The winner of the tender to conclude a production sharing agreement (PSA) for the extraction and enrichment of metal minerals within the Dobra lithium deposit (Kirovograd region), will be a consortium led by the Irish company TechMet (Dublin), according to The New York Times, citing two anonymous members of the PSA commission.
“Although (the decision) requires formal approval by the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers, officials said the agreement is essentially a done deal,” the newspaper writes.
Interfax-Ukraine has not yet been able to obtain official comment on this information from the Interdepartmental Commission for the Conclusion and Implementation of PSAs, which is headed by Minister of Economy, Ecology, and Agriculture Oleksiy Sobolev.
The agency also contacted the second participant in the tender, European Lithium Ukraine LLC, which, through the Australian company European Lithium Ltd, is a sister company of the American company Critical Metals Corp (CRML), but at this stage, they declined to comment on the NYT information.
The publication notes that the winning consortium has close ties to the administration of US President Donald Trump, as it includes Ronald S. Lauder, a friend of the US president and heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics company, whom Trump has known since his college days.
TechMet’s largest shareholder is the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC).
The NYT claims, citing a member of the PPP commission, that the consortium’s proposal is significantly better than the minimum investment of $179 million required by the terms of the tender.
As reported, the opening of the envelopes of the participants in the tender announced in September took place on December 15, 2025. Subsequently, the URPP commission had five days to check the submitted applications for completeness and, by January 12, 2026, to provide the government with substantiated proposals for determining the winner of the tender.
CRML, which is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol “CRML,” announced its bid for the tender. positions itself as a leading mining development company specializing in critical metals and minerals, as well as producing strategic products necessary for electrification and next-generation technologies for Europe and its Western partners. According to the company, its flagship Tanbreez project, located in southern Greenland, is one of the world’s largest rare earth element deposits.
European Lithium, listed on the Australian Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “EUR,” is a mining company engaged in the exploration and development of lithium, rare earth, precious, and base metal deposits. Its stated markets are Austria, Ireland, Ukraine, and Australia. According to information on the company’s website, it wholly owns the Wolfsberg lithium project located in Carinthia, Austria.
CRML had previously claimed its rights to the Dobra site, linking them to the transfer of assets from European Lithium, which in turn had acquired these rights from the Ukrainian company Petro-Consulting LLC.
In mid-June 2025, when he was head of the Office of the President, Andriy Yermak stated that the development of the Dobra lithium deposit could become the first pilot project within the framework of cooperation with the US.
As for the mining investment company TechMet, one of whose largest investors is the US government through the DFC, it announced in July 2025 its interest in participating in this competition and, if successful, building processing facilities with investments of more than $0.5 billion. In September, a DFC delegation accompanied by Ukrainian Ministry of Economy officials visited the Kirovograd region.
Earlier in 2025, TechMet CEO Brian Mennell reported that the company was part of a consortium interested in developing the potentially large-scale Dobra lithium deposit in Ukraine under a production sharing agreement. According to him, TechMet has been evaluating the Dobra project since 2023.
TechMet, according to information on its website, owns controlling or dominant minority stakes in 10 critical mineral assets on four continents. The U.S. international development finance corporation DFC is a significant shareholder in TechMet. “TechMet’s investment approach supports the broader policy goals of the U.S. government and its allies,” the website notes.
In addition, TechMet-Mercuria has been established as a joint venture with Mercuria, which is also a major shareholder in TechMet on a 50:50 basis. This is a physical supply chain management platform focused on marketing, trading, logistics, and risk management services for the range of technology metals that TechMet works with.
TechMet’s representative in Ukraine, Vladimir Ignashchenko, was vice president of the Ukrainian State Credit and Investment Company in the late 1990s, then deputy head of the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Ministry of Economy, in 2010-2011, he was first deputy head of the Ministry of Natural Resources when the ministry was headed by Nikolai Zlochevsky, and then advisor to Minister Eduard Stavitsky and Minister of Energy Igor Nasalik.
His son, Taras Ignashchenko, was for some time the director of Petro-Consulting (later renamed European Lithium Ukraine), which fought for the Shevchenkivske lithium deposit in Donetsk Oblast, now occupied by Russian aggressors, and the Dobra deposit.
The tender for the conclusion of a PSA for the Dobra lithium deposit was announced with the aim of exploring, extracting, and enriching lithium, niobium, rubidium, tantalum, cesium, beryllium, tungsten, and gold for a period of 50 years. The minimum investment for geological exploration is the equivalent of $12 million, and for the organization of mining and enrichment of lithium-containing minerals and other metal minerals – $167 million, but the final obligations are determined by the results of the tender.
The total area of the site is 17.07 square kilometers, and the deadline for submitting applications for participation in the tender is December 12, 2025. The participation fee is UAH 0.5 million.
According to the terms and conditions, the maximum share of compensation production, through which the investor is compensated for its expenses, is 70% of the total volume of production until the investor’s expenses are fully reimbursed, while the state’s share in profitable production must be at least 4-6%.
It is noted that the reserves and resources of lithium ores in the area were approved by decisions at the end of 2017 and in 2018 in the amount of 1 million 218.14 thousand tons (average Li2O content 1.37%) and P2 – 70.6 thousand tons (average Li2O content 1.43%).
