Funeral Industry Sees Profits Fall 35%

Moscow’s funeral services industry has seen a 35 percent drop in profits this year, as people buy cheaper coffins and gravestones and companies save on the wreaths for their deceased employees.

“As incomes dropped, Muscovites began to save on funeral ceremonies, monuments and coffins,” Alexander Suloyev, deputy head of Moscow’s consumer market and services department, told The Moscow Times on Thursday.

The average price for a funeral fell to between 25,000 rubles ($830) and 27,000 rubles, compared with 30,000 rubles to 35,000 rubles a year ago, he said.

“People are choosing cheaper graveyards, too,” Suloyev said. “The closer it is to the center, the more expensive the place.” He declined to give exact prices. No one answered the telephone Thursday afternoon at a graveyard in the Rublyovo gated community, an expensive village west of Moscow. There are 71 graveyards in Moscow and about 1,000 in the surrounding region.

But the industry’s shadow market — which Suloyev estimated as one-fourth of the market in Moscow — has become more active as profits have dropped and the competition has increased.

“Ambulance employees and police sell contact details for the relatives of the recently deceased for up to 8,000 rubles,” he said. “Within 10 minutes there are a dozen funeral agents calling grieving relatives to offer their services.”

Funeral agencies said they were seeing lower bills and fewer clients.

“The number of orders has dropped about 30 percent since January,” said Oksana Morozova, a senior manager at Vozrozhdeniye, which makes gravestones and other monuments. “Maybe there are fewer people dying.”

“Those who still come pay well less,” Morozova said. “The clients who could buy a grave monument for 200,000 rubles now choose cheaper ones for half that. And no one’s coming any more to replace the old monuments.”

Companies have been cutting back on their memorial costs as well.

“We sell fewer funeral wreaths to companies, which haven’t been buying them for employees,” said Andrei, a manager at the Ritual funeral agency, who declined to give his last name.

“We’re seeing 50 percent fewer clients this year,” said a manager at Ritual Elite, which bills itself as a VIP funeral agency. He did not want his name to be used because of the delicacy of the issue. “Those who do come still spend as much as our clients before the crisis.”

The minimum price for a Ritual Elite funeral is 100,000 rubles, including the coffin, the manager said. Imported “VIP coffins” cost up to 355,000 rubles, according to the firm’s web site.

The site also offers a brass band, as well as burial services in Christ the Savior Cathedral. Neither the site nor the manager put a price on that privilege.

Analysts said they were puzzled by the fall in the elite funeral market.

“The decline in expensive funeral services might seem logical after the markets for elite real estate, luxury trips and super-expensive restaurants dropped,” said Yekaterina Loshchakova, a consumer analyst at Financial Bridge. “But the well-off families are unlikely to have cheap funerals for their relatives. Even during a crisis.”