Investments have grown like the last time

The investment goods supply index, after a decline in the spring of 2022 and even stabilization, made a sharp rise and at this stage is higher than the 2021 figure. Experts agree that such growth is unlikely to continue for a long time, there is a high probability of further correction of this indicator, which again is not something special. Most analysts claim that such a jump is “seasonal”, since the Russian economy has already experienced similar changes in previous years. In any case, experts take into account the volatility of the market, therefore, it is too early to draw any conclusions and further observations are needed.

If we consider the crisis of 2022 from the side of capital investments, then it turned out to be ambiguous, if only because the conditional indicators grew steadily in almost all parameters. Such growth was stimulated by corporate profits and an injection of capital from the state. Real growth at that time (specifically for January-September 2022) was at around 5.9% per year. The main “culprits” of such a jump were the pipeline transport and petrochemical industries. Stabilization ended only in the middle of the year.

It should be noted that the lion’s share of additional investment was made up of prohibitively expensive investment imports, which, nevertheless, were in demand and needed by most industrial companies, which in turn were looking for workarounds against sanctions in order to obtain the technologies they needed. Unfortunately, sanctions and other negative criteria affecting the country’s economy have a cumulative effect: many foreign companies have left, and restrictions on the import of technologies force most Russian industrial organizations to improvise almost blindly in order to stay afloat. Such negative additions could have a bad effect on the investment market in 2023.