The shareholder of Russia’s leading e-commerce company Ozon Holdings will inject up to $92mn into the company to fund its further expansion, reports East-West Digital News (EWDN).

Dubbed “the Russian Amazon” the shareholders will invest RUB3.5bn ($61mn) and possibly as much as RUB5.25bn ($92mn) the shareholders said last week.

The better part of the capital injection will come from Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), which invested in Ozon in 2014, and Baring Vostok, an early investor in the company and Russia’s leading private equity company.

A leading Russian mobile operator and an active investor in the digital field, MTS is committed to invest RUB1.15bn ($20mn) in exchange for an additional stake in the company (13.7%, up from 11.2%). An optional capital injection of RUB582bn rubles ($10mn) could further bring its share to 14.7%, according to MTS’s press release.

“Since [we invested in the company in] 2014, Ozon has seen exceptional revenue growth and improved operational performance. Now, however, is an opportune time to expand, and we believe that Ozon can use the additional resources to increase its reach and further improve its efficiency,” said Alexei Kornya, VP Finance, Investment, Mergers and Acquisitions at MTS.

“We boost our own e-commerce efforts and pursue our 3D strategy by expanding the digital services available to our clients,” he added, reminding the recent acquisition of two online ticketing services.

Ozon’s $150mn round of funding in 2014 came as the second largest in the history of Russian e-commerce — and has remained so to date, after Sberbank’s $500mn investment last year in a joint venture with Yandex.

Three years earlier, in September 2011, Ozon had raised $100mn from a consortium comprising Russian funds and the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten.

The company was founded in 1998, with an initial focus on books, CDs and DVDs. The site enlarged its positioning in the mid-2000s – following the example of Amazon – with consumer electronics, cameras and mobile phones and later added children’s goods and travel products.

Ozon launched Ozon Travel in 2009; acquired Sapato.ru, a major online retailer of shoes and accessories, in 2012; and took control of Litres, the Russian e-book leader, two years later.

The company has also developed an in-house fulfilment and delivery network, which encompasses several hundreds of cities in Russia with more than 2,500 pick-up points. A major part of Ozon’s successive fundings have gone to developing further these logistics capacities – and the capital injections announced today will be no exception.

Ozon now claims 3.2mn unique buyers.

Ozon has developed one of the largest e-commerce logistics networks across Russia.

According to EWDN’s Russian E-Commerce Report, online sales in 2016 exceeded $26bn, growing more than 20% year-on-year. Included in this figure are some $16bn for physical goods and $10bn for online travel, according to Data Insight. The cross-border segment is the fastest growing, up 26% by value and 80% by the number of parcels and small packages, and exceeded $4bn for physical goods alone, according to Russian Post and industry association NAMO. The 2017 numbers are not available yet.