Best to not drink any soft drinks
Wouldn’t be bad for one’s health either.
Again: The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund still have active investments in Russia.
Where is the outrage for them?
According to this Norwegian publication in an article published January 31st 2023:
the Norwegian oil fund still holds hundreds of millions worth of shares in petroleum companies like Gazprom, Novatek, Bashneft and Lukoil
Even if the value of their investments lower, they still haven’t pulled out any from Russia. The investments could be worth very little, but they still have something invested in Russia.
Norwegian Government on February 28, 2022, ordered the Oil Fund to freeze all investments in Russia and prepare a plan for divesting with the goal of totally exiting the Russian stock market
What’s stopping them?
The value of their investments is lower because they’ve been pulling out of Russia. The article you sent says they’ve slashed the value down by 90%, and they’re still going. Liquidating hundreds of millions in stocks while getting a decent value out of them takes time, and so far they’ve done a pretty good job selling off 90% of their Russian holdings with just a few more millions to go
Let’s break down that January 31, 2023 article once more:
1: The investments in Moscow listed equities dropped from $2.7 billion to a mere $300 million.
It would be laughably naive to think this is purely because they’ve been ‘pulling out’ of Russia. By all means, review the article and let me know if it states the exact reason for the decrease in value.
2: By December 31, 2022, Norway still had shares in 51 Russian companies.
It’s September 2023. If they were aggressively pulling out, wouldn’t they have zero investments by now?
Nice try.
Timelines for individual retail investors are significantly shorter than timelines for multibillion dollar sovereign wealth funds with fiduciary obligations.
And yet all the investments, their value, and what percentage of ownership the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund possess are all publicly available on their website.
If I filter by ‘Russia’, they still show 51 companies. Today. Let’s look at their top five, which you can also view by accessing their own data.
Highest Percentage of Ownership:
- Lenta International Co PJSC: 2.25%
- Rosseti Centre PJSC: 2.69%
- Ufaorgsintez OAO: 0.99%
- Segezha Group PJSC: 1.16%
- Bank St Petersburg PJSC: 1.76%
Highest Amounts of Investment in NOK:
- Gazprom PJSC: 731,368,780
- LUKOIL PJSC: 536,571,485
- Sberbank of Russia PJSC: 523,299,961
- Novatek PJSC: 118,267,597
- Surgutneftegas PJSC: 76,130,966
^ these alone = ~$185,140,710 USD.
What fiduciary obligations does a pension fund have that is somehow more complex, important, and forgivable vs obligations belonging to Pepsi Co?
What fiduciary obligations does a pension fund have that is somehow more complex, important, and forgivable vs obligations belonging to Pepsi Co?
I largely agree with what your saying but this part is ridiculous. The Finnish parliament has no obligations to serve/sell Pepsi. It’s not an investment it was literally having the drink available. That’s not at all comparable to the fiduciary duty of a pension fund.
Sure, but now tell me how the richest pension fund in the world, currently valued in the trillions, has such fiduciary obligation that it can’t divest ~$300 million of Russian investments.
Make it make sense.
Did you miss the first few words I wrote?
I largely agree with what your saying
Making rapid economical changes in this scale will collapse companies and economies.
Who would collapse?
sugar drinks could be compramised over living in the freezing cold
How would the richest sovereign wealth fund in the world pulling out their investments from Russia bring about living in the freezing cold?
It isn’t as if Norway’s fund haven’t already said they would divest. It’s just that they haven’t taken any concrete action on what they promised for more than a year.
Why?
I mean, the US has been helping Saudi Arabia starve and destroy Yemen for eight years now. Aren’t we also a sponsor of war?
We’re a key part of the war machine. We are gears of war.
Gears of war only has 4 sequels…
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Anyone who works to maximize equality is a good guy and anyone who works to maximize inequality is a bad guy
Depends on how you want to maximize equality. Nazi Germany maximized it by eliminating everyone else lol. Probably not a good guy. :)
No they definitely had plans to leave some untermenschen alive as slaves. I wouldn’t call that maximizing equality
They’ve simply been promoted to living to serve the remainder of the population! (I’m just using the playbook from every movie for evil dictator justifications. Absolutely don’t think this at all btw. Big /s after these statements if it wasn’t clear. )
I’m not sure I follow your logic here. What equality was gained by the victims of the Holocaust?
