NH companies with ties to Ukraine or Russia put business aside as brutal invasion rages

Austria-based Fischer Sports GmbH — whose U.S. headquarters are in Auburn, NH — doesn’t want to discuss the more than 1,000 employees who work at its factory in Mukachevo, Ukraine — a factory that supplies 60 percent of the multinational company’s ski equipment.

“Our first priority is our employees there. We are trying to keep everything close,” said Ryan Dee, the customer service manager at Fischer’s New Hampshire office. He would not say anything more on the subject, referring a reporter’s inquiry to the company’s marketing director, who did not return phone calls by deadline.

It may be that the company doesn’t want to draw attention to the ski factory, the largest of its kind in Europe.

The factory, which also produces snowboards and ice hockey sticks, covers 20 acres in the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine, not too far from the Hungary and Polish borders. It employed as many as 1,200 people, more than half of Fischer’s worldwide workforce of 2,000. Most of the others are located in Austria. In Auburn, it employs about a dozen people.

The reason we know such details about a privately held company was that in October 2020, a fire destroyed nearly half the plant, which has been around since the 1940s and entered Fischer’s hands in 1985, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fischer rebuilt the plant in 2021.

Today, the fear is that the facility will come under fire, though thus far much of the western part of the country has been spared. Indeed, some journalists seem to have fled to Mukachevo, since that’s from where many dispatches are now written.

But while the factory hasn’t been attacked — at least as of March 21 — it is possible, even likely, that war has already disrupted things. Trains are being commandeered for refugees and troops, Fischer workers volunteering for the war effort or starting to flee the country.

Ski equipment is Ukraine’s biggest export to New Hampshire. Last year, the country shipped some $8 million worth of the equipment to the Granite State — nearly all the amount that came into the U.S. from that country, although there is another ski manufacturer with operations in Lebanon that is rumored to sell equipment made in Ukraine. It did not respond to inquiries.

Emotional impact

This is not a story about how important Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine impacts the New Hampshire economy, either via the embargo of the former or the devastation experienced by the latter. In fact, it doesn’t, at least not directly — aside for a few companies like Fischer.

Russia is ranked 32nd when it comes to exports to New Hampshire — about $29 million worth in 2021, according to U.S. Department of Commerce statistics. Ukraine, with $9.4 million in exports comes in at 52nd. Combined, they account for less than half a percent of the state’s imports. In fact, New Hampshire imports more from Estonia than from either of them.

The same goes for exports from New Hampshire. The state sent some $12.3 million in goods to Russia last year, No. 40 on the list of nations receiving products made in the Granite State. Ukraine bought $9.2 million of the state’s goods, even after a high-profile trade mission that then-governor John Lynch led there in 2005. Both account for a little more than a half of percent of New Hampshire exports. The state sold nearly twice as much to Romania than to both combined.

“The world does business in China, and then Europe, not Russia,” said Howard Brodsky, co-founder, chair and co-CEO of CCA Global Partners. Brodsky’s connections to the conflict, like so many other business owners, is more personal than financial.

His father escaped from Ukraine shortly after the Russian Revolution, in a dangerous year-and-a-half journey.

The NH Manufacturing Extension Partnership conducted a quick, anonymous email survey after the war began, and out of 16 initial responses, only one had any direct business with either country, and it was Ukraine.

The financial impacts are in general terms — rising prices and supply difficulties — that can’t be pinned on the conflict alone. The responses were more emotional than economic: “Staff is anxious, worried, and uncertain about the state of the world,” wrote one business leader.

“We have one employee who is from Belarus and has family in both Ukraine and in Russia. It’s been very stressful for her,” wrote another.

A couple of survey participants agreed to talk to NH Business Review.

Hollis Line Machine Co. in Milford has a minor economic connection. It bought some Russian large-diameter aluminum round bars that were the perfect size for a classified military project for the U.S. government. But the purchase came through a New Jersey company who imported it.

“They didn’t like buying material for such purposes from Russia,” said John Siergiewicz, president of the firm. He still has a couple of the rounds, but the project has concluded, so the question is now moot.

GreenSource Fabrication, a metal shop in Charlestown, has no such connection but ultimately, said strategic account manager James Brown, “a war like this affects everyone in the world. Look at the rising price of oil. There is a ripple effect.”

When it comes to Russian imports to New Hampshire, the main product is not oil but lumber. The U.S. as a whole is not dependent on Russian oil. Only 3 percent of the oil imported into the U.S. comes from Russia, and a third goes out west, mostly crude.

