Despite the survival mode and two years of losses due to the war, the mining and metallurgical group Metinvest will increase its investments to $500 million in 2026, said Alexander Vodoviz, head of the group’s CEO office, at the event organized by NV “Ukraine and the world ahead 2026.”
He previously reported that Metinvest Group had reduced its investments in the company to approximately $300 million per year from $1-1.1 billion since the war began.
According to him, before the war, the company employed 120,000 people, but now their number has fallen to 50,000. More than 12,000 have served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine—almost one in four—and more than 1,500 have died.
“Before the war, we were the largest exporter, and today we remain the largest exporter. But now we are in survival mode. We are not looking at any new strategic investments at the moment. Before the war, Metinvest was the largest private investor in Ukraine. We invested an average of about $1 billion in direct investments “in iron” and in factories,” Vodoviz said.
He added that current investment plans are about $500 million for 2026.
“These are quite ambitious plans, given that the company has been unprofitable for the second year in a row. We have not received any positive cash flow for the second year in a row, and our shareholders are helping us here,” said the top manager, specifying that the company is helping the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the families of employees who are serving.
Vodoviz also noted that the company cannot currently invest on a large scale as it did before the war, in particular due to military risks, which make banks afraid to lend.
“We do not currently have free access to funds. There are Ukrainian banks where you can get these funds, but the “5-7-9” program is not entirely suitable for large businesses because we do not have investments of UAH 100 million. Our investments start at $20-30 million. And banks do not give money because they say, ‘You have a war, you have assets near the conflict zone. We don’t have any insurance to cover this. Wait until the war is over, and maybe something will happen,” explained the office manager.
He also said that Metinvest had been in talks with investment company BlackRock about raising funds.
“We had negotiations with BlackRock for a whole year. We talked to them, they did a great job, they found investors in the United States. We developed projects and showed them programs. And in the end, these investors say: ‘Everything is great, guys, hang in there! But after the war,’” said the group’s representative.
The top manager noted that there are currently many programs for the country’s recovery, but they are not allocating large sums of money: “These funds are in a kind of frozen state, and we do not have access to them, so we do not see any strong motives for investing at the moment.”
“Let’s say we found the money, we want to invest, we want to build another blast furnace. But we don’t have the people. I’m not going to talk about the “18-22 years” law here, when we had 200 people leaving every day — the cream of the crop. And where can we find these people? For example, to build a new blast furnace, we need 3,000 people. But it’s impossible to find them,” Vodoviz said.
He also reminded that Europe is now introducing the CBA, and this will hit the economy very hard, especially exporters, as they will have to pay between €50 and €100 per ton of steel if they sell to the EU.
“We are looking at new products. We want to invest in these new products, such as HBI, or hot briquetted iron, which has very low CO2 emissions. And we are now looking for partners for these projects at our iron ore mines. There is demand for these products at European metallurgical plants, if anything remains there, because they are also going bankrupt one after another,” Vodoviz said.
The company is also analyzing electricity generation projects in order to invest in them due to constant blackouts.
“Due to constant airstrikes, our electricity is being knocked out. And because of the last airstrike, when we were down for a day or two, we lost millions of dollars. I’m not even talking about the losses from the strike itself,” said the top manager.
Metinvest is a vertically integrated group of mining and metallurgical enterprises. The group’s enterprises are located mainly in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipropetrovsk regions. The main shareholders of the holding are SCM Group (71.24%) and Smart Holding (23.76%), which jointly manage it. Metinvest Holding LLC is the managing company of the Metinvest Group.
