Oligarchs and the CFA: can those born to crawl fly?

The fashionable glass bead game of digital financial assets, which was started by some oligarchs squeezed by sanctions, did not work out for everyone. Four out of five companies whose main activity is issuing and conducting transactions with digital financial assets, turned out to be unprofitable by the end of 2023. The only operator that showed a profit was Lighthouse. The company earned 214.7 million rubles with revenues of 314.6 million rubles and expenses of 90.6 million rubles. Lighthouse explained its success by the creation of an ecosystem including lending, factoring, bank guarantees and deposits.

However, there is another explanation for this. Iskandar Makhmudov and Andrey Bokarev caught the spirit of the times back in 2020, when Transmashholding, which they controlled, invested in Lighthouse, on the basis of which TMH transformed the work of its treasury. Corporate financing has completely moved to the online format, it has become possible to receive real-time quotes from different banks for each tranche and choose the best rates. The Makhmudov/Bokarev project was initially tailored to specific business tasks, which it solved, which is why it took off with such a positive financial result.

It would seem that here is the "digital Klondike" - just keep up with the bucks. But not everyone succeeds. Atomize, a company part of Potanin’s Interros, demonstrated the largest losses among its market colleagues in 2023 - 428.9 million rubles. The main reason for such results was the high operating costs of issuing digital financial assets, which amounted to 640 million rubles, with a total income of 110.4 million rubles.

But now it is clear why Potanin fired the previous CEO of his digital financial assets operator Ekaterina Frolovicheva, who, together with her colleagues, was having fun with, as it turned out, unprofitable projects to sell digital financial assets to Norilsk Nickel employees or a token collaboration with the Hermitage. However, questions about the company’s unprofitability should be addressed not so much to the management as to the shareholder, who, counting on a quick and abundant cash flow, as he is used to, either set the wrong strategic priorities or simply did not delve into the topic. Once again on the question of whether the raw materials oligarchs who formed in the 90s can give birth to something worthwhile and effective in another business. Makhmudov and Bokarev seem to have succeeded.