Link Securities | Inditex (ITX) CEO Oscar García Maceiras said that conditions are not right for the owner of Zara to return to Russia, more than two years after it sold its local business following the invasion of Ukraine, according to the Inditex newspaper.
When asked what circumstances would be right for the group to return to the market, the executive told the Financial Times that ‘an environment that is not the current one, of course.’García Maceiras’ statements are the latest sign that multinationals are in no hurry to return to the Russian market, despite an earlier statement by Russia’s top investment envoy, who went so far as to say that Western companies would begin returning in June this year. Few multinationals that left Russia would be better positioned to return than Inditex, which before the invasion considered the country its largest market outside Spain, accounting for 8.5% of its global profits.
In early 2023, it closed a deal to sell its Russian business for an ‘insignificant’ sum to a Lebanese family that manages the Spanish group’s franchise in the Middle East. However, the terms of the sale included an obligation on the buyer, the so-called Daher group, to ‘immediately’ establish a Russian franchise for Inditex with the transferred stores if the Spanish company decided to return.
