Amid Western economic sanctions, falling commodity prices and high interest rates, the financial situation of Russia's largest companies has sharply worsened, international economic analyst Gogita Suramelashvili wrote on social media.
Thus, in March, the balanced financial result of Russian organizations (profit minus loss) collapsed by 34% and amounted to 1.45 trillion rubles.
This is evidenced by Rosstat data, The Moscow Times reports .
Compared to March last year, business in Russia missed out on about 750 billion rubles in profits, and every third company operating in Russia became unprofitable.
In the raw material center of the Russian economy – oil and gas production – the net profit fell almost by half (to 789.5 billion rubles), and 40% of enterprises closed in the first quarter in the red.
Food producers lost more than 13% of their net profit, clothing factories lost almost 30%, and the furniture industry lost 33%.
The profits of construction companies have collapsed by a third.
The financial performance of oil refineries fell by 94%, or more than 17 times .
The coal industry remained deeply unprofitable, where, according to Rosstat, two-thirds of companies are already in the red: the net loss of Russian coal miners for three months reached 79.9 billion rubles and is approaching the figure for the entire last year (112.6 billion rubles).
Pumped up by trillions of dollars in military spending and state defense contracts, the Russian economy is sustained almost exclusively by industries related to the military-industrial complex: outside of the “defense industry,” there are few growing sectors .
It was previously reported that the Russian authorities are increasingly concerned that the “managed cooling” of the economy, as Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak called it, may become unmanageable – the Russian economy is slowing down sharply after two years of rapid growth.
Previously, it became known that more than 50 Russian companies refused to pay dividends for 2024. The suspension of payments occurred in almost all industries: oil and gas, metallurgy, retail, real estate, agriculture, logistics, mechanical engineering, and medicine.
In turn, the Russian Central Bank suggested that not all large companies will survive the sharp slowdown in the economy and a prolonged period of high interest rates.
The Central Bank of Russia also warned of possible bankruptcies among the largest Russian companies- Suramelashvili writes.
