Prepared by the KSE Institute team and KSE members of the Board of Directors with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation; 30.01-05.02.2023

Disclaimer: At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine KSE Institute launched an analytical project, which was named “SelfSanctions”, aimed to collect data on foreign companies operating in the Russian market and limiting or terminating their activities. Examination of data was conducted jointly with specialists from the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine. The database contains a lot of information, we collect daily statistics on changes in the status of foreign companies operating/operated in the Russian market and limiting or terminating their activities. Also, we created the Telegram bot https://t.me/exit_ru_bot for tracking/monitoring of news on priority foreign companies (coverage 1, 2, 3 or 7 days of monitoring). Also, we do regular analysis of changes in share prices and capitalization of parent groups of companies that have or have had business in Russia.

KSE database is partly based on the Yale’s School of Management database, the University of St.Gallen latest Paper, epravda.com.ua, squeezingputin.com, https://bloody.energy/ and leave-russia.org websites and other open sources. Data is verified and KSE status is assigned. Data on stocks is taken from Google and Yahoo Finance. At the same time, the KSE database is more complete and comprehensive and contains much more information than most other similar databases, as it also includes data on number of staff, revenue, capital and other financial indicators, the latest updates and changes in statuses, links to used sources, and daily updates from the telegram-bot etc.

KSE Institute and Leave Russia project are the part of B4Ukraine Coalition since mid-2022.

KSE Institute is glad to announce have finalized merging with project leave-russia.org which was developed by a team of volunteers.

Also, we became partners with Rubargo. Rubargo allows you to find any brand or company that is operating in Russia just by scanning barcodes.

Impose your personal sanctions by downloading app here: Apple App Store | Google Play.

KSE DATABASE SNAPSHOT as of 05.02.2023

Number of the companies that continue Russian operations (KSE’s status «stay»¹) – 1 220 (+2 per week)

Number of the companies that have reduced current operations and hold off new Investments (KSE’s status «wait») – 494 (+3 per week)

Number of the companies that have curtailed Russian operations (KSE’s status «leave») – 1 158 (-1 per week)

Number of the companies that completed withdrawal from Russia (KSE’s status “exited”) – 183 (+4 per week; +25 per month)

As of February 05, we have identified about 3,055 companies, organizations and their brands from 88 countries and 56 industries and analyzed their position on the Russian market. About 40% of them are public ones, for ~1 400 public groups of companies, we also identified (where it was possible) their operating business in Russia (the presence of a controlling stake in a legal entity) and updated the data for 2021, which allowed us to calculate the value of capital invested in the country (about $174.2 billion), local revenue (about $296.6 billion), local assets (about $285.7 billion) as well as staff (about 1.394 million people) and taxes paid (about $24.4 billion). 1,652 foreign companies have reduced, suspended or ceased operations in Russia. Also, we added information about 183 companies that have completed the sale of their business in Russia based on the information collected from the official registers (update in January allowed us to identify another 25 exited companies).

As can be seen from the tables below, as of February 05, 183 companies which had already completely exited from the Russian Federation, had at least 326,600 personnel, $45.2 bn in annual revenue, $35.2bn in capital and $41.2bn in assets; companies, that declared a complete withdrawal from Russia had 168,000 personnel, $33.8bn in revenues, $14.4bn in capital and $16.1bn in assets; companies that suspended operations on the Russian market had 262,600 personnel, annual revenue of $43.5bn, $18.9bn in capital and $32.7bn in assets.

What’s new last week – key news from Daily monitoring

(updated on a weekly basis)⁹

KSE Institute and Yale School of Management issued this week a joint paper named “The Russian Business Retreat – How the Ratings Measured Up One Year Later” at the Social Science Research Network (or SSRN) – TOP world’s repository of scholarly research in the economy, social sciences, humanities, life sciences among others. Here is the link with this work:

 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4343547

Also, this week we made a lot of significant improvements in our Telegram-bot with improving the interface, adding overall statistics and reflecting on the latest KSE statuses of companies taken from the KSE public database.

