State-controlled Ukreximbank (Kyiv) with the assistance of the World Bank has provided a $22 million loan to Protein-Invest vegetable oil producer.
According to a report on the bank’s website, $14 million was used to refinancing an investment loan, and the company will receive another $8 million as part of a sub-project for the purchase of soybean seeds for further processing.
“Protein-Invest plant is increasing its production capacity, taking into account the global tendencies of increasing the consumption of oilseeds. To meet the needs of the enterprise in a sufficient volume of working capital for the purchase of raw materials, the bank made the most of the program of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The sub-project worth $ 8 million was approved for the project of access to long-term financing, a mandatory criterion for the participation of enterprises in which is an export-oriented activity or the attraction of local supply chains to this direction,” board member of Ukreximbank Oleksandr Ihnatenko said.
Protein-Invest enterprise has a soybean oil extraction plant with a capacity of 700 tonnes per day. It supplies vegetable oil and high-protein meal to the market of Ukraine and other countries, which are further used in the food industry and for the manufacture of animal feed. Production was launched in the village of Dunayivtsi, Khmelnytsky region, in 2019.
According to the unified state register of legal entities and individual entrepreneurs, t
Number of unemployed in Ukraine and job opportunities, May 2019-June 2020.
The mobile network operator Kyivstar is ready to share its resources and services with the business to create new applications and services for different models of cooperation, including partnership.
“As an operator, we are a very closed system. This is largely due to the fact that for us any type of partnership is a very high risk. We are a large business and, attracting a small partner, we take risks. Therefore, for many years we were caught in ourselves… But It seems to me that on a new evolutionary stage – IT and digital – we need to open up,” Kyivstar President of Alexander Komarov said at a conference in Kyiv on Thursday evening.
According to him, at present, the mobile communications market has a huge entrepreneurial potential, with which large companies are unable to fully cooperate due to the high bureaucracy of processes. At the same time, this area is very attractive in terms of the speed of generating ideas and their usefulness for the industry as a whole.
“We have such a concept – Open operator. Now we have a very fashionable story: an open API bank, when, in the long run, the exchange of impersonal customer information allows building additional business on top of basic banking processes and services. We have approximately the same vision for the mobile business,” Komarov said.
He also recalled that earlier Kyivstar tried to attract third-party developers at the level of accelerators, selected even several interesting projects, but “strangled them with its red tape.”
“We have studied the most popular areas for business partners, prepared certain technological API stacks for them, and in principle we are ready at the pilot level in the next six months to open and see if potential partners succeed in coming up with some business models or business services that would be of interest to our clients,” Komarov said.
He said that the operator’s openness for partner companies means the ability to technologically connect to the network and anonymized data of the operator, as well as the presence of an IT sandbox where ideas and products can be tested at the stage of their development.
According to him, Kyivstar is ready to consider various models of cooperation, including partnership. “The question of dividing money always arises, but our task now is to get people to talk about money,” he said.
Komarov also noted the plans of Kyivstar to soon transform from an operator into a modern digital-IT company capable of developing its own products and commercializing partner products quite successfully in its network.
Kyivstar plans to strengthen the internal development department by the end of the year, so that to have digital divisions with 120 people and at least 70 in-house developers.
The website of the Farmak pharmaceutical company (Kyiv) is visited by about 400,000 people per month.
According to a Farmak’s press release, the pharmaceutical company entered the top 10 companies according to the Company Transparency Index 2019, calculated by the Corporate Governance Professional Association in cooperation with the Corporate Social Responsibility Development center and with the support of CIPE and assistance of the Ministry for Development of Economy, Trade and Agriculture.
The top 10 index leaders provide more than 50% of the information that was included in the evaluation categories, while the overall level of transparency of the websites of other companies in Ukraine is about 25%.
The Index survey showed that most often companies post information related to environmental protection, labor relations, work with communities, corporate governance, company management, composition of the supervisory board, information for investors, anti-corruption programs on their websites.
Executive Director of Farmak Volodymyr Kostiuk said that “information openness is a requirement of the time, without which the company cannot become successful.”
“International investors and partners are actively exploring the information space about the company. This is extremely important for us. After all, we export products to 28 countries,” he said.
Kostiuk said that Farmak publishes financial statements according to international standards every year. And having become a member of the UN Global Compact, in 2020 Farmak first published the company’s non-financial statements.
“In addition to the main website of the company, we also have the websites of our representative offices, where relevant information for these countries is collected. The company also has active pages on social networks Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Only on Facebook, 24,000 users have already subscribed to the Farmak page,” he said.
SkyUp (Kyiv) will operate two nonscheduled flights on the Kyiv- Tashkent (Uzbekistan)-Kyiv route on October 15 and October 29, 2020.
The airline’s press service said on Friday that tickets are available for a price of UAH 8,400 one way. People can buy them on the official website of the company in the All Flights – Special Flights section.
The airline said that from October 1, 2020, to enter Uzbekistan, it is necessary to have a negative PCR test done no later than 72 hours before arrival in the country.
Romania has suspended flights with Ukraine, which is in the “yellow” lockdown zone, the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine said.
“As reported by the Digi24 Romanian television channel, the Romanian government has decided to suspend airline service with the countries of the ‘yellow’ lockdown zone, among which is Ukraine,” the State Border Service of Ukraine said in the statement on the Telegram channel on Friday.
According to the statement, an exception to the ban on flights to Romania was made for the member states of the European Union, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
