Maersk to completely leave Russia and sell its Russian assets | Hacker News Reader

Maersk to completely leave Russia and sell its Russian assets

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64 pointsCharlesW22 comments

You would think that an intelligence operation that ransomed your corporate network, and shut down your core business for weeks would be sufficient to declare a jurisdiction unfriendly. But alas, it takes public opinion to shift before doing anything drastic…

They still could suffer an attack from Russia. At least before the current Russian war of aggression they could get some business from that country without upsetting too many people, now they have to face likely ransom attacks from Russia while also forgoing all business opportunities there. I think this all makes sense when you look at it from a for-profit point of view.

I wonder what happens once this war is over. Will companies return. Or are they replaced by local or maybe even Chinese companies. I somehow still think that Russia might gain from the current conflict. Lets see.

It depends on which war you mean. The shooting war might end, but with Putin still in power, the economic war (sanctions) will probably continue, because European/US voters will vote out their governments if said governments wanted to return to being friends with Putin (or maybe they won't, voters seem to have short memories).

The Russian government is toppled and Western corporations are given Russian assets as reparations.

> The Russian government is toppled

Not entirely improbable.

> Western corporations are given Russian assets as reparations.

That's less probable.

> That's less probable.

It happens a lot, even in modern times. It will probably take the form of companies like BP, Shell, Total, Exxon, etc receiving favorable terms on oil field leases from the new Russian government under the guise of "reconstruction". Rinse and repeat for other sectors.

You can look at what's happening in Libya for an example.

I believe Russian's action is a stop-loss, rather than a gain. War is costly, for anyone with any reason, it would be a bad decision. To Putin it is just not a worse decision, or a worst decision. Probably he was worried that he is going to lose more. I don't understand the rational beyond Eastern Ukraine.

China wins in all cases; everybody else is a loser.

China has already lost from this conflict. Before Ukraine there was a widely accepted view in the west that China wanted terroritories such as Taiwan and that Western democracies were too fractured to oppose it. The Russian conflict has directly shown that's not the case and that western democracies will put themselves through significant hardship to oppose strategic aggression. It was possible that China could have pushed its agenda slowly and acheived its objectives, but it's probably a decade further away from that now thanks to Russia, and the west is pretty much in agreement it needs to find ways to move away from dependence on the East for essential goods like semiconductors (which tbf, was starting to happen before this). It's also shown that Chinese officials will personally be foregoing all their western luxuries if this happens. In return for this, it's got a sclerotic ally in the form of Russia begging for MREs and selling cheap oil.

If you want to look at winners from this, look at Trump impotently shouting about Germany's defense budget, and then look at Germany's new commitments to spending. This aligned NATO in an unprecendented way.

Both Ukraine and Russia have reasonable friendship with China, China benefits more from a stable relationship between Ukraine and Russia. Who is losing in this? Ukraine, and Russia. Don't forget Europe, it needs to spend more money in military and higher price in energy. Who is winning? The only U.S. and A. The US has been pushing Europe to expand their military spending, and Europe is depending on US even more, meaning a lot more weapon sales in coming years; Russia's power is declining; US will benefit as an energy exporter as well.

For China it is all bad news, except the SWIFT sanction on Russia will show to other players, and the future trade currency could be more diverse, China can lower the risk of being sanctioned by the US.

Gain is relative. I’m certain that Putin sees all the western cultural influence (branding, company presence, movies, media etc.) of the 90’s and 00’s as unnecessary for the purity of the Russian empire. So if anything these companies backing out are a sort of gain for his power structures. I somehow too agree that there will be gain from this conflict for Russia - it just might not be what we all expect.

> The company has also decided to sell all of its assets in Russia following its annual meeting of shareholders.

How this is even possible? Isn't by definition impossible to remove money for non-essential uses from embargoed countries?

What sanctions are you referring to? Danish ones?

What is their benefit to doing this? Do they just not ship there anymore, and this announcement is a PR move? Certainly they aren't sacrificing profit just to seem ethical. If they were worried about ethics they'd be concerned about the place of global shipping in the progression of global warming.

According to Wikipedia, in 2017, Maersk was a victim of a major cyberattack, intended to look like ransomware, but actually a GRU attack intended for Ukraine, and it nearly ruined the company.

It may have been widely reported, but I didn't recall.

>If they were worried about ethics they'd be concerned about the place of global shipping in the progression of global warming.

I don't understand. Aren't ships pretty much the least carbon intensive way of moving stuff, per pound, per mile? Haven't they always been the most energy efficient means of transportation? Is it just a coincidence most cities are on coasts where they're vulnerable to sea level rise?

Shipping to a warzone costs more and in some cases things start to get uninsurable and the crews don't want to go there etc.

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