Belarus Company & Beneficial Ownership Directory

Analysis

What this data actually tells you about Belarus

Belarus is a $75.96 billion economy (World Bank, nominal GDP, 2024), with GDP per capita of roughly $6,791 (World Bank, 2024); the IMF’s October 2024 World Economic Outlook put nominal GDP closer to $73 billion. Growth has slowed sharply: GDP expanded only 1.1% in 2025 (Belarusian Economic Research and Outreach Center/FREE Network monitor), well below government targets, while inflation ran at 6.8–7.1% through 2025 against a National Bank target of “no more than 5%” — a target the Bank itself has acknowledged it will likely miss. The currency is the Belarusian ruble (BYN, redenominated 1000:1 in 2016). Core sectors are potash (Belaruskali), heavy machinery and tractors (BelAZ, MAZ, MTZ), oil refining (Naftan, Mozyr NPZ), and until recently a fast-growing IT sector centered on the Hi-Tech Park (HTP). Company registration runs through the Ministry of Justice’s Unified State Register of Legal Entities and Individual Entrepreneurs (operating since 2003, with an e-registration portal, egr.gov.by, launched 2011). The World Bank’s Doing Business index — which last ranked Belarus 49th of 190 in 2019 — was discontinued in September 2021 after a data-manipulation scandal, so no comparable current ease-of-business ranking exists for Belarus or any other country. Counterparties verify a specific Belarusian counterparty’s actual current registration status via egr.gov.by directly.

Belarus’s economy is now tightly bound to Russia’s: roughly two-thirds of Belarusian exports go to Russia, mutual Belarus–Russia trade in goods and services reached $62 billion in 2025 (+6.2% year-on-year, per Belarusian officials), and Union State integration measures were credited with adding over 1% to combined GDP in 2025; EAEU membership underpins this by removing customs barriers with Russia and other member states. In parallel, Western sanctions have hardened: the EU renewed its Belarus sanctions regime again in February 2025 and in July 2025 converted earlier SWIFT-disconnection measures into a full transaction ban covering nine Belarusian banks (including Belagroprombank, Belinvestbank, BelVEB, and Belgazprombank, extended to Belarus units of Alfa-Bank, Sberbank and VTB by October 2025); EU law also still bars imports of Belarusian potash and most oil products, with Belaruskali and the Belarusian Potash Company under asset freeze. The US, by contrast, began easing sanctions from September 2025 in exchange for releases of political prisoners (e.g., delisting Belavia from the SDN list in November 2025) — a genuine US/EU divergence that counterparties should track rather than assume a unified Western sanctions posture. Foreign direct investment fell 10.3% to $5.2 billion in 2024 (Belstat), with Russia supplying 66.7% of the total and Cyprus 14.7%. Counterparties verify a specific counterparty’s actual current sanctions-exposure and payment-channel access directly.

The labor force was about 4.82 million in 2024, and Belstat’s official ILO-methodology unemployment rate was just 2.5–3.0% in 2024–2025 — a figure that should be read cautiously, since it is a quarterly Labour Force Survey estimate in a country where independent monitoring of labor-market and politically-adjacent statistics is constrained, and it does not capture the effect of mass emigration shrinking the working-age population itself rather than raising joblessness. Independent researchers estimate 250,000–500,000 Belarusians have left the country since the disputed 2020 election, skewed toward younger, educated professionals; roughly 20,000 IT specialists are estimated to have emigrated over the same period, and the Hi-Tech Park’s resident headcount fell to around 60,000 by early 2025 as HTP export revenue dropped 45%, from $3.2 billion (2021) to $1.8 billion (2024), with more than 170 IT firms relocating abroad between spring 2022 and October 2023. Belarus’s population fell to about 9.1 million as of January 1, 2025 (down roughly 47,000 in a year, roughly 300,000 over five years), fertility sits at 1.08 children per woman, and nearly a quarter of residents are now of retirement age. Belarus is, however, over 100% self-sufficient in milk, meat, eggs and potatoes, and its two-unit Astravyets nuclear plant (2021/2023, Rosatom-built) now supplies roughly 35% of national electricity, with a third unit approved in November 2025. Counterparties verify a specific counterparty’s actual current workforce composition and emigration-linked exposure directly rather than assume pre-2020 labor-market patterns still hold.