Much of the world has had its eyes on Ukraine over the last few weeks as Russia has gone to war with Ukraine. As this relates to the theme park world, Universal Studios had announced in early 2017 that an indoor theme park (Universal Studios Russia) was coming to Moscow sometime in 2022. Obviously, the Coronavirus pandemic would have pushed that timeline back. There also hasn’t been much conversation about the park since the original announcement, so it’s difficult to know the status of the project. Nonetheless, the success of the project is in jeopardy at this point.
Currently, there are two main theme parks (it seems) in Russia. Sochi Park (in Sochi) is nicknamed Russia Disneyland. There is also Divo-Ostrov in St. Petersburg, which appears to be like a typical U.S. regional theme park with a few intense roller coasters. The rest of this article will look at the likelihood of a top tier theme park coming to Russia--both prior to the war and now that the war has started. Pre-War Rating Using the same criteria as I had earlier in the “Next International Resort” analysis, I evaluated how well Moscow would have been as a location prior to the war. I will call this “Moscow, Russia (2021).” Moscow (2021) overall rating is 47.8, which would put it basically tied with Seoul, South Korea for 8th place in the above rankings. It gets high grades for distance to other parks and the fact that talks were underway. It gets low grades for weather and IP penetration. During War Rating In short, the rating for Moscow drops to 35.3 (from 47.8) due to the war. This puts it near the bottom of the rankings (and perhaps at the very bottom when I revise the distance from other parks criterion). The only criterion that hasn't really changed value for a Moscow theme park since the current (iteration of) war with the Ukraine is weather. But this is still worth discussing, too, since I didn't detail it in the last post. Although Moscow gets low marks for weather, the Universal Studios park is planned as an indoor one. This means that the weather sort of becomes a non-factor in a guest's experience at the park. For population, it is difficult to know how many people are fleeing Moscow. I assumed approximately 10% of the population. Certainly the Russian ruble has decreased value astronomically and Russian banks have been frozen. I took off half of the Russian GDP. The occurrence of talks went from a 10 to a 4; basically any previous discussions get put on-hold while a country is at-war. I halved the IP penetration criterion as Russians aren't going to be focused on going to movie theaters at this time. Ease of doing business also took a significant hit from 78.2 to 46.0 (this later value represents a value close to Afghanistan and Ethiopia, which are two other countries that are currently at-war). Certainly other analysts would give higher or lower ratings to Russia right now, but this was my attempt to provide a snapshot of the impact of the war.
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