Russian retail sales slowing
Receipts at merchants rose 5.1 percent from a year earlier, slowing from June’s 6.9 percent to the weakest pace since January 2011, the Federal Statistics Service in Moscow said in an e-mailed statement. That missed all 15 estimates in a Bloomberg survey, which forecast 6.2 percent growth.
"The key driving force behind the slowdown, especially in consumer demand, is the spike of inflation in June and July," Vladimir Osakovskiy, chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Moscow, said by phone after the data release. "We expect real GDP growth to slow from nearly 5 percent in the first quarter to just over 3 percent in the second half of this year."
"The softening in retail sales was to a large extent concentrated in food sales, likely a consequence of rising food inflation," Vladimir Kolychev, head of research at Societe Generale SA’s OAO Rosbank (ROSB) unit in Moscow, said by e-mail. The expansion in non-food categories was still robust at 8.6 percent, he said.
The central bank has signaled it’s satisfied with the trend of economic growth and is more likely to focus on imported food inflation in the coming months, according to Julia Tsepliaeva, head of research at BNP Paribas in Moscow.
Source: bloomberg.com
