The advantage of experience is that each crisis is perceived through the prism of what has already happened, you can pick up analogies and, with a certain amount of corrections, apply them to the present. One of the stereotypes that I constantly hear from the lips of completely different people sounds like this: we have a poor population, they cannot afford the minimum benefits. Reasoning from a series of old women rummaging through the garbage dumps, who survive as best they can, have no means of subsistence. In a crisis, the harmonious chorus of those who write that the economy has failed and there is no money sounds much louder. Between “no money” and “purchasing power has decreased” there is a huge gulf that cannot be bridged, but most importantly, the reality is very different from the stories of citizens living on garbage cans.
To begin with, Russia has always lived richly, and it is precisely the whole country, and not just Moscow. It is very difficult to accept and realize this moment, it contradicts the stereotypes that have always been drummed into our heads. You can deny the official statistics, but the data on the electronics market speaks for itself, and very eloquently. Until March of this year, Russia was the largest market in Europe, the share of flagships in sales was several times higher than in all CIS countries, as well as in the “prosperous and rich” Baltic states. Higher than in Germany, which is considered the largest economy in Europe. The average price of a sold smartphone and any other electronics was also higher than in Europe. And here a natural question arises: what is poverty in the understanding of our fellow citizens and what is the comparison with? There are poor people everywhere, in the same America, 14% of the total population is poor, which makes up about 50 million people. And they cannot afford expensive smartphones or full-scale communications; they become participants in various social programs of the state.
In this crisis, I very often see the substitution of concepts, pictures of the apocalypse are drawn, in which people stopped going to electronics stores and purchasing equipment. And then there is a conclusion that people “have no money”, and then the usual chain of events unwinds, at the end we are waiting for a trash can.
If you look at the electronics market, then in the second quarter it sank heavily, the same smartphone market fell by about half year-on-year in unit terms. In money less, as the average price of devices has risen.
It seems that the halving of the market is the best demonstration that there is no money, people have reduced their spending. But is it? In 2008, and that crisis is the closest analogy to today, exactly the same thing happened. Let me remind you that then the cost of the flagship was about 20-22 thousand rubles (about a thousand dollars). We can recall such a model as Sony Ericsson W980, a fashion clamshell.
The market reacted to the weakening of the ruble in the usual way, at first sales of all equipment grew, and then a long period of cooling followed, demand remained minimal and was supported only by necessary acquisitions. In 2014, everything happened exactly according to the same pattern. From each crisis, you can make a pattern – a collapse in the exchange rate, a rush in demand for equipment, then several months of very low demand. Fixing a new level of demand at a low level and gradually increasing it. On average, it took about two years to reach the previous level of sales. At the same time, prices increased in proportion to the change in the exchange rate. So, until 2014, the flagship cost about 30 thousand rubles, then it began to cost 50 thousand rubles, then to go to the level of 100 thousand rubles. And every time there were exclamations that we are poor and unhappy, there is no money in the country, and prices are prohibitively high. But the sales of these flagships showed exactly the opposite, they grew year by year. Of course, we can assume that loans and installments did their job and people bought the same iPhone for the last time (February 2022, the share in unit sales is 17%, and these are the most expensive smartphones on the planet). But this moment looks, frankly, doubtful, if you really have nothing to eat, then you won’t think about the iPhone. As well as sales in all other price segments showed the relative well-being of the country’s residents.
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