Ukraine’s life insurance companies in 2019 collected UAH 4.624 billion of gross insurance premiums, which is 18.4% more than a year earlier.
According to the report on the website of the National Commission for the State Regulation of Financial Services Markets, 97.1% of the total insurance premiums came from individuals, 2.9% from legal entities.
As of December 31, 2019, the number of insured individuals increased by 14.7%, to 5.133 million.
During this period, life companies paid customers UAH 575.9 million, which is 18.3% less than in 2018.
The value of changes in life insurance reserves amounted to UAH 1.017 billion, which is UAH 1.4 million less than a year earlier. The regulator also notes that the bulk of the change in life insurance reserves is formed under other accumulative insurance contracts, namely, UAH 898.9 million.
In 2019, seven life insurance companies received a negative value of increase in life insurance reserves for a total of UAH 76.10 million, which is associated with the early termination of insurance contracts.
The increase in life insurance reserves amounted to UAH 1.093 billion. The largest increase in insurance reserves (more than UAH 100 million) was declared by four life insurance companies in the amount of UAH 574.3 million, UAH 169.6 million, UAH 146.4 million and UAH 122.3 million, respectively.
According to the commission, the number of life insurance companies in Ukraine at the end of 2019 decreased to 23.
The number of cattle in Ukraine as of April 1, 2020 amounted to 3.37 million animals, which is 7.2% less than on the same date in 2019.
According to the State Statistics Service, the number of cows by that date decreased by 6.5%, to 1.78 million animals. The number of pigs decreased by 6.2%, to 5.79 million animals, the number of sheep and goats by 5.6%, to 1.39 million.
The number of poultry in the country decreased by 2% compared to April 1, 2019, to 200.6 million birds.
According to preliminary data from the State Statistics Service, the cattle stock in Ukraine in 2019 amounted to 3.12 million animals, which is 6.5% less than in 2018. The number of pigs decreased by 4.9%, to 5.73 million animals, sheep and goats by 4.8%, to 1.21 million, poultry grew by 4.2%, to 220.46 million birds.
The RDS group of road construction companies is ready to provide 850 jobs to Ukrainians returning from abroad, as well as to all people who have lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, co-owner of the group Yuriy Shumakher has said.
“Our team has more than 1,200 employees. And we will be glad to welcome about 850 new specialists to work in eight regions of Ukraine, where we build roads and important infrastructure facilities,” he told Interfax-Ukraine.
According to him, the coronavirus not only threatens the health of people, it also robs them of their work, confidence in the future.
“The construction industry is not quarantined! And we want to provide jobs for those who need it most,” he said.
The Ukrainian group of companies RDS includes Kyivshliakhbud and Rostdorstroy. Its core business is construction, modernization and maintenance of roads and bridges, construction of airfield complexes.
The company is building concrete road H-14 Kropyvnytsky-Mykolaiv. As part of the reconstruction of the H-31 Dnipro-Reshetylivka highway in Poltava region, RDS is building an overpass over the railway and the section of the first concrete road in Ukraine. In 2019, the company won a World Bank tender for work on the first category highway M-03 Kyiv-Kharkiv-Dovzhansky.
As of April 2020, the company operates in eight regions of Ukraine and has ten production facilities.
The ultimate beneficial owners of RDS are Ukrainian citizens Yuriy Shumakher and Yevhen Konovalov.
TB-Market LLC (Dnipro), owning the discount shop chain in Ukraine and part of the ATB Corporation, is not intending to adjust its plan to open new stores for 2020, Director General of ATB Corporation Borys Markov has said in a statement. “We do not change the plans for the opening of stores in 2020 we are working according to plan. However, everything will depend on the depth of the economic crisis and the quarantine period. Our plan is to open 100 stores. We have a different cycle [than other retailers], 90% of the stores that we planned to open this year were purchased in 2019 and are in different state of preparation of documents, repair, or construction,” he said during the retail company anti-crisis management online webinar broadcasted on Tuesday, April 14.
According to Markov, 90% of ATB’s retail space is owned by the company, part of the vacant space is rented by the retailer, thus, when quarantine was introduced, the company negotiated with the landlords and its tenants about the rental benefits.
“We have 10% of the stores for rent and almost 100,000 square meters of vacant space that we lease. Thus, we operate responding to the current situation, without waiting for any decisions from Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce and Industry or laws, we negotiated with everyone and tried to make compromises,” he said.
Markov also said that one of the main challenges when quarantine was introduced was to cope with large fluctuations and falling in demand of buyers.
“We have seen catastrophic amplitude of demand and supply day by day, from 50% rise to 20% decline during the last week of March. Therefore, we mainly focused on maintaining the supply chain, stable uninterrupted work of almost 10,000 staff, which provides for the movement of trade, the availability of goods and imports,” the CEO of ATB Corporation said.
ATB Corporation is a group of companies involved in retail trade, production and sale of food.
Avers-Agro agricultural equipment manufacturer in connection with the coronavirus pandemic launches production of lung artificial ventilation devices.
The company told the Interfax-Ukraine agency that production of ventilators was established as part of an international project.
“Our company participates in an international project together with manufacturers from Italy and Germany: there the devices have already been licensed. We adapted our devices a little for the Ukrainian market. This week we will release the first ten ventilation machines and at the end of the week we submit documents to the State Service of Ukraine on Medicines and Drugs Control for registration,” the company said.
Avers-Agro also emphasized that several private clinics were already interested in the devices.
The fire beds near the resettled towns of Prypyat and Chornobyl in the exclusion zone of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant have been extinguished, there is no smoldering now, said speaker of the Main Directorate of the State Emergency Situations Service in Kyiv region Viktoriya Ruban.
“Indeed, there were fire beds near Prypyat and Chornobyl, but everything was localized, extinguished and at the moment there is not even smoldering there,” she said on the Ukraine 24 TV on Wednesday.
Spokesperson of the regional department of State Emergency Service added that the houses of the settlers, who live in the exclusion zone, have not been damaged following the fire.
According to her, the fire really came closer to the villages where people lived, but these houses have been saved.
