A rating assessment of the condition of the Urals’ agro-industrial complex: Key problems and potential growth points

In recent years, despite mounting external challenges – from the general problems affecting global agriculture and the deteriorating situation on food markets to the intensifying "first global food war" – Russia's agro-industrial complex has been turning into a backbone sector of the national economy. It can now be viewed not only as a supplier of food and resources for many industries, but also as a developer and consumer of critical high-tech solutions and breakthrough technologies capable of mitigating many of today's global threats. The specific processes unfolding in the country's agro-industrial sector, however, are rarely scrutinized at the micro-level – that is, from the standpoint of individual agricultural and food-industry enterprises – largely because the work is so labor-intensive and primary data so difficult to collect. This work is one of the first attempts to fill that gap, using a sample of 585 enterprises from the agro-industrial complex of the Urals, spanning seven federal subjects: the Republic of Bashkortostan; the Chelyabinsk, Orenburg, and Kurgan regions; and three regions of the Non-Black Earth Zone – the Udmurt Republic, the Perm Territory, and the Sverdlovsk Region. As far back as 2000, this macro-region ranked second among the country's 11 economic regions in gross agricultural output (14.07%) and produced nearly one-tenth of the Russian Federation's food (8.78%), yet over the following quarter-century it has lost some ground in that hierarchy (down to 10.81% and 7.13% in 2024, respectively). The main methodological tool is a first-ever ranking of the enterprises of the Ural agro-industrial complex, based on open data from the "Professional Market and Company Analysis System". For each year from 2018 to 2024, seven rankings were compiled: the Top-400 Leaders of the Ural agro-industrial complex by sales revenue; the Top-100 Leaders in agriculture; the Top-100 Leaders in the food industry (by sales volume); the Top-100 Leaders by net profit; the Top-100 Leaders by profitability; a ranking of problem zones (the 50 agricultural and food-industry enterprises with the largest net loss from business operations at year-end); and the Top-100 Leaders by labor productivity. In line with the study's objectives, the paper identifies the key risk-prone problem areas and possible growth points for the Ural agro-industrial business. Given its focus on the period 2018–2024, the discussion is prefaced by a brief characterization of the key global challenges currently affecting the world agrarian sector and of the main outcomes of the repositioning of agriculture in the modern Russian economy. The findings can be used by practitioners when preparing specific decisions to refine the "road map" for the further development of the country's agro-industrial complex and of the Urals in particular.