Kaspi Pay, a 100% subsidiary of Kazakhstan’s Kaspi.kz JSC, has signed a sale and purchase agreement for 100% of Portmone Group, an independent provider of payment and money transfer services in Ukraine, which is majority owned by Europe Virgin Fund (EVF).
“The acquisition of Portmone puts our Payments Platform in a strong position to end into Ukraine,” according to Kaspi’s semi-annual report on the London Stock Exchange.
According to the report, subject to anti-monopoly approval in Ukraine and Kazakhstan and approval by the National Bank of Ukraine, this transaction is expected to complete in the final quarter of 2021. The report said that upon successful closing the acquisition of Portmone also gives Kaspi.kz a payments license and Visa and Mastercard accreditation in Ukraine. In the medium-term, Ukraine can also become an important source of IT talent and a development hub for Kaspi.kz.
It is noted that Ukraine is characterized by high cash penetration (44% cash withdrawals), low e-commerce penetration at 8% of retail, low unsecured consumer lending at less than 4.5% of GDP and over 70% smartphone penetration.
Oleh Gorokhovskyi, the co-founder of virtual monobank serving over 3 million clients, predicted on Facebook that the new owner of Portmone would increase competition in the market.
“Kaspi is a global fintech star. The company’s valuation has doubled since the recent IPO and is already $13 billion. I love strong competitors. They are very motivating and mobilize the team,” Gorokhovskyi said.
At the same time, he doubted Kaspi’s ability to gain leadership in the Ukrainian market.
“In payments, they will have to compete with completely free payments from mono. In acquiring, in which they are strong in Kazakhstan, they will have to learn all the charms of government interference with the regulation of this market and compete not only with us and Privat, but also with Apple and Google Pay. Even in Kazakhstan, they got a marketplace – in Ukraine, this will also be difficult,” the co-founder of monobank said.
EVF, a regional private equity fund organized by Dragon Capital in 2010, acquired a majority stake in Portmone. The fund’s participants were Dragon Capital, EBRD, the Swiss sovereign wealth fund Obviam, the Black Sea Trade and Development Bank and other investors.
Kaspi.kz operates on three platforms – marketplace, fintech platform and payment system. The company’s shareholders are Baring Vostok funds – 28.82%, Vyacheslav Kim – 23.25%, and Mikhail Lomtadze – 22.44%.
JV Nibulon LLC (Mykoliav) intends to replace technological flows at its operating transshipment terminal for grains and oilseeds in Mykoliav and modernize the aspiration (ventilation) system, which will minimize the impact on the environment, increase the emergency safety of production, improve working conditions, fire safety and industrial sanitation.
Information about this is stipulated in the unified register of environmental impact assessment of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources of Ukraine.
The project involves the installation of additional 24 aspiration systems at the terminal, replacement of belt conveyors with chain conveyors, installation of fire-fighting dry pipes and explosion arresters for transport elevators – devices to prevent an explosion in an enclosed space.
At the moment, Nibulon is considering two options for installing the aspiration system: using dust collectors of the sleeve type or cyclone type.
The company said that its transshipment terminal is located on a plot with a total area of 15.86 hectares, which it owns.
TOP 20 COUNTRIES UKRAINE HAS POSTED THE HIGHEST SURPLUS OF TRADE IN GOODS JAN- APRIL 2021 (THSD USD)
Energoatom in the first half of 2021 received UAH 1.124 billion of net profit against UAH 2.651 billion of net loss in January-June 2020.
According to the company’s financial statement for the first half of 2021, its net income from product sales decreased by 9.4% compared to the same period in 2020, to UAH 24.011 billion, gross profit – by 2.8 times, to UAH 2.734 billion.
As follows from the notes to the interim financial statements of Energoatom, as of June 30, the total amount of accumulated losses of the company stood at UAH 43.511 billion, having decreased since the beginning of the year by 1.5% (by UAH 638.570 million).
The positive net worth of Energoatom as of the indicated date increased by 8%, to UAH 130.554 billion.
The document lists a number of positive factors that contributed to the improvement of the company’s financial indicators in the first half of the year. One of them is an increase from January 1, 2021 of the ceiling price at which Energoatom sells electricity to state-owned company Guaranteed Buyer for the needs of the population from UAH 10 to UAH 150/MWh.
In addition, from February 1 to April 9, Guaranteed Buyer repaid UAH 4.125 billion of debt to Energoatom by attracting loans from state banks to Ukrenergo.
Another positive factor is the forecast electricity balance for 2021 approved by the Ministry of Energy of Ukraine. It provides for an increase in the production of electricity by nuclear power plants by 2.08% (by 1.533 billion kWh) compared to 2020, to 75.233 billion kWh.
Travel services imports, which fell sharply in 2020 due to the pandemic, will grow by almost 1.5 times this year, to almost $7 billion, Deputy Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) Yuriy Heletiy said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.
“Travel services imports will not reach pre-crisis levels this year, but there will be an increase compared to the last year, when international travel was restricted due to lockdowns. We forecast an increase this year to nearly $7 billion from $4.7 billion in 2020, and it will exceed the pre-crisis level in the next year,” he said.
Earlier, the National Bank estimated travel services imports in 2019 at $7.5 billion.
At the same time, Heletiy said that the growth of remittances of labor migrants continues, which did not stop even the last year, and following the five months of this year amounted to 11%.
“According to our forecast, remittances of labor migrants this year will increase by 11%, to about $13.3 billion due to the economic recovery of the countries of destination of labor migrants and simplification of border crossing conditions due to the acceleration of vaccination rates,” the NBU Deputy Governor said.
The Macroeconomic Review section has been launched on a monthly basis within the framework of the Experts Club. In the first video, the co-founder of the project, PhD in Economics, Maksim Urakin, analyzed the main macro indicators.
“The goal of our Macroeconomic Review project is to provide the viewer with the key statistics and information in the most convenient form, to do it succinctly and clearly, replacing cumbersome tables and lengthy reasoning with graphic analysis,” research organizer Maksim Urakin said.
In the block on the population of Ukraine, the latest data of the State Statistics Service on the number of residents of our country were presented, a comparison was made between the statistics of state bodies and the indicators of the so-called “electronic census” of January 2020. In addition, the latest data on unemployment and wages in the regions were studied.
In the economic block, the indicators of GDP, the volume of foreign trade, the main trade partners of Ukraine, the national debt, the indicators and sources of investment and industrial production are analyzed.
All data is presented in the form of graphs and diagrams that complement the visual backdrop.
In the future, the Experts Club will analyze and present both the current statistics of Ukraine and compare the latest data with the previous periods, as well as with the indicators of other countries.
In addition, a series of thematic programs are planned, which will be devoted to the state of various sectors of the Ukrainian economy and their characteristics over the period of 30 years of independence.
The full video can be found on the Experts Club YouTube channel at the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCKGn3uGR_Y
You can subscribe to the Experts Club channel here.
