Where to find a Russian company's financial statements

A Russian issuer's financial statements sit in several places at once, and they are not interchangeable: the investor section of the company's website gives the primary source with its appendices and breakdowns; the corporate information disclosure centre holds the legally required publication with a fixed date; the Federal Tax Service's state information resource for accounting statements provides the RAS (Russian Accounting Standards) accounts of any legal entity, including non-public subsidiaries; the industry regulator publishes forms that exist nowhere else. The platform brings together figures that have already been processed — the earnings feed and the events calendar. The choice of source is determined not by convenience but by exactly which question you are asking.

First decide which statements you are looking for

Half of all failed searches are searches for the wrong document. A Russian public company lives in different accounting frameworks at the same time, and the figures in them diverge legitimately.

RAS statements are the accounts of a specific legal entity. For a holding company this is often an empty shell that receives the dividends of its subsidiaries, and the revenue shown there has nothing to do with the group's business. IFRS means consolidated financial statements, that is, the whole perimeter of the group, with intra-group turnover eliminated. When you calculate a valuation multiple, you almost always need the second document, not the first.

Next comes frequency. The annual report is audited, while an interim report undergoes a review or is not checked at all, and that is a different level of assurance in the same lines: interim reporting. Finally, if the question is "what does the company make its money on", look not for the report as a whole but for a specific note: segment reporting discloses the breakdown by business line and geography, and it is usually what breaks a naive valuation of the business as a monolith.

The issuer's website: the primary source and what sits next to it

The "Shareholders and Investors" section is the only place where the report is accompanied by all the supporting material: the notes, tables in machine-readable format, the management presentation, the recording of the analyst call, the operating results for the period. The notes matter more than the statements themselves: the debt structure, covenant terms, off-balance-sheet liabilities, related parties — all of this lives at the end of the document, where the reader usually does not get to.

The disclosure centre: a mandatory publication with a date

The corporate information disclosure centre is not an alternative to the website but a different mechanism. Publication there is required by law and carries a timestamp, and it is also where material facts, notices of board of directors' decisions and of the convening of a shareholders' meeting are kept. The practical point: when you need to understand at what moment the market learned the news and whether you were too late for the record date, the dispute is settled by the disclosure feed, not by the date of the file on the company's website.

GIR BO: the statements of a legal entity that is not traded

The Federal Tax Service's resource provides the accounting statements of practically any Russian organisation. For an investor this is a way around a closed door: if a group discloses little but its operating subsidiaries file RAS accounts, the picture can be assembled from the bottom up. Guarantors of bond issues are checked in the same way — the issuer of the security and the company that carries the real assets on its balance sheet are quite often different entities. This becomes noticeable when you look at the list of issues not by brand name but by issuer.

Industry sources

Banks, insurers and non-state pension funds disclose forms under the requirements of the Bank of Russia — they show things that are absent from IFRS: the portfolio structure, loan quality, capital adequacy ratios. For financial companies this is the main source, not a supplement.

When disclosure is restricted

Since 2022 some Russian issuers have been using the right not to disclose the full scope of information: individual notes disappear, as does the shareholder structure and, sometimes, entire periods. There is no universal workaround, and it is more honest to admit it. The partial substitutes that do work are the RAS accounts of subsidiaries, industry statistics, regulator data and operating releases. A picture reconstructed this way remains an estimate, and it should be treated accordingly.

The working procedure

Step 1 — determine exactly what you are looking for: the group or the legal entity, the annual document or the interim. Step 2 — take the primary source from the issuer's website and open the notes straight away. Step 3 — check the publication date against the disclosure feed, so that you understand whether the news has already been priced in. Step 4 — read the segment breakdown before calculating anything. Step 5 — compare what you have with the market price: the {{instrument:SBER}} card and the 3,77 indicator on the platform are calculated from the latest available statements, and a discrepancy with your own calculation is a signal that you were looking at different documents.

Where to go next

If you need financial statements as an input to stock selection rather than as an end in itself, it is more useful to start with a filter than with reading: on the screener as a tool. The dates of upcoming publications and meetings are in the events calendar, payouts are in the dividend calendar, {{dividend_calendar|limit=5}}. Unfamiliar terms from the notes are explained in the glossary.