Ukraine produced 51 billion cigarettes in 2019, which is 15% less than in 2018, Country General Manager of Imperial Tobacco in Ukraine Rastislav Cernak has said.
“Compared to European countries, the decline in the volume of the cigarette market was indeed proceeding rapidly. According to our data, the market dropped by 15% compared to the previous year. In 2011-2017, the decline was less than what we observed in 2019,” he said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.
There are several objective reasons for the fall of the Ukrainian market, according to Cernak, including an increase in excise duty.
“In 2018, the excise tax on cigarettes increased 30%, in 2019 we had two increases – in January by 20%, and in July, by an additional 9%. A significant increase in excise tax led to an increase in the price of a pack of cigarettes, which caused growth in illegal trade,” he said.
The general manager of Imperial Tobacco in Ukraine said that over the past few years, the level of illegal trade has doubled. According to TNS Kantar research, in 2019, the level of illegal trade reached 7%. The upward trend has been observed since 2017.
Weidmann Malyn paper factory (MPF, Zhytomyr region), the only producer of electrical insulating board for power engineering machines in Ukraine, reduced production by 20.9% in January 2020 compared with January 2019, to UAH 46.07 million.
According to the UkrPapir association, in natural terms the factory’s production fell by almost 9%, to 494 tonnes, while transformer board output grew by 6.4%, to 451 tonnes.
MPF Weidmann is a member of the Weidmann international group, the only company in Eastern Europe that can supply almost all kinds of electrical insulating paper and cardboard meeting regional and international standards.
In 2019, the factory decreased production of commodity goods by 6.5%, to UAH 595.05 million.
National bank of Ukraine’s official rates as of 17/02/20
Source: National Bank of Ukraine
Official rates of banking metals from national bank as of February 17
One troy ounce=31.10 grams
Alfa-Bank (Kyiv) has improved our real GDP growth forecast for 2020 from 3% to 3.2% and expects economic growth to reach 3.8% in 2021, according to the bank’s macroeconomic forecast under the base case (most probable) posted on its website last week. According to the document, the economy would expand with moderate rates of 2.3-2.5% during the first three quarters of 2020. At the same time, the bank sees prospects for economic growth accelerating in the fourth quarter of 2020 to more than 4% due to expected thrust in bank lending, which would provide additional impetus for domestic demand.
“Low baseline effect would be another major reason behind economic growth acceleration at the end of 2020, as the last quarter of the previous year was associated with local slump in industrial and agricultural output,” the bank said in the forecast.
According to the bank’s analysts, low inflation would be one of the key features of 2020. According to the bank’s forecast, average annual growth in Consumer Price Index (CPI) would turn just 3.4% this year, after 7.9% in 2019.
“Only by the end of 2020, inflation would return to the target range set by the National Bank of Ukraine (4-6%), as a result of monetary easing and some recovery in producer prices,” the bank’s analysts said.
The bank’s experts share the recently updated central bank’s expectation of its prime rate at 7% by end 2020 from current 11%. However, they do not exclude that prolonged inflation below target range in 2020 would request for an even more accommodative monetary policy.
The Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine has permitted ADM International Sarl, Bunge S.A., Cargill International S.A., Louis Dreyfus Company Suisse S.A. (all based in Switzerland) and Glencore Agriculture B.V. (the Netherlands) to create TechCo (Switzerland).
According to a Monday posting on the committee’s website, the creation of the company is aimed at uniting and transforming the process of the process of performing post-sales operations for the sale of agricultural products by gradually moving from manual document management to automatic through digitization.
“Given that the platform will be used only for the stage of performing after-sales operations at the international level by sea, outside Ukraine, the planned creation will not affect the level of competition in any Ukrainian market,” the committee said.
