Fastlane Ventures

Can you start by giving us an overview of your company, the services you provide and your business model?

Lokata is a location-based online service, internet service and mobile applications for shoppers, which give them a digital alternative to print circulars, to printed catalogues. So, it is actually in digitized format that allows to pull the retailers’ circulars into seeing what to buy, where to buy and working hours and other shopping related information.

So, this is like coupons. I mean in America they have coupons and that is when you get your newspaper and you have your circular that comes in the newspaper with special deals. Russia never had those. Is it like coupons for Russia?

I would say it is much wider than just the coupons because you can see here not just the special offer. You can see for example the new collection, you can see the new arrivals, maybe wide range of different kind of products the retailer would like to offer. This is much wider than just couponing.

Give me an example that is very obvious to our listeners. For instance I am walking on the street and I want to buy some new jeans.

You have Lokata in your mobile phone for example. So, you go to Lokata, you go to the search and you write “jeans” or “blue jeans” and then you will see the catalogues of the stores which are nearby, let’s say 100-200 meters from you. And then you can choose, you can see and since you are already quite close to the store, this is very logical that it is very easy for you to go the store and to see and in case the jeans are ok, then you are buying. This is very simple.

In shopping centers you can also use this to tell you which floor to go to.

Absolutely.

Can you put a brand or just jeans in general?

You can put the brand as well. You can just search in a category like fashion, clothes or shoes and choose whatever you want.

How mane partners do you have to have?

Lokata started to operate on Russian market from April 2012. We are two years old right now. Since that time from scratch we built the network of more than 130.000 stores of 800 retailers, retail chains. But this is regarding the location based information, so it is regarding addresses, working hours, phone numbers etc. Regarding the catalogue for those two years almost 130.000 retailers are our clients, they place the advertising brochures and everything.

What percent of the stores is here in Russia?

I wouldn’t say it is quite a big percent yet but since we are trying to concentrate on really big federal retail chains, I would say almost 20% of the big retailers in Russia already tried Lokata. I see that now more than 80% of retailers already know about our service. This is a great achievement.

How do you work with these companies? Do they pay you a listing fee?

Yes, they pay. It is very simple model. They pay for the effective contact. So, every time when the unique users opens their catalogue, they pay. Actually I would say it is not even the pay for the contact, it is pay for the reader of the catalogue. Because one user can look through the whole catalogue or at least 5-10 pages and actually have a contact with a lot of different kinds of product and also can for example go to the website of the retailer from the application, they can call, they can watch video, which is also available on Lokata. So, it is a lot of different kind of actions and you pay just once. For the users it is absolutely free and Lokata exists for all major operation systems.

How many employees do you currently have?

In Russia we have 22 employees. Since a lot of functions are done in different countries, all together there are more than 200 employees right now. But we will be developing in Russia as well.

Tell me about development in Russia?

The office is in Moscow and since we are online company we do not need any other representation. But Lokata operates all over Russia even in the small cities.