Putin humiliated as Russia’s only TV company goes bankrupt – £38.3m in debt | World | News
Vladimir Putin has been dealt yet another major blow as Russia’s only domestic television manufacturer has been declared bankrupt. Consumer electronics retailer DNS filed a bankruptcy petition against the manufacturer, Kvant, last June over an unpaid debt of more than 654 million rubles (£6million).
DNS owns the in-house TV and electronics brand Irbis, which Kvant stopped producing last year due to high costs and low demand. Following DNS’s initial petition, 24 additional creditors joined the bankruptcy proceedings against Kvant, the only Russian TV maker registered with the country’s Ministry of Industry and Trade. Court-approved claims have pushed Kvant’s total debt load to 4.15 billion rubles (£38million), with Sberbank and Yandex listed among its largest creditors.
Founded in 2016 in the Moscow suburb of Zelenograd, Kvant saw its business model unravel in 2024 when Chinese suppliers TCL and Xiaomi halted shipments of components to the Russian plant to avoid secondary sanctions, according to the independent news site, The Moscow Times.
Kvant’s revenue plummeted from 13.1 billion rubles (£120million) in 2023 to 4.9 billion rubles (£45million) in 2024.
Last year, revenues collapsed to just 45 million rubles (£412,000), leaving the company with a net loss of 387 million rubles (£3.5million) and tens of millions of rubles in unpaid wages owed to workers.
In recent weeks, Russia has been facing an intensified Ukrainian long-range drone strategy against Russian infrastructure, heavily targeting logistics warehouses belonging to Russia’s largest online retailer, Wildberries. Recent strikes have hit facilities across multiple regions, killing at least nine people in Russia.
Ukraine‘s targeting of energy infrastructure has led to a severe domestic fuel crisis in Russia. Estimates indicate that Ukrainian strikes have knocked offline between 20% and 40% of Russia’s oil refining capacity, with dozens of major refineries – including key facilities in Ryazan, Volgograd, Saratov and the Omsk refinery (one of Russia’s largest top producers) – having been hit.
Over two-thirds of Russia’s regions have reported disruptions to gas and diesel supplies. The occupied Crimean peninsula has been hit particularly hard, with state-of-emergency protocols, strict limits on petrol sales – down to 20 litres or full temporary bans for ordinary consumers – soaring prices and rolling blackouts. Elsewhere, long queues, fights at the pumps, and crowdsourced fuel-tracking apps have become common.
