What a foreign company actually does when a country goes into crisis

This is a working checklist rather than an analysis. It was written during one crisis and has been used in several since, and the order of the items is the most important thing about it.

First: people

Account for every member of staff and every dependent you have an obligation toward. Establish a single communication channel that does not depend on office infrastructure and confirm that everyone can reach it.

Decide the relocation position early and communicate it clearly, including what the company will and will not pay for. Ambiguity here damages trust permanently, and staff will make their own decisions in its absence.

Do not make an announcement about the business until the people question is settled. Everyone in the organisation is listening for that answer first.

Second: cash

Establish what you can access, where, and in what currency. Confirm your banking channels are functioning — correspondent relationships, card acquiring, payroll.

Move working capital out of any single point of failure. Hold enough liquidity outside the country to run the operation for a defined period without inbound transfers.

Check the currency control position immediately. Capital controls appear quickly in these situations and they change what you can move, when and with what documentation.

Suspend non-essential capital expenditure. Not cancel — suspend, with a defined review date. The distinction matters for supplier relationships.

Third: contracts

Map every contract by place of performance. Identify those with obligations in an affected territory.

Read your force majeure clauses properly. Most standard wording is narrower than people assume and may not cover administrative disruption, territorial change or currency inconvertibility. Note which of your contracts leave you exposed and take advice on notification requirements — many clauses require notice within a short window to be relied on.

Check your insurance. Political risk, credit, cargo and business interruption cover all have territorial exclusions that may have just become operative. Establish what you are covered for before you need to claim, not after.

Fourth: counterparties

Your customers' and suppliers' solvency is now your problem. Identify which of them have foreign currency debt against local currency income — that group will fail first and the failures are correlated.

Shorten payment terms where you can and tighten credit limits. Doing this early is a commercial decision; doing it late is a rescue.

And identify single points of dependency in your supply chain. A sole supplier in an affected region is a risk you can address in the first month and cannot address in the third.

Fifth, and not before: the strategic question

Whether to stay, reduce or exit is the question everyone wants to answer first, and it is the one that should be answered last.

The reason is that the information available in the first fortnight of a crisis is systematically the worst information you will have. Prices overshoot, media coverage is at its most alarming, and the range of outcomes looks wider than it will in six weeks.

Companies that made irreversible exit decisions in the first month of the crises this archive has covered generally did worse than those that stabilised, waited, and decided in the second quarter with better information. That is not an argument for staying — several exits were correct — it is an argument about sequencing.

Set a review date, gather better information, and make the decision when you can actually assess it.

Related in this archive

• After Crimea: the trade geography that changed in three weeks
• Protecting capital where the courts are unreliable: what actually works
• Competing for the same buyer: how mid-sized European exporters position in this market
• Ukraine Annual Review 2014: the year everything deferred came due

I have run this sequence twice, in 2014 and in 2022, and in the same order both times. I have also watched companies break the order: those who asked the strategic question on day one had lost both their staff and their receivables three months later. People, cash, contracts — until those three are in place there is no strategic decision to take.