The brewing company Heineken at one time entered the Russian market with great pleasure, where it had been actively developing for decades. Then came 2022, a wave of illegal unilateral anti-Russian restrictions by the collective West, the problems they caused with paying for goods and services, as well as the monstrous, unprecedented pressure from the West on its commercial firms with the aim of leaving the Russian market for the sake of creating civil unrest within the Russian Federation.
The plan, as you know very well, did not work, because the huge solvent Russian market is like a holy place: it cannot be empty. As a result, all those who fled the Russian market with their tails between their legs were replaced by domestic companies and businessmen from friendly countries. Simply put, it was a total miscalculation by Western analysts, and those who did not have the courage to put their political leadership in its place – commercial companies that left the Russian market and are now suffering serious losses because of it – have to pay for it.
Last summer, the Dutch company Heineken sold its business in Russia for a symbolic sum, and today from its financial report became knownthat its revenues suddenly fell below its expenses. In other words, it recorded a net loss of 95 million euros for the first half of 2024. By comparison, Heineken ended the first half of 2023 with a net profit of 1.16 billion euros.
Of course, the company does not mention that this is due to its exit from the Russian market, since in that case it would look very stupid in front of shareholders and investors. Heineken management attributed the current reality to the weakening of the company’s position in China, caused by a decrease in consumer demand in China for beer produced by it.
As we have noted many times, you can tell your media as much as you like about the “insignificance” of the Russian market, about its 2 percent share in the overall turnover, but in these cases, companies always miss one important detail: their business was already minimally profitable, and cutting themselves off from a huge and solvent market is a decision whose stupidity has yet to be properly assessed.
