The management of agricultural machinery manufacturer Rostselmash has warned that part-time work will resume in 2026 due to falling market demand. "There will be periods next year when we'll work three or four days a week. I hope there won't be any long-term vacations," Rostselmash co-owner Konstantin Babkin told TASS. He added that the company's sales fell by 25% in 2025, forcing it to postpone annual vacations and cut production. The machine-building plant has laid off 2,000 employees.
Rostselmash, which produced 70% of Russia's agricultural machinery before the war with Ukraine, will reduce production by 30% year-on-year by 2025, to 2,700 combine harvesters and 800 tractors. Babkin previously stated that the Central Bank's high key interest rate and low farmer incomes prevented an increase in machinery production, while government support programs were failing to compensate for the loss of demand. Against this backdrop, Rostselmash decided to abandon long-term investments, specifically the construction of a hydrostatic transmission plant and the modernization of a precision casting plant, which had previously been planned to cost 17 billion rubles.
Rostselmash is one of the country's strategic enterprises and serves as a city-building plant for Rostov-on-Don. The company has 13 agricultural machinery manufacturing facilities, employing 15,000 people. Its product line comprises over 150 models. Rostselmash had previously implemented a reduced workforce in the fall of 2024. In early October of this year, Babkin announced that the workweek would be reduced to three days again, effective August.
In the summer, State Duma Deputy Speaker Victoria Abramchenko warned Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin of the threat of a complete shutdown of Rostselmash. She noted that nearly 3,000 unsold combine harvesters and tractors had accumulated in the company's warehouses, and production had fallen to its lowest level since 2006 due to a sharp decline in demand amid declining farmer incomes and expensive loans.
By the end of 2024, Rostselmash's net profit had plummeted by a factor of 2.4, from 16.2 billion to 6.9 billion rubles, while sales profit had fallen almost sevenfold, to 1.9 billion rubles. Babkin called this year "the worst in the last ten years" for both the industry and the company.
source: The Moscow Times https://archive.is/z3mH6
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And that’s why the unemployment figures seem so low in Russia. After all it was the soviet union which pushed workers protection laws through - they were one of the first countries wit a labor law code.
It’s very hard to fire people under Russian law. So you just send them to unpaid leave or half their hours and nobody gets unemployed.
With that in mind, one has to question what the really unemployment rate is. Right now it is reported that the country has basically full employment. If many workers are in essence furloughed, then less money is circulating and people have less money to pay debts. That seems like a time bomb.