Nearly 40 companies were “digging in,” defying public demands to exit Russia or reduce their activities in the pariah state as of Thursday, according to a list kept by a professor with the Yale School of Management.
Among those operating undeterred: AstraZeneca, Ball Corporation, Credit Suisse, Emirates Airlines, Koch Industries, Lenovo, and SC Johnson.
On Friday Spotify announced that it was pulling its free, ad-supported service from Russia, completing its exit, Bloomberg reported. Its premium service is no longer available in Russia either, according to its website Friday.
“Spotify has continued to believe that it’s critically important to try to keep our service operational in Russia to provide trusted, independent news and information in the region,” the company said in a statement Friday, as reported by Bloomberg.
“Unfortunately, recently enacted legislation further restricting access to information, eliminating free expression, and criminalizing certain types of news puts the safety of Spotify’s employees and possibly even our listeners at risk.”
The list of companies still doing business in Russia, launched several days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is “updated continuously” by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, and his research team in a bid to “reflect new announcements from companies in as close to real time as possible.”
Since the initial publication of the list during the week of Feb. 28, Sonnenfeld and fellow researchers have revised their categorization method. In a March 16 article for Coins2Day, Sonnenfeld acknowledged that the initial “naughty and nice list … smoothed over some of the complexities related to these companies’ exits from Russia.”
As of Saturday the revised list contained five categories: “withdrawal,” “suspension,” “scaling back,” “buying time,” and “digging in,” with “withdrawal” correlating to a letter grade of an A and subsequent categories each assigned a lower letter grade.
The 38 companies “defying demands for exit or reduction of activities,” receiving an F, as of March 31, per Sonnenfeld’s list:
- Aalberts
- Acer
- Alibaba
- Align Technology
- Asus
- Auchan-Retail
- Cersanit
- Check Point Software
- Cloudflare
- Didi
- dōTERRA
- Egon Zehnder
- Emirates Airlines
- Eutelsat
- FM Global
- Glencore
- Gruma
- Huawei
- Ingka
- Institute of Internal Auditors
- Intermedia
- International Paper
- Koch Industries
- Korn Ferry
- Kronospan
- Lenovo
- Leroy Merlin
- Manitowoc
- Metro
- MOLGroup
- MSI
- Raiffeisen Bank International
- Societe Generale
- Tencent
- Titan International
- Turkish Airlines
- Xiaomi
- Wex Inc.
[Editor’s note: Bose contacted Coins2Day with a statement saying its name was listed by Sonnenfeld in error and that it has no operations in Russia whatsoever and “stands with the people of Ukraine.” The rest of its statement is as follows: “As of March 3, Bose stopped all product shipments into Russia. Bose does not sell directly to consumers in Russia – we do not operate retail stores or sell or ship products through any company operated website. On March 3, we stopped providing product to any independent third-party resellers. We strongly support and comply with all export laws and economic sanctions that have been put in place.”]
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