economy

On inheritance

I remember when I was a kid we often discussed with friends who will become who when we grow up. Pretty much everyone wanted to be rich. But we had no idea how one can become rich, except for an opportunity via inheritance from a distant American relative. Years passed, we grew up, and went our own separate ways. A few of those kids became rich, but most didn’t. Most of us are doing OK though.

Why am I telling you all that? Because today I came across a few pictures that cover current state of economic affairs in the United States. One of those images brought back all those memories, and somehow suggested that kids of today have to dream up some other way of becoming rich when they will grow up.

Petrol prices across Cyprus

Cyrpus Mail runs an article about some ‘name and shame’ list that the government is assembling for petrol stations across the country. And interesting bit there is the paragraph that compares petrol prices:

In Larnaca petrol 95 costs €0998 while in Limassol it is €1.022. Petrol 98 costs €0.999 in Larnaca and €1.058 in Limassol. Diesel will set you back €0.893 in Larnaca and €0.969 in Paphos.

The cheapest petrol is in Larnaca. Not that I am too surprised with this fact, but rather by how much difference there is – more than 5 cents per litre!

Minimum salary in Cyprus

Living and working in Cyprus, I am often asked by people from other countries what are salaries like in Cyprus. I never had a good answer to the question, because the answer depends a lot on the company you’ll be working for and your position. Even the range for the same position across different companies can vary 3-4 times easily.

Cyprus Mail reports that the government had decided to increase the minimum wage (salary). Gladly, the article provides a reference for average salary across the island.

THE MINIMUM wage is being increased to €887 from €840 effective from Thursday, the Labour Advisory Committee announced yesterday. Final approval for the 5.6 per cent increase, which will bring the minimum wage to 50 per cent of the average national wage, rests with the Cabinet.

So, this means that the while the minimum wage will now be €887, the average is twice that much – €1774. That’s good to know. Now I have an a better answer for all those people who are asking.

Unemployment in Cyprus

Cyprus Mail reports that unemployment rates are through the roof and kicking all previous records in the butt.

By the end of November, there were almost 21,000 unemployed people in Cyprus, representing a 73 per cent rise compared to the same month last year.

That’s mostly due to the downfall in construction and tourism industries. On the other hand, pretty much every company I know is looking for IT people. Accounting, management, and marketing seem to in demand as well.

Russian web shoppers : the relative absolutes

Quintura blog has this nice post with some statistics of Russian online shoppers – how often they buy, what they buy, and how they pay. As any other bit of statistics, it’s rather interesting. However, I think there is more to it than the article covers. Here are my random thoughts in a bullet list format.

“85% of Russian Internet users shop online”. It would be extremely interesting to see at least some approximation of country population to its Internet users. According to Wikipedia, Russian population is about 142,000,000 people. How many of these are online? According to some resources, such as, for example, Public Opinion Foundation Database, it’s somewhere between 18% and 25%. And then again, it’s depends a lot on where you are looking at. Moscow and surrounding areas have a much higher Intenret penetration than Central and Eastern Russia. Moscow can have as much as 56% of its population online, while less than 20% of the Urals and the Siberia population are connected.
“The Russian e-commerce market has doubled to $3.2 billion in 2007”. Sounds huge, doesn’t it. But let’s see. I’ll pick 28,000,000 people or 25% of connected population as per Public Opinion Foundation Database for the calculations. 85% of these are shopping online. That’s about 23,800,000 people. $3.2 billion market devided equally between all those people comes down to $135. So, the market is huge, rather because there are so many people around, as opposed to how much those people buy. If you need more numbers to explain you the situation, have a look at the state of the Russian economy at Wikipedia.
“However, it’s yet to become a habit because only 16% of users shop online once a month”. Sounds like the other 84% shop less than once a month. Why? Maybe because it isn’t so easy to find a few people to batch into a single order. Or maybe they just don’t have time to, between the two jobs or something.
“Most of the shoppers or 70% paid for online goods in cash upon delivery while only 12% of responders used bank cards in online transactions and another 10% used online payment systems”. Internationally recognized credit cards, like Visa or MasterCard, are probably either expensive to have or difficult to get or both. Personally, I don’t have much experience in this area, but I’ve heard a few of my Russian friends complaining about the state of the banking system in the country. Also, there is another thing to remember – language. I don’t have any numbers at hand, but I’d say that people who can at least read and understand at least one foreign language are a minority in Russia. With no credit card and foreign language knowledge, most of the purchasing activity would stay within the country.
“The most popular shopping items included books (51% of responders), computers (43%), home appliances (42%), software (31%), movies (26%), beauty products (25%), and music (23%)”. It looks like the majority of Russian online shoppers are rather young, tech-savvy people.
All of the above make it sound like a lot of marketing opportunities – large number of people, who are roughly in the same age group, with somewhat poor geographic distribution and limited access to credit cards… And with that, it’s interesting to see at the advertising channels. TV, radio, Internet itself. And then, which Russian sites with some sort of ad campaigns are the most visited?

Feel free to throw in your thoughts and more numbers via comments.