These 15 Stocks And 10 Funds Are Overexposed To Russia And Ukraine

Stock markets worldwide have been seeing red since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last week, and American and European companies that have a significant presence in Russia have been hit particularly hard.

The S&P 500 Index is down 4.6% since the start of February as Russia escalated the conflict. But that is nothing compared to Newtown, PA’s EPAM Systems, a software development and consulting firm that crashed 45.6% on Monday after withdrawing its 2022 financial outlook. It was the S&P 500 index’s biggest loser for the month.

Founder and CEO Arkadiy Dobkin, a Belarusian immigrant, started the company in Princeton, NJ in 1993 and later moved its headquarters to Pennsylvania, but maintained deep roots in Eastern Europe. EPAM disclosed in its annual report Friday night that about 14,000 of its 58,824 employees at the end of 2021 were in Ukraine, plus another 18,350 delivery professionals in Russia and Belarus.

“EPAM’s highest priority is the safety and security of its employees and their families in Ukraine,” the software firm said in a statement Monday. “The company is proactively working to relocate its employees to lower risk locations in Ukraine and neighboring countries.”

Across the Atlantic Ocean, Dutch telecom company Veon has crashed more than 70% in the last month, with its market cap falling to less than $1 billion. Veon’s Beeline network in Russia generates half of the firm’s $7.8 billion in annual sales, and its largest shareholder, billionaire Mikhail Fridman, resigned from its board after he was one of 26 oligarchs sanctioned by the European Union on Monday.

Several well-known companies are also feeling pain from the war on Ukraine. French automaker Renault owns a majority stake in Russia’s Avtovaz and sold 482,000 cars in Russia in 2021, second only to its home nation of France. Citigroup disclosed in its annual report Monday that it has nearly $10 billion in exposures to Russian counterparties, including loans, reverse repo agreements and cash deposits. Its shares sank 5.5% since Monday’s filing and are down 10% since the beginning of February.

Booking Holdings stock is also down 23% in the last two weeks as the European Union closed its airspace to Russian planes and Russia returned the favor, though CFO David Goulden tried to ease concerns on its earnings call last week by saying Russia and Ukraine “represent a very low single-digit percentage of our total gross bookings” as destinations.

Those companies and more are on this list of 15 stocks with exposure to Russia.

Most of those declines pale in comparison to the crash in Russian stocks. The Moscow Stock Exchange closed Monday as the ruble fell as much as 30% against the U.S. dollar, but U.S. ETFs that hold Russian stocks are still tumbling. The VanEck Russia ETF and Blackrock’s iShares MSCI Russia ETF are both down between 65% and 70% in the last two weeks.

Those are the two largest Russia-only ETFs in the U.S., but plenty of emerging markets funds for U.S. investors with disproportionate exposure to Russian stocks have also declined sharply. Many likely trimmed their Russian positions since their most recent disclosures to numb the severity of the impact on their portfolios, but all have lagged U.S. markets. Here are some of the victims.