OREANDA-NEWS. Sberbank Investment Research, the research department of Sberbank CIB, today announces the publication of its fifth survey of the pan-Russian consumer, the Sberbank CIB Ivanov2 Consumer Confidence Tracker, in our bi-monthly publication covering consumer spending, savings and confidence across the country.

Apart from publishing a headline consumer confidence index, this regular, proprietary publication provides a set of leading indicators for the most important trends across the fast-growth consumer sectors in Russia, including retail, banking, telecoms, media, IT, real estate and transportation.

The survey is executed by market research agency Cint on behalf of Sberbank CIB and is conducted every two months under a methodology that closely mirrors that of the State Statistics Service's quarterly survey and EU confidence assessments. However, our survey is expanded to encompass a wider set of questions relevant to Russia's middle-income consumers. The survey sample is 2,300 people, aged 18 to 65 and living in 164 cities with a population of over 100,000 inhabitants. The tracking error is below 2%.

The fifth tracker shows no change in the consumer confidence index, with the overall score staying at -8% in September as it has since March, when it first declined from January's -4%. There have been slight improvements in employment trends, but these are not strong enough to offset continuing inflationary concerns.