov, a representative of the Russian Export Center in Saudi Arabia, was quoted as saying.
Saudi Arabia will become the sixth country where Golden Apple operates, and the third in the Middle East. Last spring, the company began operating in Qatar, and in December it launched a pilot online store in the UAE. It also has plans to open an offline store in Dubai. In addition, the retailer operates in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
The founders of the chain are classmates Ivan Kuzovlev and Maxim Panyak. In 1996, the first small store opened in Yekaterinburg. The first store in the format of a perfume supermarket was opened in 2004. The first “Golden Apple” store in Moscow opened in 2017, in St. Petersburg – in 2019. As of April 2022, the chain has 31 stores in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Perm, Rostov-on-Don, Volgograd, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Chelyabinsk, Kazan, Khabarovsk, Irkutsk, Saratov and Samara, Krasnodar, as well as an online store in Belarus. On July 9, 2021 the first retail store outside Russia was opened in Minsk, and on March 20, 2022 – in Almaty. At the end of 2023, the company was hiring staff in the UAE and planning to enter the Middle East market. As reported, by the end of 2023 the retailer achieved a net profit of 3.3 billion rubles, up 18.3%. Revenue rose 1.5-fold to 93.5 billion rubles.
