“You can only steal anything cheaper than this” – the government may lose the fight against multi because of a Russian discount chain

Sergey Snajder, the founder of the Svetofor discount chain, was included among the Russian dollar billionaires this year. It operates its stores in the EU under the name Mere, but its expansion is much slower than in the Russian market. Hungary is also a target of the Russians, which does not help the Orbán government, which is firing heavy artillery at the retail outlets already here.

The first Svetofor (Hungarian: traffic light) opened in the summer of 2009, in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, the hometown of the Snajder family, and the prices in the store were at least 10-20 percent lower than those of competitors. The model is simple: the supply is limited, there are no shelves in the store, the customers collect the goods from boxes and pallets. 55-year-old Sergej Snajder and his co-owners – his younger brother Andrej, 47, and his parents, Valentyina and Ivan – decided to open the hard discount store at the best moment: Russia was also hit by the crisis, and the population’s purchasing power and standard of living fell.

The Snajders, who avoid the public – the family members did not give a single statement, the company does not have an official website, and not even photos of the owners were posted on the Internet – learned from their previous business failures: they decided to finance the expansion only from their own resources.