Wrapped with a "Ribbon": a new player may enter the market of discount stores
Lenta plans to launch its own network of discounters, Izvestia has learned. This will allow the company to streamline the diverse portfolio of assets acquired over the past few years. This retailer is the only major player that has not yet been represented in the segment of small format stores. But it was he who showed the greatest growth in 2025 compared to other formats of outlets, experts say. Today, the country already has discounters "Chizhik", "First Choice", "Traffic Light" and others. What place a new player can take and what are the market prospects — in the Izvestia article.
What the company has planned
The Lenta Group (owned by Alexey Mordashov's Severgroup), which unites the hypermarket chain of the same name and various convenience stores, plans to launch its own discounters. Three sources familiar with the company's plans told Izvestia about this. A representative of the retailer declined to comment.
To launch, the group can use existing brands at its disposal, a top manager of a large retail chain familiar with the company's plans told Izvestia.
In November 2025, Lenta applied for registration of the trademarks "Family" and "Hypervigilance Family" in the 35th and 43rd classes of the International Classification of Goods and Services (ICTS) - rental of space, demonstration of goods, as well as food and beverage services, according to Rospatent data. The group acquired the chain of the same name in the summer of 2021 from the structures of the ex-governor of the Perm Territory Oleg Chirkunov for 2.35 billion rubles, and the stores themselves later opened under the Lenta brand. In the same year, the company agreed to purchase the Russian Billa business from the Austrian Rewe Group for €215 million. The perimeter of the deal included 161 supermarkets in Moscow and the Moscow region. It allowed the retailer to double the number of outlets in the supermarket format.
In 2023, the group announced the purchase of the Ural network of low—budget Monetka stores - more than 2.1 thousand points of the "at home" format, located mainly in the Ural Federal District and Western Siberia. In the summer of 2025, she acquired the Mall company, which operates the Molniya — Spar network in the Chelyabinsk Region: 18 supermarkets and 49 convenience stores under the Spar brand, as well as three distribution centers. At the end of the year, the retailer closed a deal to purchase a controlling stake (67%) of the Far Eastern Remi. It includes 115 retail outlets in the Primorsky and Khabarovsk Territories, as well as in the Sakhalin Region, including 44 Economych discounters. This deal allowed the group to ensure its presence in all federal districts of Russia, its representatives said.
In the first nine months of 2025, Lenta's revenue under IFRS amounted to 781.4 billion rubles, an increase of 25.1% compared to the same period in 2024. According to the retailer's strategy, by the end of last year it should amount to 1 trillion rubles.
The reorganization of small store formats will allow Lenta to optimize operational and logistical processes, as well as bring uniformity to a diverse portfolio of assets from several regional chains acquired over the past few years, said a source familiar with the company's plans. This directly supports the goals of the retailer's new strategy, which provides for an increase in revenue to 2.2 trillion rubles by 2028 with an average annual growth rate of 26%, agrees Vyacheslav Berdnikov, head of the public equity analysis department at Sovcombank. The Group intends to achieve these goals through organic growth with a focus on small formats, the development of logistics infrastructure, as well as the improvement and redesign of the current store portfolio, follows from the published strategy.
What is interesting about this format of stores?
In a saturated food market, discounters remain one of the segments with double-digit growth rates in sales and the number of outlets, says Ilya Bereznyuk, Managing Partner of Agro and Food Communications. Such stores have higher profitability due to their high turnover and relatively smaller space, agrees Vyacheslav Berdnikov.
In the third quarter of 2025 (the latest available data), the total revenue of hard discounters amounted to 338.9 billion rubles, which is 28.4% more than in the same period a year earlier, according to data from the analytical agency Infoline. At the same time, the revenue of the top 10 FMCG retailers (sellers of consumer goods) increased by only 16.2% over the same period, to 3.17 trillion rubles (excluding VAT). The highest rate among budget format stores was shown by Chizhik (part of X5), whose revenue increased by 65.3% year-on-year, to 103.8 billion rubles, the agency estimated. For comparison, the revenue of the entire X5 (Chizhik, Pyaterochka, Perekrestok) in the third quarter of 2025 increased by 18.5% to the same period in 2024, to 1.16 trillion rubles, according to its IFRS reporting. The discounter First Choice (Magnit) had revenue of 32.6 billion rubles over the same period (an increase of 1.5 times), Infoline estimates.
The need to save money while maintaining the quality of goods makes budget stores attractive to a wide audience of customers, Vyacheslav Berdnikov notes. In the future, consumers' interest in them will increase, the expert believes. According to him, this is due to the optimization of basic goods costs for customers, the opportunity for retailers to offer competitive prices while maintaining margins by optimizing costs, as well as expanding their geographical presence in regions with different income levels.
Against the background of increasing consumer demand in cheaper formats, discounters and convenience stores are increasing their share in the structure of food retail, Ilya Bereznyuk noted. While traditional hypermarkets and supermarkets are growing noticeably slower, he noted. According to him, the cumulative share of "hard" discounters (they differ in the simplified design of the sales floor — goods often lie on pallets and in packaging boxes, there are no showcases and racks) in food retail in recent years has exceeded 5-6%. In the next three to four years, this figure will grow to 9%, he predicts.
Ilya Bereznyuk believes that the launch of its own budget stores by Lenta will increase price competition in the market, accelerate the redistribution of shares in the "austerity" segment and move classic supermarkets even more towards the "soft" discounter format (a self-service store that is an intermediate format between a discounter and a supermarket). According to him, Chizhik (X5) remains the leader of the "tough" ones at the federal level. The emergence of another player in the economy segment with its own logistics and purchasing power in the face of Lenta will increase pressure on regional networks, including the "soft" format, he believes.
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