This is really a great news source for business headlines about Ukraine: www.ubn.news
Here is a morning update from last week:
🔵Ukraine lost up to 15% of its record 70 million ton grain harvest due to improper storage and handling in transport, estimates Pro-Consulting. Investment is needed in silos and elevators. Competition is needed among the grain handling facilities at the nation’s 13 seaports, reports UNIAN, citing the Kyiv-based market analysis firm.
🔵Construction starts this summer on a $12 million grain storage and processing complex in the Bila Tserkva industrial park. Designed to ship gain by truck or train, the complex is to have the capacity to accept 3,000 tons of grain a day. In the summer of 2020, Volytsia-Agro LLC plans to open the complex which will have an elevator, grain dryers and silos for wet and dry grain. Vasyl Khmelnytsky, owner of the farming company and the industrial park, made the announcement on Facebook.
🔵Epicenter K Group is expanding its modern silo storage capacity to 1 million tons at eight locations, Svitlana Nykytiuk, tells Interfax-Ukraine. In July, the farming group plans to launch the first $30 million phase – 500,000 tons in four locations. While building rail tracks to two silos, the company also is spending $6 million to buy 100 grain trucks.
🔵Kernel, the agro giant, opened its new grain export terminal in Chornomorsk last month, adding one million tons of throughput capacity. By the end of this year, the company is to open a second phase, increasing its Chornomorsk throughput by an additional three million tons. Last month, Kernel, Ukraine’s largest vertically-integrated agribusiness, bought railcar company RTK-Ukraine. Dragon Capital writes: “With almost 3,000 grain hoppers, at a estimated valuation of $64 million, [Kernel] almost met its grain transportation needs, complementing the existing fleet of 500 wagons.”
🔵As demand grows to move grain, Sergey Tigipko is talking with foreign investors about expanding his grain wagon fleet as much as seven times, to 10,000 wagons. Tigipko, owner of TAS-Logistic, tells Novoye Vremya that his company now has 1,200 grain carriers.
🔵Ukrzaliznytsia has posted on its website a list of 301 ‘low-performing’ grain stations that are candidates for closure. During the last harvest season these stations averaged less than 2.3 grain cars a day, Andrei Ryazantsev, director of finance at the state railroad, tells the Center for Transportation Technologies. Last summer, Ukrzaliznytsia announced that 130 grain stations received less than one car a day. One grain hopper typically carries 70 tons of grain.
🔵Ukraine is the world’s largest exporter of millet, a grain used for food and fodder, according to Mordor Intelligence. The smallest of Ukraine’s grain exports, millet goes largely to Germany and South Africa. Ukraine exported 76,000 tons in 2016. By comparison, Ukraine expects to export 49 million tons of grain in the marketing year that ends this June.
🔵Ukraine, South Korea and the US are working with Science Technology, a Saudi company, to design and build an unmanned combat aerial vehicle capable of carrying tons of weapons. Details of the long range ‘unmanned bomber’ were revealed at IDEX 2019, a recent defense show in Abu Dhabi, reports Defense Blog news site. Citing interest by Middle East and North Africa militaries, the Washington-based blog reports: “The UCAV fleet in the region is forecast to increase from dozens of aircraft in 2018 up to 700 combat drones in 2028.”
🔵Ukrspetsexport, the military import-export agency, is building an armored vehicle assembly plant in Myanmar, reports Defense Blog. Equipment and production machines have arrived in Yangon for a plant that is to start operating next year, reports Defense Blog. The plant will assemble 8-wheeled BTR-4U armored personnel carriers, designed by Kharkiv’s Morozov Design Bureau. From the same Kharkiv company, the Myanmar plant will build 2S1U self-propelled Gvozdika howitzers. After Myanmar’s Buddhist majority government forced much of its Muslim minority to flee to Bangladesh, the US and the EU expanded existing bans on sales of arms and equipment that can be used for internal repression.
🔵President Poroshenko says Ukraine will start mass production this year of Neptun, a land-based anti-ship rocket, and Sokil, or Falcon, a reconnaissance and attack drone. Longer range – over 500 km – missiles could be developed now that Ukraine no longer considers itself bound by the defunct intermediate range missile ban treaty, Ukrainian diplomats say. On Saturday, Poroshenko said at a campaign rally in Chernihiv: “We are no longer bound by any limitations either on the range of our missiles or on their power. Let the enemy know about it, too.”
🔵US-based Curtiss-Wright Corporation has signed an agreement with Kropyvnytskyi-based RadICS LLC to market their nuclear power safety systems to US power plant operators. Under the agreement signed recently in Dallas, the Idaho Falls unit of Curtiss-Wright will be the US stocking facility for all RadICS system components for the Kirovohrad region company.
🔵US-owned Jabil Circuit Ukraine, Ltd. is building a second electronics assembly plant in Zakarpattia, 300 meters south of the main rail freight yard for trains to Slovakia. The new, 20,000 square meter plant will be five km south of Uzhgorod and adjacent to Jabil’s existing plant, a workplace for 2,300 people. The new plant is to employ 1,300 people assembling mobile phones, media players and computer equipment for export to the EU.
🔵Slovakian and Ukrainian officials want to speed east-west freight and passenger rail traffic by developing logistics terminals in Košice and Mukachevo and a joint customs and border control point in Chop, reports Railwaypro news site. At a bilateral meeting, Infrastructure Minister Volodmyr Omelyan cited Ukraine’s new double track tunnel through the Carpathians mountains, saying: “After the opening of the Beskidy rail tunnel, the transit though the territory of Ukraine and Slovakia can increase by several times.” Dana Meager, from Slovakia’s Finance Ministry, said: “The development of a logistics complex in Košice can turn Ukraine and Slovakia into a gate between Asia and Europe and into a one big logistics hub.”
🔵ActiveChat, a Kyiv-based chatbot software company, hit the top of sales charts last month at AppSumo, the Texas-based deals website for digitally distributed online services. ActiveChat sold 10,800 subscriptions during the last two weeks of January, making it the period’s bestselling Software as a Service, or SaaS. The previous record for a Ukrainian company was DepositPhotos, which sold 8,000 subscriptions on AppSumo. Believing in the future of voice-activated chatbots, Sergei Kostyukov, the company’s managing partner, is talking with potential American investors with a goal of increasing ActiveChat’s market cap 10-fold in the next three years.
