Resumo

The Russia-Ukraine War has had and will still have negative economic consequences worldwide. In Brazilian stock market one of the sectors most vulnerable to macroeconomic variations is cyclical consumption, whose revenues are directly affected in periods of economic recession or expansion, since turnover varies with the level of consumer income in the short term. Another group of consumer goods is the non-cyclical consumption, considered more essential, which may be less impacted by macroeconomic variations, as they do not suffer the effect of income elasticity.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February, 24th, 2022, Brazilian economy and its companies have had some impacts. In that sense, this paper aims to analyse the effects of the Russian-Ukrainian war on the return and profitability of companies in the cyclical and non-cyclical sectors, in the period between January 2022 and June 2022. To this end, the research question centres on the assessment of the intensity of the impacts of the war on the return and profitability of Brazilian publicly traded companies, in cyclical and non-cyclical sectors, before and after the beginning of the conflict.

The impacts of the Russian-Ukrainian War have negative relationship with the performance of world stock market, with a greater impact from the moment of the invasion. The stock markets of countries geographically close to the conflict were more affected by the war. Globally, the war is expected to have effects specifically on inflation, due to increased uncertainty and risks of severe adverse outcomes. Some of these effects have materialised, such as the contraction of the Russian and Ukrainian economies through the sanctions imposed on Russia.

This research has a descriptive and quantitative approach. The sample consisted of 63 cyclical consumer firms and 33 non-cyclical consumer firms, listed on B3, whose data were collected in the Refinitiv database and in the documents published in the websites of the companies. The collection period was between 1Q2022 and 2Q2022, considering the conflict that occurred at the end of February 2022 and the end of March 2022 as the period prior to the first effects felt by economies and companies worldwide. Companies belonging to the financial capital services sector were disregarded.

There were no significant differences between the average ROA of the sample firms before and after the start of the war. The conflict negatively impacted ROE of Brazilian companies, by reducing the profit in relation to the companies' equity. The profitability of Brazilian cyclical and non-cyclical consumption firms was not impacted by the war, except for the EBITDA Margins of non-cyclical consumption firms. This result reflects the literature that states that this type of company tends to maintain its demand even in adverse economic environments.

The results showed that the answer to the research question is, in relation to return, that there was no statistically significant impact on ROA, but there was on ROE for cyclical and non-cyclical consumer companies, which had decreases respectively of 1.0% and 1.8% between their averages before and after the beginning of the invasion. Regarding the profitability, the answer to the research question is that there was a significant impact only on the EBITDA Margin of non-cyclical consumption companies, with an average increase of 2.6%.

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