Hello, everyone! We are launching a new monthly column that will briefly cover the most interesting and significant events in the retail world. Here we go!

The world's most expensive companies for 2019

The rating of the most expensive brands (according to experts from Brand Finance) is still headed by Amazon. The company of Jeff Bezos for the year has added to the price of a quarter — now it is worth about $188 million, followed by Apple — $152.6 million. The third place went to Google ($142.8 million), and the fourth — to Microsoft ($119.6 million). Closing the top five is Samsung ($91.3 million) — the only company that has lost, not added to the value for the year.

Top of Ukrainian retail tax payers

Among the 100 largest Ukrainian tax-paying enterprises out of 1364, 4 retailers turned out to be taxed last year:

+ ATB (UAH 4.8 billion);
+ Epicenter (UAH 2.3 bln);
+ Silpo (UAH 1 bln);
+ Metro Cash&Carry (UAH 810 million).

Besides them, the list also includes McDonald's Ukraine, Nova Posta and Ukrposhta Office. In general, tobacco companies gave the most to the country's budget.

The best employing companies in Ukraine

The Ukrainian branch of the international HR portal HeadHunter has published the Top Ukrainian Employers according to the results of its research for the past year 2018.

The main criterion when choosing an employer for Ukrainians was the stability of the company, and when choosing a proposal they were primarily guided by the size of wages. The most popular industry in the opinion of the population is IT.

Top SEO-trends in E-commerce 2019

EVO.business highlighted the four most relevant global trends in search engine optimization in e-commerce, which were not noted in 2018:

1.Optimization of long search queries — descriptive phrases of 3 or more words, narrow in meaning. And both in the usual search, and in voice. At the top of the list are still the most informative, useful, original posts and videos that meet the EAT standard Google, but now there are more and more answers to long, accurate questions.

2.Carousel preview video in search top. Another reason to learn to work with semantics and meta tags when uploading video. Titled movies like How to get into featured snippets more often than others.

3.Boot speed on mobile devices Google promised to make SEO-factor number 1 back in July 2018. Apparently, this mechanism is still being tested, which does not mean that "slowing down" sites fly out of the Top — despite all the other work done on SEO optimization.

4.The reputation of the brand as a SEO factor. The RankBrain system learns how to distinguish frank PR from other content. Now mentions of your brand on authoritative sources (without links), as well as its reputation consisting of reviews, evaluations, complaints, more and more influence the value of the company's Internet resources in the eyes of Google robots.

eBay starts paying dividends

For the first time in its history, eBay, the world's largest online auction, will start paying dividends to its shareholders. The company's net profit for the last quarter of last year was about $760 million. On March 20, eBay investors are expected to receive 14 cents per share. The company's management is now even more active in buying back its shares from shareholders.

Ukraine — 4th in the world by contactless payments

According to Mastercard Europe SA, Ukraine is on the 4th place in the world by the number of contactless payments — through mobile devices, smart watches and bracelets. And this despite the fact that so far no more than 38% of medium and small retailers in Ukraine are ready to accept such non-cash payments from customers, and 37% of the population do not have bank cards at all. During the year, the share of cashless transactions in Ukraine has increased from 39.3% to 44.3%.

The first product with geo-labeling in Ukraine

Hutsul Sheep Brindza is the first Ukrainian product that has received registration with geographical marking. It became possible thanks to a joint project with the EU to support the geo-referenced system in Ukraine. Other promising Ukrainian geo-references that meet EU requirements have already been announced. Geo-labeling of products should increase the recognition of Ukrainian food products on the international market and contribute to their effective promotion.

First new shopping mall in Ukraine in 2019

The pioneer of 2019 in the construction of new commercial real estate in Ukraine was a three-tier shopping center Smart Plaza Obolon. It has already opened on January 25 in Kiev — literally near the exit from the metro station Minskaya. Its total area is 15 thousand square meters, of which 10 thousand are leased out. The developer of the new shopping mall "for shopping on the way home" is the company A Development. The first anchor tenants are Silpo and KFC.

This was our summary of interesting events in the global and Ukrainian retailing in January. Follow the news!