The idea is that the Nazis tried to create in their perverse fucked up way technical equality by exterminating everyone else that didn’t conform to their vision and everyone else was equally removed from existence. Thus not all methods of getting to equality are valid or good and we should be careful about saying all methods of creating equality or mandating it are good.
The logic I don’t follow is how killing some people and not killing others is in any way an application of equality. They decided that the people they killed were unequal. Like, the logic of your individual points makes sense, but it’s the overall logic of your argument that I can’t follow.
I don’t think you know what the word specifically means.
I think my point is obvious enough to be understood without getting bogged down in the pedantry of equity vs equality, but if you want to start that discussion you are welcome to provide some definitions :)
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There have been plenty of times they were, though name any country with 200+ years of existence and I’ll show you how they aren’t the good guys either from certain points of view. Ask Africa how they feel about some of the perceived “good guys” in the EU
Doesn’t count since we’re the good guys.
“What about …”
The rallying cry for people who kinda just want to ignore what a piece of shit our country is. You are a well-behaved chickenhawk.
But what about me?
well, yes?
Those are the Good guys, Gods gift to humanity, they dictate what is moral and what ever harm they bring on others they are still righteous
Yes.
All the more reason to stay away from soda
… and chips (Frito-Lay).
What am I supposed to eat with my fish, then?
So what then, is the mercury not filling enough for you? Christ
Microplastics I guess. Or calamari/squid rings
And Doritos if my memory serves me well.
The title is incredibly hard to understand.
It’s not ideal.
Also:
- Don’t import Coke from Mexico–the anchor bottler also has a stake in Heineken (soup)
- Don’t drink Dr. Pepper until Mondelez quits Russia or DPS
Mondelez is way more than DP. Brands under Mondelez include
Cadbury
Grenade
Halls
Oreo
Among others:
Heineken recently sold all of their Russian assets
This is what I love about the free market. You can change the world by drinking the right sodas!
Just Mexico?
So European coke is okay?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Finnish parliament will no longer carry Pepsi products as the American soft drink giant continues to support the Russian economy by continuing its operations in the aggressor country, Finnish news outlet Yle reported on Sept. 5, citing the manager of the parliament’s restaurant.
Pepsi products that had already been received have been removed from the shelves.
Earlier, MP Tuomas Kettunen demanded that the parliament building stop selling Pepsi products.
Pepsi and Mars were added to the international sponsors of war list on Sept. 1 by Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NACP) for continuing to operate in Russia after the invasion and continuing to pay taxes to the aggressor state’s budget.
Earlier, the media reported that Mondelez, Mars, and PepsiCo recorded a significant increase in sales in Russia in 2022.
The original article contains 131 words, the summary contains 131 words. Saved 0%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Now this is nice
I have a genuine question that maybe somebody with more economic knowledge can educate me in:
How is continuing the sale in Russia helping Russia? As I understand Russia is gaining money on the sales taxes, etc. but the rest of the earnings will go to the US parent company, which cannot be taxed directly by Russia. If Pepsi backs out, wouldn’t operations just be replaced by a rebranded russian company, where all of the earnings would be under russian “sphere of influence”?
I genuinely do not understand why Pepsi backing out is considered bad for Russia. I thought countries generally prefer national companies over foreign ones.
Because Pepsi doesn’t just manifest out of nowhere in Russia. They are brining need for supplies, transportation, repair, maintenance etc.
In other words economic movement and income for the country.
Could some other fully Russian company take over the same thing? Maybe, but not without startup investment and knowledge. All of that isn’t free, and if an economy is unstable, no-one is going to commit money into it.
Maybe, but not without startup investment and knowledge. All of that isn’t free, and if an economy is unstable, no-one is going to commit money into it.
At least the knowledge is already there. Pepsi is not going to take the workers in Russia away with them. And as far as I know the investment is mostly the cost of buying the assets from the western company. For example the russian McDonalds branch just reopened with a new name at the same locations.
Not all the knowledge is there. Some ingredients are imported, in order to protect trade secrets and ensure global consistency.
After Russia took over McDonald’s, customers did notice a change in how the food tasted.
If they imported some ingredients before and then had to switch to local suppliers after the pullout … doesn’t this also benefit Russia, since now all of the production is national and they require less imports?
It is not like making food or soft drinks is really high tech. At worst, it is just going to taste a bit different if the ingredients are different. Or other, already local companies might gain market share.
That depends on if they can keep their customer base.