According to U.S. Commerce figures, no Russian oil was shipped into the state in 2021, though Russia, along with Canada and the Virgin Islands, were the three largest sources of oil for Portsmouth’s Sprague Operating Resources — at least they were in 2013, the last time the publicly traded company reported such information. That oil doesn’t enter the United States at Portsmouth Harbor but in the Mid-Atlantic region of the Gulf Coast, according to that filing.

“The origin of the fuel prior to entering the harbor or the refineries is unknown to us,” said spokesperson Shana Hoch, who said the old figures came from a government agency.

Last year, New Hampshire imported $24.7 million in lumber from Russia, mainly soft lumber like pine that is used in construction.

This was news to both the NH Timberland Owners Association and the New Hampshire chapter of the Northeast Retail Lumber Association. If there were Russian lumber coming in, it’s probably brought in by a wholesaler and shipped out to the rest of the country to builders and various building suppliers, they said. Several suspected that a Nashua company might be the buyer, but managers there also didn’t respond to inquiries. Businesses are apparently very skittish these days about talking about their economic ties to Russia.

When it comes to New Hampshire’s exports to the two countries, things are even more mysterious. It turns out that printed matter is the state’s biggest export to both countries: $3.5 million worth to Russia and $8.7 million to Ukraine. Books? Pamphlets? Brochures? NH Business Review could not track down the exporter and find out what was being sent.

A distant second in New Hampshire exports to Ukraine in 2021 was sports hunting target-shooting rifles ($201,052), and in January 2022 (the latest month available) the lead exports were revolvers and pistols.

Ties to Russia

As for Russia’s next biggest exports to New Hampshire, last year they were parts and accessories for use with machine tools ($3.6 million), composite diagnostic lab reagents ($940,000) and parts for machinery for making fibrous cellulose ($907,000).

The latter category might be related to a joint venture of Albany International, a publicly traded company out of Rochester. Its financial filings revealed its Swedish subsidiary, which merged with Albany in 2015, set up the venture with a Russian company to gain a manufacturing presence in Russia in the company’s core paper machine clothing business.

The Russian company, Nevo-Loth Ltd. in St. Petersburg, makes consumable belts used in the papermaking process. The company only involves “a handful of employees” and is “immaterial in all respects to the company,” said spokesman John Hobbs. “Immaterial” doesn’t mean Albany doesn’t care about it. It is a legal term that means that it won’t have a significant effect on profits and net earnings.

In any case, in response to the invasion and the sanctions, “we are in the process of determining how to sever our relationship with them,” Hobbs said. He would not go into details, but with Russia threatening to seize the assets of companies pulling out, it’s not hard to fathom the difficulties of an abrupt withdrawal.

There are a number of other companies with ties to the Granite State that are in the same predicament.

Several national companies — none based in New Hampshire but with New Hampshire presences — are on a list of about 400 companies trying to disentangle themselves from Russia. The list is updated daily by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale University professor, who said he was frankly trying to embarrass companies that were not pulling out, like the Subway sandwich chain, which has 446 Russia franchise locations.

The companies that say they’re suspending operations in Russia, according to Sonnenfeld, include:

• Thermo Fisher Scientific, a Massachusetts company that grew out of a merger with Fisher Scientific of Hampton. Thermo currently has facilities in Portsmouth and Newington, and said it plans to suspend some manufacturing in Russia but not all.

• Autodesk, a California company with a facility in Manchester.

• Timken, an Ohio company that has two joint ventures in Russia to service that market. Timken has operations in Keene and Lebanon.

• Austin, Texas-based Oracle, which has a Nashua facility.

• Anheuser-Busch, based in St. Louis with a brewery in Merrimack, said it would suspend all shipments to Russia. The company, however, has a Russian subsidiary with five breweries in that country.

• A German conglomerate, Freudenberg Group, with facilities in Bristol, Manchester and Northfield, also has companies in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Nizhniy Novgorod. It announced it would end all trading activities in and out of Russia and Belarus. It also said it was donating $3.25 million to help Ukraine.

NH Business Review also found a few companies that weren’t on Sonnenfeld’s list, at least as of March 21:

• Smiths Medical, which runs a medical supply facility in Keene, also has a facility in Moscow.

• Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, with a facility in Merrimack, has a plant near Moscow.

• Teledyne FLIR, a California company, has a facility in Hudson (the former Teledyne) and Nashua (the former FLIR) and two in Moscow.

• Hutchinson, a French company with a facility in Newfields, has a liquid natural gas production plant in Siberia.

Bob Sanders can be reached at bsanders@nhbr.com.

When it comes to Russian imports to New Hampshire, the main product is not oil but lumber. The U.S. is not dependent on Russian oil.