Business news from Ukraine

In Ukraine, 52,200 active companies have filed annual financial statements showing zero revenue—or have not reported any revenue at all—for at least two consecutive years, according to data from the Unified State Register analyzed by Opendatabot.
About a quarter of these companies have reported zero or blank revenue figures for three consecutive years, and 4,600 companies—or roughly one in eleven—have been in this situation for five years.
The largest number of companies with a long-standing lack of declared revenue is registered in Kyiv—15,078, or nearly 29% of the total.
The Dnipropetrovsk region accounts for 3,998 such companies, or about 8%; the Kharkiv region, 3,663; and the Odesa region, 3,471.
The most common sector of activity for these companies is wholesale trade. This sector accounts for 9,894 companies, or about 19% of the sample studied.
Another 5,523 companies operate in real estate, 4,279 in construction, and 3,426 in agriculture.
The majority of enterprises that have long reported no income are registered as limited liability companies—42,383 companies, or 81% of the sample. Another 7,673 are private enterprises, and 1,691 are farms.
Denis Popov, head of the legal department at Opendatabot, attributes the persistence of such a large number of these companies, in particular, to the complexity of the business liquidation process.
“One of the reasons companies remain registered for years without generating any income is the complex procedure for closing them down. To officially terminate a business, one must settle obligations to creditors and the government and complete the required procedures, which takes time and money,” he noted.
According to him, zero revenue does not necessarily mean that operations have actually ceased. Some businesses may have temporarily suspended operations due to full-scale war, the loss of production capacity, employees, or sales markets.
The analysis included active commercial companies of various legal forms that had filed financial statements with zero or blank revenue for at least the last two consecutive years. Nonprofit organizations were not included in the study.
Source: Opendatabot