At Least 6%

Putin, who is seeking to return to the Kremlin in a March 4 presidential vote, says Russia needs to grow at least 6 percent a year to become one of the world’s five largest economies and should be less reliant on energy exports.

Retail sales jumped 7.2 percent in 2011, faster than a 6.3 percent increase in the previous year, as consumer prices rose at the slowest pace since the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago, the service said last week. Inflation totaled 6.1 percent last year, according to the central bank, which is seeking to trim price growth to 6 percent in 2012.

OAO Magnit, the country’s largest food retailer by market value, was among the companies that benefited from the surge, posting a 20 percent gain in net income last year.

“Domestic demand rose thanks to lending growth, the pre- New Year’s mood and higher incomes toward the end of the year,” Ksenia Yudaeva, chief economist at OAO Sberbank (SBER) in Moscow, said yesterday by e-mail.

The International Monetary Fund on Jan. 24 cut its forecast for Russian growth to 3.3 percent in 2012, saying the global economy poses risks. GDP will expand 3.5 percent this year and 3.7 percent in 2013, according to the median estimates of 17 economists in a Bloomberg survey.