KSE Telegram bot on news monitoring @exit_ru_bot 

Twitter of SelfSanctions project

Leave-russia.org website

BI analytics @ Leave-russia.org

Company news @ Leave-russia.org

Twitter of leave-russia.org website 

LinkedIn of leave-russia.org

YouTube of leave-russia.org

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¹ – KSE status “leave” – Companies that have published on the company’s official website (or their release has appeared in a foreign publication such as FT, NYT, etc.) that are completely shutting down in Russia or companies that have officially announced that they are temporarily reducing operations in Russia
– KSE status “wait” – Companies that have published on the company’s official website (or their release has appeared in a foreign publication such as FT, NYT, etc.) that they are reducing only part of their business operations by continuing to work on other operations or companies that have reported delaying future investment / development / marketing , while continuing their core business
– KSE status “stay” – Companies that ignore exit / downsizing requirements in Russia, as well as companies that have officially stated that they remain in Russia or news of their exit have not been found
– KSE status “exited” – Companies that sold its business/assets or its part of the business to a local partner and leaved the market

² As of 19/06/2022, we updated the database with extended information on ~ + 400 new companies, and as of 28/08/2022, we have updated data for another 422 companies with data on personnel, revenue, capital and assets for 2021. Also, we started to monitor additionally whether companies really stated any actions to exit the country (currently we observe a very small number of such companies). So far we found information only about a few companies which started selling their business in Russia. Even for most of them – it’s just an intention or they just started the process of sale. Everything else is mostly the statements or some preliminary steps. The collected information is already available and systematised in the form of a newKSE’s status “exited”.

³ On 24 July 2022, we introduced the new status “exited”, which reflects the companies’ actions to finalise the exit from the Russian market. The status relies on data from the Uniform State Register of Legal Entities in Russia (USRLE or EGRUL) and complementary analysis such as companies’ announcements and media publications of company activities. At the same time, companies’ activities can be hard to track and can be missed in the analysis, especially for companies less covered in the media. We encourage our readers to inform us if they are familiar with the companies’ actions that contradict their announcements about the exit via the Feedback Form at https://leave-russia.org/

⁴ As it was mentioned earlier KSE Institute reconciled data from the University of St.Gallen latest Paper issued in January on 120 exits and verified them with EGRUL whether there were real sales. As a result, 7 new companies were identified and added to KSE’s database and 13 new exits confirmed.

⁵ Telia Company was deleted from the database as they left Russia before the invasion

⁶ https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/russian-mcdonalds-buyer-turns-logistics-with-havi-purchase-2022-11-16/

⁷ https://www.rbc.ru/rbcfreenews/6221fbc79a79471b05ebfd35

⁸ On April 8, 2022 the Russian Parliament introduced a draft law allowing the Russian government to expropriate the property of foreign nationals/companies from “unfriendly countries”. So far, this bill was not voted into law and is being reconsidered. Based on various press reports and general sentiment of Russian commentators, there are grounds to believe that similar law can be adopted in the near term. The draft law stipulated the following:

• • Russian courts are authorized to appoint an ‘external administrator’ of a foreign-owned Russian company if 25% or more of that company’s shares are owned by foreign shareholders from “unfriendly” states, and the company has either exited Russia or taken actions to terminate its business in Russia;
  
• • A Russian state entity, or other Russian entities can be appointed as external administrators;
  
• • The external administrator shall have a mandate to liquidate the company and transfer all of its assets to a new company;
• • The shares and assets of the new company would then be transferred and disposed of by way of public auction;
  
• • The original shareholders shall not be admitted to the auction;
  
• • If no bidders submit their proposals, the Russian government may purchase the shares, at a price to be set by the Ministry for Economic Development;
• • The bill explicitly stipulates that original shareholders’ right of ownership over the company is to be annulled;
• • The bill further states that the confiscation shall be carried out without any compensation.

PRACTICAL STEPS IN DIVESTMENT FROM RUSSIA are described in the recent analysis prepared by Anna Vlasiuk and Nataliia Shapoval.

⁹ Recently, a new section “Company news” was added to the project site https://leave-russia.org/, follow daily updates directly on the site