sounds dramatic, but it is important to understand that this is fundamentally a story about control over delivery. And for Wildberries, delivery has long ceased to be a supporting function — it is one of the core pillars of the entire business model. The assets became part of the RWB group as part of a strategy to develop proprietary transport logistics services and RideTech infrastructure. The company is openly stating that the integration should accelerate order delivery in more than 100 cities across Russia, including Siberia and the Far East.
From a business logic standpoint, the deal looks fairly straightforward. For a large marketplace, one of the most expensive and sensitive parts of the operational model is last-mile delivery — intracity logistics and local fulfillment. If you have your own order volume, your own demand for moving goods, and a sufficiently dense geographic footprint, any transport asset stops being just a taxi service and becomes infrastructure for distributing load. A fleet can be used not only as a taxi service but also as a delivery service, filling capacity during hours and in areas where passenger demand does not use the full fleet. For a platform with this volume of deliveries, it is a perfectly rational economic hypothesis.
This is where things get interesting. In the ride-tech market, Yandex holds the strongest position, while Wildberries has a near-endless internal flow of its own logistics tasks. This creates an opportunity for asymmetric competition. Wildberries does not necessarily need to beat Yandex in classic urban taxi across all fronts — it is enough to embed transportation into the customer journey and its own logistics processes so that transport starts paying off not only through passenger rides, but also through goods delivery, parcel pickup, intracity movements, and regional routing. Competing head-to-head with Yandex will be difficult for Wildberries, but integrating passenger and commercial transport into the customer journey and last-mile delivery is entirely achievable.
There is another important layer: speed. In e-commerce, the winner is not the one who simply delivers — it is the one who turns delivery into a user promise. The larger a marketplace becomes, the closer it gets to urban infrastructure: pickup points, sorting, couriers, returns, express scenarios, same-day delivery, and movement between nodes. Against this backdrop, acquiring existing transport aggregators is an attempt to cut the time needed to build one from scratch — taking over a ready-made network is always faster than building it from the ground up, even if you then spend a long time fixing the integration, IT layer, and operational model.
But this is exactly where, as with any coin, the other side appears. This strategy makes sense on paper, but it is highly capital-intensive. Forbes, citing experts, reports that the deal itself may have cost between 3–4 billion and 5–8 billion rubles, and the full development of Citymobil alone within the RWB ecosystem could require a similar amount again. This means the question here is not only about logic, but about having the resources to execute. Turning this asset into a stable, technologically embedded service within the ecosystem is no trivial task.
Against this backdrop, the market inevitably looks at the other side of the balance. In March 2026, the platform changed its payout policy, extending the payment period for sales revenue from one week to one month, and introduced a paid "Withdraw Now" feature for early access to funds at a 4% fee. Many media outlets reported seller complaints and technical delays even for those who attempted to withdraw funds early. In this context, any new capital-intensive acquisitions will automatically be evaluated by the market through the lens of liquidity and management focus — not because the idea itself is bad, but because every big idea has a price, and that price is especially visible when partners already have grievances over money.
So the key conclusion, in my view, is this:
From a strategic standpoint, this is a very logical deal. For Wildberries, a transport service is a potential lever for improving the efficiency of the entire commercial machine. If the integration succeeds, the company will strengthen its last mile, increase delivery density, and gain an additional tool for competing with Yandex — not head-on, but from an angle.
But if resources and management attention fall short, the market will see yet another example of a large ecosystem trying to take on too much. Will it succeed? We will find out soon.