If your local McDonald’s left town and a place named Burgers-R-Us took its place, would the new restaurant sell as many burgers as the McDonalds did? I doubt it. McDonald’s devotes vast resources to build its brand and get customers into their restaurants. Smaller companies don’t have those resources.
Good point. Thanks for your insights.
Despite what people say, imports aren’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean it’s literally stuff that’s coming into a country that the people of that country now have. Having more stuff is good. Having less stuff is bad.
Trade means the people that can most efficiently produce a certain good in a country most efficiently do that while the people in your country who can most efficiently produce another kind of good do that. Russia having to produce all their goods locally is an economic inefficiency.
And yes, that economic inefficiency means more jobs for Russians. And that’s great! I want Russians to be working in jobs to supply their McDonald’s substitute instead of working on a factory line making tanks.
Yeah but how does that meaningfully impact their lives? If McDonalds ceased to exist here today, I might grumble a bit and then move on to some other fast food joint. And in Russia where people are already resigned to not having any say in the matter?
Not saying these companies shouldn’t pull out, they should. But unless it’s something fundamental (chip fabs, steel production, etc.) it won’t have that much impact. These luxury goods aren’t going to make any difference.
Let’s put it this way. There are about 250 McDonald’s in NYC. If they were all replaced by an Arby’s, there is no way they would be as profitable as the McDonalds were. Arby’s cannot match the brand or advertising power of McDonald’s.
NYC does not want 250 Arby’s, and consequently some - probably most - of the Arby’s would close. That certainly would change the lives of those employees.
So, do Russians want Tasty-and-that’s-all as much as they wanted McDonald’s? I doubt it.
Could some other fully Russian company take over the same thing?
That’s how Fanta became a thing after Coca Cola withdrew from Germany in WWII.
Using that example, yeah there’s an economic cost to doing that. They may not be able to get the ingredients they could get before and would have to do some work in coming up with a new recipe with the ingredients they have available. Figure out supply chains for the new ingredients, all that kind of thing.
Also consider what happened with Fanta after the war. Coca Cola returned to Germany and resumed ownership of their bottling plants. “Oh people actually like this Fanta thing you came up with while we were gone? Yeah that’s cool… we own that now.”
How much is someone going to invest in a company that is operating in a bottling plant owned by Pepsi, who may return and take it all over again after Putin is gone?
Your question is basically “why are embargoes effective”
Collectively shunning an economy cripples it, and it’s most effective when widely adopted.
Pepsi should be ashamed of their actions.
My question was more specific than that. I absolutely understand why it is important to sanction high-tech products and stop Russia from exporting their goods.
But western companies selling non-critical goods inside Russia felt more like russian economic dependancy to western companies to me, which (for me as a layman when it comes to economy) seemed preferable to Russia having an independent economy. Thats where my question came from.
Now I realized that rather than “dependant economy” or “independant economy” the intended goal in this case is “no economy”, although i am doubtful whether that will really work.
Because Russia companies can’t make Pepsi products, they just don’t have the supply chain to get the flavor right. They can, and do make similar products already, it’s just Mountain Dew is way better than off brand Mountain Dew. If the Russian consumers wanted that, they would have been buying it already.
I for one would never drink a cola that is not coca cola. Soda is a luxury, and in my opinion no other cola has the flavor profile to be worth the calories. Some people feel the same way about Pepsi, and a massive amount of people feel that way about Mountain Dew and other Pepsi products.
How’s that been working for Russia? Hasn’t their manufacturing PMI been shooting up? Isn’t inflation actually higher than desired because their economy is red hot?
Lol.
No.
The rubble has fallen to the value of approximately one penny.
That’s the cause of their inflation: because their currency is worthless.
You’re right, it doesn’t matter.
A sanctioning country can get good results from doing its thing to a sanctioned country when the stuff being sanctioned is important to their development. That’s why the us wants to keep 5g chips out of chinas hands.
E: touching finger to ear I’m receiving reports this did not work at all.
A set of sanctions doesn’t matter when the thing that’s being kept out of the sanctioned country’s hands isn’t important. So naturally when in a war no one cares about specific brands of soda or fast food. Pepsi executives saw what happened to McDonald’s and stayed in.
People will say things like “it hurts their economy” and “it makes the people unhappy”. The American experience of war is so completely different than almost every other nationality that they think that makes sense, and the American experience of a war economy is so far beyond the cultural memory that it only reenforces the idea that specific brands of soda matter in wartime.
