Paul Goble
Staunton, Feb. 1 – The Irbit Motorcycle Factory, the only firm in Russia that had been manufacturing heavy-duty motorbikes, faced bankruptcy after sanctions were imposed on Russia in response to Putin’s expanded war in Ukraine. To try to survive, it shifted its operations from Sverdlovsk Oblast to Kazakhstan; but it was unable to recover its sales from there,
Then, the Horizontal Russia portal, which covers developments beyond Moscow’s ring road, reports that the IMF, despite its earlier “pride” in resisting what it saw as “the general ‘sinification’” of the market in Russia decided to move its manufacturing to China (semnasem.org/articles/2026/01/28/ural-pereehal-v-kitaj).
But despite its hopes, the IMF continued to suffer losses, at least in part, the portal says, because Russians who might have been interested in purchasing its products were reluctant to spend money on motorcycles bearing the name “Ural” that they knew had been produced not in Russia but in China.
Putin tried to help the firm out by giving an Alaska native a Ural motorbike when the Kremlin leader had his summit in Anchorage with US President Donald Trump. But that did little good for a company that in the past had sold many of its products to foreign countries and now can’t do so because of sanctions.
At least one reason the IMF has had problems in China is that its leaders as recently as 2016 celebrated the fact that their firm “had not given in to the general ‘sinification’” of industry in Russia east of the Urals and instead had held on in Russia to produce a Russian motorcycle in Russia, something they no longer do (irbit.info/business/imz/).
To have any chance of surviving, experts in the industry say, the IMF must produce first and foremost for the Chinese market and also come up with new models of lower costs if it hopes to recover any of its former position in the Russian one given that Russians can buy motorcycles from elsewhere rather than ones with Russian names but produced in China.
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