Gazprom begins producing refrigerators as its core gas business collapses

A seized Bosch home appliance plant near St. Petersburg, now managed by a Gazprom subsidiary, has resumed refrigerator production and posted a net profit, The Moscow Times reported on March 16.

According to the company's financial statements, after resuming production in May 2025, net profit amounted to 192.5 million rubles (about $2.1 million), compared to a loss of 1.7 billion rubles (about $18.6 million) a year earlier.

Revenue increased from 100 million rubles ($1.1 million) to 422.4 million rubles ($4.6 million). By the end of 2025, the enterprise set up the production of over 30 refrigerator models. The plant signed over 20 contracts to sell its products. The first buyers were major Russian retailers M.Video-Eldorado and DNS, as well as home appliance seller Weissgauff.

The enterprise produced 30k+ refrigerators. It plans to increase production to 100k units in 2026, and to 220k in 2027. At the same time, the company is preparing to start manufacturing washing machines, a Gazprom Domestic Systems representative said.

This new direction is developing amid problems in Gazprom's core business. Gazprom, which pumped gas to dozens of countries before the war, had only four long-distance clients by early 2026: Hungary, Slovakia, Turkiye, and China. Pipeline gas export volumes from Russia remain at their lowest since the second half of the 1980s for the third consecutive year: 60 billion cubic meters in 2023, 81 billion in 2024, and 78 billion in 2025, as of BCS estimates.

Compared to pre-war peaks (200 billion cubic meters in 2018), Gazprom's exports fell by nearly two-thirds. Deliveries to Europe, once its largest market, rolled back to early 1970s levels, hitting only 18 billion cubic meters last year. China increased gas purchases to a record 38.8 billion cubic meters via the Power of Siberia pipeline, but these volumes offset only one-fifth of former exports to the European Union.

Bosch stopped producing home appliances in Russia in 2022 and planned to sell the enterprise in 2024, but the deal fell through. In April of that year, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin signed a decree temporarily transferring the Russian subsidiaries of home appliance manufacturers Ariston and Bosch to the management of Gazprom Domestic Systems.