Russian Businesses are Pessimistic About Their Future - Grant Thornton Survey

According to the Grant Thornton International Business Report, the number of business leaders in Russia who feel optimistic for the outlook of the country’s economy reduced from 36% to 17% during the last six months. The optimism index incorporates the results of the survey of 5,000 business leaders in 32 countries.

The most pessimistic countries are still the same – Japan (6%), South Korea (10%) and Sweden (13%). Last year, optimism was shared by 16%, 16% and 20% of business leaders in these countries, respectively.

The most optimistic countries include the United Arab Emirates (69% against 77% last year), Vietnam and China (65% against 82% last year), and Nigeria (64%) that replaced Indonesia in the third place of the list.  

The global optimism index dropped from 59% in 2019 to 43%.

Optimism varies across industries as follows: oil and gas, mining, mass media, utilities, construction and real estate, agriculture and professional services are the most confident sectors (in descending order of optimism). Traditionally pessimistic education and healthcare joined by tourism are the least confident sectors.

Russian business leaders believe that the following functional areas of their business are most negatively impacted by Covid-19: marketing and sales (about 50% of respondents), purchasing (28%) and operations/production (20%). They also mention certain problems with human resources, accounting and finance. Information technology and legal areas were affected by Covid-19 less than the other sectors. According to the report, 13% of respondents did not experience any negative impact of Covid-19 at all.

While 12% of business leaders surveyed managed to hire talents made redundant by other companies. Others (11%) were motivated by restrictions to implement new technology. Some businesses (6%) even managed to increase sales. However, the majority of companies (60%) felt no positive impact of Covid-19.