Wildberries sellers may have lost 215-280 billion rubles in Ukrainian drone strikes on warehouses, Forbes Russia reports

Sellers on the Russian marketplace Wildberries could have lost between 215 and 280 billion rubles due to Ukrainian drone attacks on the company’s warehouses, estimates Sergei Semko, lead analyst at the research agency Data Insight, in an interview with Forbes Russia.

Semko based his calculations on 2024 data, when a fire at a 112,000-square-meter warehouse in Shushary led to compensation of nearly 35 billion rubles for lost inventory. The exact number of sellers affected by the attacks has not been established. Denis Vetrennikov, CEO of the marketplace services ecosystem SellerDen, told Forbes Russia that the figure could run into hundreds of thousands.

As of August 2, strikes had hit warehouses covering 1.21–1.47 million square meters, with 893,000 to 1.154 million square meters damaged, Semko estimated. This equals 17.2–22.2% of the 5.2 million square meters of logistics infrastructure that Wildberries has publicly disclosed.

Wildberries has not said how many of its sellers were affected. After the first attacks in mid-July, the company said it would need about 30 days to assess the scale of the damage. By August 3, at least 18 warehouses had been struck.

In the wake of the initial strikes, Wildberries and its partners announced support measures for entrepreneurs. In late July, the company reported paying out more than 40 million rubles to affected sellers. However, so far only small companies and individual entrepreneurs are receiving partial compensation for stored goods, and sellers complain they do not understand the payment process. Those who have received payouts say the amounts are too small.

Russian authorities have not announced any centralized assistance program for affected sellers. In late July, Leningrad region Governor Alexander Drozdenko said that around 1,500 Wildberries sellers had lost goods in a warehouse fire in the region and promised them support.