It is a list that gives cold sweats to all the communication cells of large companies. In a few weeks, it spread like wildfire on social networks and quickly went around the world. Concocted by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, an economics professor at the prestigious Yale School of Management in the United States, she first classified multinationals into two categories: the “good ones”, those who left Russia, and the “bad ones”. “, those who remained. Since then, Sonnenfeld has refined its classification: at the last tally on March 28, of the 450 multinationals scrutinized, 174 decided to pack up, 195 to suspend their business, leaving themselves the possibility of restarting it once the conflict is over, 31 to reduce their current activities, 56 to freeze their future projects and only 43 continued their activity normally. Among the latter pilloried by this academic specialist in social responsibility, many Chinese companies, including Alibaba (the Chinese leader in online commerce), Didi (the Chinese Uber), but also Huawei, Tencent, Lenovo or Xiaomi.
Across the Atlantic, where the practice of “name and shame” has been elevated to the rank of religion, the effect of this “blacklist” was immediate on major brands such as McDonald’s, Nike, Coca Cola or Levi Strauss. In France, Kering or LVMH have decided to temporarily close their shop, Renault to suspend production at its factories and the manufacturer is no longer concealing the possibility of withdrawing in the future from AvtoVaz, the Lada manufacturer in which it holds 68% of the capital.
The fact remains that the pressure is still increasing on TotalEnergies, which has certainly decided to no longer supply itself with Russian oil but remains present in gas, but also on the tenors of the food industry Danone and Lactalis as well as the two giants of the galaxy Mulliez Auchan and Leroy Merlin, while the third, Decathlon, finally highlighted supply problems to announce this Tuesday, March 29 the suspension of its activities in Russia. Volodymyr Zelensky, in video before French parliamentarians last week, urged French groups to no longer be “sponsors of the Russian war machine”. As a communicator, he knows how much companies can lose by neglecting the “reputational” risk. Now in the eyes of public opinion, morality takes precedence over economic or financial reason. Whether they like it or not, companies will have to integrate this dimension.
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Still, it is not easy to leave when you have built factories, opened large logistics centers and when you employ tens of thousands of Russian workers. With nearly 1,200 French companies present in the country, France is the leading foreign private employer in Russia. Leaving would be “considered a premeditated bankruptcy giving rise to expropriations and would amount to making a” gift from the company “to the Russian regime, recently declared the head of the family structure at the head of the Auchan, Leroy Merlin and Decathlon brands. foreigners fear the pure and simple seizure of their assets. Recently, it was the Swiss watchmaker, Audemars Piquet, which saw itself seize watches for an amount of several million euros after Bern decided to stop exports of luxury goods to Russia.”If the multinationals decide to leave, they risk seeing their assets nationalized and then resold to private players, Russian or Chinese in particular”, dissects a Frenchman at the heart of business networks in Moscow .
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A bill going in this direction and carried by the majority party United Russia was presented to the Duma but it has not been voted for the time being. The Russian Legislative Commission has proposed that “any company owned at least 25% by an individual or entity from a hostile country deciding to stop its activities in Russia could be placed under state administration”. “You have to be consistent: if at some point the government decides to push French companies out of Russia, then there will have to be a compensation system,” adds economist Elie Cohen. The amounts at stake are enormous: with just over 23 billion euros of direct investment in the country, France is the second largest foreign investor in Russia.
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