By Diana Mandia
(Reuters) – French food company Bonduelle’s frozen vegetables site in Russia’s Belgorod region was hit by attacks earlier this month, the group said on Monday, adding there had been no casualties among employees.
“The bombing raids at the beginning of June in the Belgorod region on the Russian-Ukrainian border hit our Shebekino industrial site,” a spokesperson for the group told Reuters. There were no casualties among employees and the damage was limited.
Bonduelle had halted production at the Shebekino plant, about 7 km (4 miles) from the Ukrainian border, in the autumn for security reasons.
The French group said it had decided to temporarily subcontract a very minor part of its activities at the site “to be able to pack existing vegetable stocks and avoid any wastage” without further elaborating.
The site was not at risk of expropriation by the Kremlin, Bonduelle said, a scenario that is increasingly worrying analysts.
Bonduelle has been operating in the top growing regions of Ukraine and Russia since the 1990s. Its two other Russian plants are in Timashyovsk and Novotitarovskaya, in the Krasnodar region near the Black Sea.
“We believe that the Russian business is the group’s most profitable, and an exit would clearly be catastrophic for the group,” Mid Cap’s analyst Florent Thy-Tine said in a note to clients last week.
Before the war, revenue in Russia and in peripheral countries accounted for around 150 million euros ($165 million) or 5% of Bonduelle’s total revenue.
A statement on the company’s website says it has suspended all investment projects in Russia since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, and had decided to dedicate all of its profits from sales in Russia to the future reconstruction of Ukraine. ($1 = 0.9159 euros)
(Reporting by Diana Mandiá; Editing by Alison Williams, Kirsti Knolle and Alex Richardson)
