What Are the Financial Results of Foreign Business in Russia in 2023, and Have Exit Rates Slowed Down?

Abstract

Starting from February 24, 2022, many multinational companies operating in the Russian Federation announced their intention to exit the Russian market, cease business relations, and halt trade operations in response to Russia's armed aggression against Ukraine. At the same time, some companies ignored the call to suspend normal business operations with Russia. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the “SelfSanctions / LeaveRussia” project team from the KSE Institute began creating a database of foreign firms with legal entities (LLCs and JSCs) in Russia and collecting key financial indicators of their activities (including the number of employees, revenue, assets, capital, taxes paid, and profits).

In total, we track nearly 4,000 companies, of which about 1,500 had assets in Russia at the start of the full-scale invasion.

In our previous work titled “How the income of foreign businesses in the Russian Federation has changed in 2022 and why so many companies still do not leave,”2 we discussed financial results for 2022, the first year after the start of the full-scale invasion.

In this policy brief, we update this information with data for 2023, and for the first time, we can observe the dynamics of foreign business revenue in Russia.