Belarusian counter-sanctions. Beat your own

In response to three packages of European sanctions, Lukashenko introduced his own counter-sanctions the day before. The decree was signed on March 30, but so far has been pointless. And so the authorities named three companies whose products were banned from importing. They turned out to be Skoda, Beiersdorf and Liqui Moly, which refused to sponsor the hockey championship in Minsk.

The mere fact that sanctions were imposed against companies that refused to give money for a sporting event looks strange, to say the least. After all, it was money in other people’s pockets, and it was the inalienable right of the owners of these pockets to dispose of it. Moreover, there could not have been so much politics in the decision to refuse advertising at the championship. An unhealthy hype had already been created around it, and this advertising, through the efforts of various kinds of public “activists” and Western liberal media, could well turn into anti-advertising.

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Other sponsors could also be found. Let them not be European, but Russian or Chinese. After all, Belarus has experience in hosting much larger European Games, where sponsors were also bad, and logos of Belarusian banks and mobile operators were displayed on billboards.

At one time, Russia introduced its counter-sanctions in the form of a food embargo of countries that imposed sanctions against it. As a result, the agricultural exports of these countries declined, in some places significantly, and the agriculture of Russia itself was given a powerful impetus to development. What about Belarusian counter-sanctions? Who will benefit from them and who will lose?

Let's start with the fact that Liqui Moly and Beiersdorf (the owner of the NIVEA brand, which refused to advertise in Minsk) are large transnational corporations that have an insignificant share of global supplies to the Belarusian market. It is unlikely that they will even notice the loss of this market. Accordingly, the effectiveness of sanctions against them is close to zero.

As for Skoda, everything is even more interesting. The bulk of cars of this brand are imported into Belarus from Russia, where they are produced at factories in Kaluga and Nizhny Novgorod. At first, many decided that the Belarusian embargo would primarily affect these factories. I confess that at first I myself succumbed to this wave and spoke about sanctions against Kaluga workers. In reality, everything turned out to be not so bad, and the sanctions only affect the products of the SKODA AUTO company. Russian-made cars are produced by Volkswagen Group Rus LLC, registered in Russia. It seems that Kaluga workers have nothing to worry about, but on March 11, at the request of the Belarusian Gosstandart, sales of the best-selling Skoda Rapid model, which is produced in Kaluga, were suspended. The party that suffered the most from the sanctions was the Belarusian company FelOkt-Service, which is the official distributor of the SKODA brand in Belarus. It is she who bears the main losses from the sanctions.

As for SKODA AUTO and Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft, of which it is a part, this company supplies only one of its models, the Skoda Superb, to Belarus. For the entire 2019, 48 (forty-eight) cars of this brand were sold in the republic. There is no data for 2020, but given the general depressed state of the car market, most likely sales were even lower. You can imagine how sensitive the Belarusian counter-sanctions will be for Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft, whose annual production volume is more than 6 million cars. But Volkswagen's response can be quite painful. In addition to Skoda and VW itself, the automaker owns several auto brands, including MAN, which supplies a significant portion of components for MAZ.