Foreign investor purchases of Russian assets fall 43%
In the first half of 2025, the volume of purchases of Russian assets by foreign investors decreased 43% against the same period of the previous year to $911 million (8 transactions), the AK&M agency estimates in its bulletin The M&A Market. According to the agency's methodology, such transactions include both purchases of assets in Russia and foreign purchases of stakes in Russian entities, where the buyer is a foreign investor. In cases where the transaction value was not disclosed, valuations are given on the basis of multipliers applied to the companies' financial indicators.
The largest transaction of this kind was the sale of Evraz's US assets (Evraz Inc. North America and Evraz Inc. NA Canada), which totalled $500 million. The buyer was the US investment fund Atlas Holdings.
As for domestic transactions, the largest was the February sale of the operator of the Western High-Speed Diameter toll road in St. Petersburg: VTB Bank sold control in the project to a Turkish investor (LM Infra LLC, whose beneficial owners are Ozat Hasan Emre and Şahin Gekhan). The estimated value of the deal, according to AK&M, was $220.1 million.
Transactions involving assets in Russia also included the purchase by Azerbaijani businessman Araz Mehdiyev of 50% of Rubis Holdings Limited, which owns LLC Travel Retail Domodedovo (the Domodedovo airport duty free store), estimated at $10.6 million.
In the fuel and energy sector, 52.6% of the Sakhalin-Shelf-Service joint venture was sold in June to the Qatar-based Technology Bridge for Research and Development KSTP (whose beneficial owners are unknown) for an estimated $16.8m. The stake was previously held by Vostok-Incom. Other shareholders of the joint venture are the Japanese Marubeni Corp. (25.77%) and American International Development Services Inc. (21.64%).
In the food industry, Ultra Fish Group, whose largest owner is the British Plymouth Rock Management, acquired Severny Kristall fish and seafood processing plant for an estimated $3.8 million. And in the financial sector, Armenian businessman David Amaryan's Balchug Capital fund bought Goldman Sachs' Russian subsidiary, Goldman Sachs Bank LLC, in April for an estimated $2.1 million.