Separately, the State Commission of Ukraine on Mineral Reserves (SCM) noted the presence of promising and forecast resources of associated useful components (P1+P2) in the lithium ores of the Dobra site: Ta2O5 – 4.75 thousand tons; Nb2O5 – 8.24 thousand tons; Rb2O5 – 104.07 thousand tons; BeO – 22.08 thousand tons; SnO2 – 4.46 thousand tons and Cs2O – 7.97 thousand tons.
The winner of the tender must ensure geological exploration of the subsoil and conduct an international audit of reserves at the site within two and a half years, as well as submit materials to the State Geological Committee on the assessment of lithium and other metal mineral reserves for approval.
After the conclusion of the PSA, the investor will be required, among other things, to search for, extract, and enrich (primary processing) lithium and possibly other metal minerals, and to ensure the comprehensive development and exploitation of the metal mineral deposit.
In addition, for the first time, the PSA tender documentation includes obligations for the investor related to the agreement signed at the end of April 2025 on the creation of the US-Ukrainian Investment Fund for Recovery, which has the first right to invest in new projects for the extraction of rare earth materials and the purchase of their products.
Retail sales of passenger cars in China in 2025 increased by 3.9% – the slowest pace in three years, according to the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA). In 2024, sales growth was 5.3%.
Sales of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids rose 17.6% last year after jumping 40.7% a year earlier. At the same time, annual sales of such vehicles in the country exceeded sales of traditional vehicles for the first time.
Car exports from China rose 19.4% last year to 5.79 million units. Exports of electric vehicles jumped 48.8% to 1.52 million units, the CPCA reported.
Domestic demand for new energy vehicles (NEVs) in China declined after subsidies for buyers were reduced or discontinued in many cities and provinces across the country.
According to the CPCA forecast, car sales in China will remain at 2025 levels in 2026, and the growth rate of electric vehicle exports will slow down.
Ukrainian metallurgical companies focused on expanding their raw material base in 2025. Despite a slight decline in total steel production, pig iron production showed significant growth, increasing by 11.2% over the year. At the end of the period, pig iron production reached 7.884 million tons, compared to 7.090 million tons in 2024.
This is the second year in a row that pig iron production has grown at a significantly higher rate than other indicators. In December 2025, the company produced 696,200 tons of pig iron. The steady growth in primary raw material production is a key factor in the long-term stability of the industry and indicates investment in the restoration of blast furnace production.
Overall, pig iron production in Ukraine has grown by 31.4% since 2023. This allows metallurgists to reduce their dependence on imported billets and creates a basis for future growth in the production of finished steel and rolled products. However, the industry still has a long way to go to return to its pre-war capacity, when more than 21 million tons of pig iron were smelted in 2021.
The National Bank of Ukraine fined FC Axioma LLC UAH 200,000 for violating currency legislation.
The violations concerned the timing of providing fragments of video archive data at the request of the NBU. A similar fine of UAH 200,000 was imposed on FC Centrofinance LLC for failure to comply with the requirements for equipping a separate unit with a video surveillance system for currency transactions.
Axioma, Centrofinance, FC, FINE, NBU
The Ukrainian metallurgical industry continues to show positive recovery dynamics after a sharp decline due to the full-scale war. At the end of 2025, companies increased their total rolled steel production by 4.8% to 6.521 million tons, compared to 6.222 million tons in the previous year. This marks the second consecutive year of growth after a sharp decline in 2022.
However, statistics for 2025 revealed an ambiguous trend: with an increase in the output of finished rolled products, steel production for the year decreased slightly by 2.2% to 7.409 million tons. Such indicators may indicate the use of imported billets or strategic reserves of raw materials by enterprises. In December 2025, rolled steel production amounted to 554,400 tons, and steel production amounted to 596,700 tons.
Overall, the steel industry is showing resilience and potential for further recovery. Over two years (2024-2025), rolled steel production grew by more than 21% overall, and steel production by 19%. However, production volumes are still significantly lower than pre-war levels: in 2021, Ukraine produced over 21 million tons of steel and 19 million tons of rolled steel, which is three times higher than current figures.
Five sugar factories belonging to the Astarta agro-industrial holding, Ukraine’s largest sugar producer, produced 361,000 tons of sugar during the 2025 sugar season, which is 5% less than in 2024 (380,000 tons), the agro-industrial holding’s press service reported on Facebook on Friday.
According to the information, sugar yield was 15.56% compared to 14.96% a year earlier and exceeded the average in Ukraine, which, according to the National Association of Sugar Producers of Ukraine (NASU) as of January 1, 2026, was 15.19%.
In total, the enterprises processed more than 2.3 million tons of sugar beets grown in the fields of the agricultural holding and in partnership with agricultural producers.
“The season was marked by high product quality that meets the most stringent market requirements,” the agricultural holding said.
It specified that this sugar processing season was the 26th in the company’s history and the 168th for the Zhdanivsky sugar factory within the holding’s structure.
Astarta is a vertically integrated agro-industrial holding operating in eight regions of Ukraine. It includes six sugar factories, agricultural enterprises with a land bank of 220,000 hectares, dairy farms with 22,000 head of cattle, an oil extraction plant in Hlobine (Poltava region), seven elevators, and a biogas complex.
In January-September 2025, Astarta reduced its net profit by 42.2% to EUR43.70 million, and its consolidated revenue decreased by 22.4% to EUR342.78 million.