So basically you’re right, what Pepsi does doesn’t matter. But if we as consumers of Pepsi outside the conflict wished it had a better policy, one that put its weight on the scale to end the fighting, we should wish for it to stop supplying both nations and perhaps even any nation directly supporting either one.
Turns out, keeping 5G chips out of China’s hands didn’t work out too well. Do people just happen to forget that Huawei isn’t exactly some young naive kid in the telecommunications space?
The whole thing was bait to get the most advanced Chinese companies to make the chips they’d otherwise have gotten from tsmc so they could be sanctioned by the west directly and lose their lucrative western contracts.
Jokes on America though, between china throwing state money at contracts to create internal production and brics+ picking up the slack it’s gonna be just fine for em.
Tfw u sink semiconductor reshoring before it even gets off the ground.
Huawei was already sanctioned to shit, though… And a lot of the other big consumer tech companies are technically headquartered in Taiwan.
So what sodas CAN I drink?
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Soda is bad for you. Have some tea or water.
How is no-sugar soda bad for me?
A lot of the artificial sweetners have their own issues.
Like what?
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What carcinogens, in what sweeteners?
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Specifically what?
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Contrary to poplular belief, sugar and fat are not the only unhealthy food components used, and the rest of what they put in sodas isn’t pretty.
Like what?
IDK, I guess you could get a soda stream /s
Owned by Pepsi…
And made in Israel
Double whammy
Legit strat
Maybe Im dense but why does the Finnish government carry a soda anyway?
Because the building has a staff cafeteria and a restaurant, as one would expect from an office space of that size.
At least here in the Finnish defense forces all conscripts can buy Pepsi from soda machines. Iirc some government events/buildings have had Pepsi too
Didn’t you see that commercial? They’re the number one way to stop wars.
Well, civil wars between citizens and cops.
Pepsi is better than tear gas at least.
Damn, maybe Kendall Jenner could have stopped Putin
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This is almost as dumb as Freedom Fries.
French Fries is a word. You can’t boycott a word which is why Freedom Fries is dumb.
Pepsi is a corporation. You can boycott a corporation and boycotts can influence the decisions that corporation makes.
That’s why I consider it to be slightly less dumb.
It’s not dumb at all to boycott a corporation that’s doing something wrong.
It’s just the corporations that tell you it’s dumb because they want to continue to do terrible things without it affecting their profits.
It’s dumb because it’s pointless political theater. I mean how much Pepsi does the Finnish parliament actually drink?
In a boycott, it’s not the effect of one individual that matters it’s the collective effect of millions of people that can have an effect. To accomplish there needs to be awareness of the boycott.
Right now we’re discussing the boycott of Pepsi products, so they’ve successfully raised awareness. Which is the point of doing it.
Per your “argument”, every single individual and entity boycotting a corporation is dumb, yet when they add up to millions of single individuals and entitities doing it it’s not dumb.
Unless you have some magical way of getting millions of people and entities all over the World to all start doing something at the same time with full commitment, it’s always going to take individual people and entities boycotting things (something you think is dumb) to eventually add up to millions of them doing it (which is you don’t think is dumb anymore).
In other words, either you mentally live in Narnia or some similar La-La-Land of magical thinking, or your “argument” is senseless and is really just an excuse to do nothing.
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In other words, either you mentally live in Narnia or some similar La-La-Land of magical thinking, or your “argument” is senseless and is really just an excuse to do nothing.
There’s a conversation killer.
I’m pretty sure that was your first comment.
Is freedom fries a real thing? I always thought it was a joke, but I’m not American.
Yes. In 2003 The US Congress changed the wording of its cafeteria menu because France opposed the invasion of Iraq.
This international sponsors of war thing really should only apply to companies based in countries that have sanctioned Russia - if you’re not operating against sanctions, the onus isn’t with the company (which could be sued for contract violations) but with the government for not placing sanctions.
They have a duty to try and maximize the return on investment for their stakeholders. Dumping all of their stock on the market at once would crater the value of those holdings. In the end the only people who would benefit would be those who picked up that stock cheap (probably the Russian Oligarchy). It would also greatly harm the Sovereign fund due to the losses incurred.
Selling off holdings slowly to try and minimize losses for the sovereign fund is the logical move.
It used to be that Coca-Cola and Pepsi divided the sides in the Middle East between them (one sold their product in Israel, and was banned in much of the Arab world, which the other took). Now history may be repeating itself with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
