On June 11, Kirovogradoblenergo announced a tender for compulsory motor third-party liability insurance.
According to the Prozorro electronic procurement system, the expected price for the services is UAH 900,000. The deadline for submitting applications is July 19. The winner of a similar tender a year ago was SK VUSO.
The All-Ukrainian Bakers Association (VAP) expects bread prices in the country to rise by 20% by the end of 2025, but this is unlikely to undermine the budget of Ukrainian families, its head Oleksandr Taranenko said in an interview with the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens. Everything is moving in that direction,” he said.
“I won’t be surprised if that happens. Everything is heading in that direction,” he said.
Speaking about the 20% prospect of bread price increases, Taranenko said that the current wholesale price of 1 kg of bread from a bakery is slightly more than 40 hryvnia. At the same time, supermarkets’ margins on bread, using various marketing mechanisms, sometimes reach 30%, although by law they should not exceed 10%.
“Let’s not take domestic statistics into account — they do not reflect reality due to the existence of a ‘shadow’ market and other nuances. Objectively, Ukrainians currently consume 150-200 g of bread per day, or about 5 kg per month. Thus, every month, Ukrainian citizens spend 200-210 UAH on bread. If the price increases by 20% per year, people will spend 40 UAH more on bread every month. Yes, for our pensioners and other low-income groups, 40 hryvnia is a lot of money. However, to say that 40 hryvnia per month will undermine the budget of a Ukrainian family would probably be an exaggeration,” the expert stressed.
Among the reasons for the rise in bread prices, he cited increases in the prices of all components of the product—flour, yeast, fats, and sugar. Added to these are the cost of electricity, logistics, and the state’s requirement for enterprises that are critical to the economy and have the right to reserve personnel to raise salaries to 20,000 hryvnia.
“After taxes, people will receive 16,000 hryvnia. Previously, the average salary in our business was 13-15-16 thousand hryvnia, regardless of the enterprise. You must agree that this is not a high salary. But when someone says that bakers are getting rich, this is not the case at all. A salary increase of even 20-30% is a significant increase in production costs, while we are unable to increase our income,” the expert explained, adding that the profitability of the bread business is currently slightly above zero, and for some types of bread, it is below zero.
Taranenko cited State Statistics Service data, according to which there are over 3,000 registered bread producers in Ukraine.
“Let’s say that not all of them are currently operating for various reasons, but even if only 2,000 of them are operating, it is nonsense to imagine that they have all conspired to make excessive profits,” said the head of the VPP, rejecting the idea of an industry conspiracy to raise bread prices in Ukraine.
According to the results of January-March of this year, PJSC Ukrainian Graphite (Ukrgrafit, Zaporizhia) increased its net loss by 80.6% compared to the same period last year, from UAH 36.466 million to UAH 65.870 million.
According to the company’s interim report, net income for this period decreased by 1.6% to UAH 296.640 million.
The company’s undistributed profit at the end of March amounted to UAH 3 billion 599.831 million.
Ukrgrafit ended 2024 with a net loss of UAH 202.447 million, while in 2023 it increased its net profit by 2.34 times compared to 2022, to UAH 122.920 million.
Ukrgrafit is a leading Ukrainian manufacturer of graphite electrodes for electric steel melting, ore-thermal and other types of electric furnaces, commercial carbon masses for Soderberg electrodes, and carbon-based refractory materials for metallurgical, machine-building, chemical, and other industrial complexes.
According to the National Depository of Ukraine (NDU) for the first quarter of 2025, Intergraphite Holdings Company Limited (Malta) owns 23.9841% of the private joint-stock company, and C6 Safe Group Limited (Cyprus) owns 72.0394%.
The authorized capital of the private joint-stock company is UAH 233.959 million, and the nominal value of a share is UAH 3.35.
According to the April report of the World Gold Council, Uzbekistan has once again become the world leader in gold sales.
In April 2025, total gold purchases by central banks worldwide amounted to 12 tons, which is 12% less than in March and significantly below the average for the last 12 months (28 tons). This is the second consecutive month of decline in purchases.
WGC experts believe that the decline in demand may be linked to record gold prices recorded at the beginning of the year. Although central banks usually adhere to a long-term strategy, the rise in the price of gold may have temporarily reduced interest in active purchases.
The largest purchase in April was made by the National Bank of Poland, which increased its reserves by 12 tons to 509 tons. This exceeded the European Central Bank’s reserves of 507 tons. In total, Poland has purchased 61 tons of gold since the beginning of the year.
Other notable buyers included the central banks of the Czech Republic (+3 tons), China (+2 tons), Turkey (+2 tons), Kyrgyzstan (+2 tons), Kazakhstan (+1 ton), and Jordan (+1 ton).
Amid general caution in the gold market, the Central Bank of Uzbekistan continued to sell off its reserves, selling another 11 tons in April. Thus, for the third month in a row, the republic has maintained its position as the largest seller of the precious metal. Since the beginning of the year, gold reserves have decreased by 26 tons to 356 tons.
Uzbekistan retains its status as the largest gold exporter in 2025.
As of May 1, the country’s total gold and foreign exchange reserves reached $49.25 billion, equivalent to 15 months of imports. At the same time, foreign exchange reserves exceed $11 billion.
The mining and metallurgical group Metinvest is transforming its business processes with artificial intelligence (AI) through automation, the use of drones, and the application of these tools in the financial sector.
“In 2020, we were able to automate about 70% of our processes, with 30% remaining inaccessible due to technological limitations. Today, this figure has risen to 95%. This opens up completely new opportunities, and we are actively moving in this direction,” said Anton Ishchenko, head of the R&D product development team at Metinvest Digital, at the 13th Annual Forum of Financial Directors of Ukraine in Kyiv.
According to him, in five years of working with intelligent process automation, more than 500 solutions based on various technologies have been implemented, which has made it possible to automate about 200,000 hours of work, equivalent to approximately 100 full-time employees.
He noted that modern intelligent automation at Metinvest is based on a combination of RPA (routine operation robotization), low-code platforms (rapid solution development without complex coding), Process and Task Mining (process analysis to identify inefficiencies), and AI (automation of complex tasks and real-time data processing).
One of the main innovations is the active involvement of employees in the automation process. At Metinvest, employees independently record their business processes and work activities using Task Mining, Power Automate, and SAP Scripts. This allows for the formation of high-quality and structured automation requirements from the ground up, reduces the workload on business analysts, and speeds up the transition from idea to finished solution. The collected data and processes are analyzed automatically using AI and then quickly transformed into working automated scenarios. As a result, the time and resources spent on development and implementation are reduced by tens of percent. In the context of limited business budgets, this approach has become extremely important, emphasized Ishchenko.
The result of this practice is the creation of the Application Warehouse corporate platform, a centralized repository of universal applications for automating typical business processes in various departments of the company. This significantly increases the availability of digital tools: new solutions are quickly implemented, distributed among employees, and do not need to be developed from scratch for each task. Currently, about a thousand employees use the platform.
“We continue to invest in research and development to create business value and remain among the leaders in digital transformation,” Ishchenko concluded.
In turn, the group’s CFO, Yulia Dankova, pointed to the comprehensive implementation of computer vision and intelligent document processing technologies in the company’s financial and production processes. According to her, modern solutions based on Computer Vision enable instant reading, analysis, and classification of documents from various sources, from scanners to corporate mail, without the need for prior training.
Since 2023, Metinvest has been using its own intelligent document processing system, myOCR. The platform, which processes up to 40,000 pages of documents per month, including confidential ones, has been implemented at seven large enterprises of the group. It saves about 20,000 hours of working time per year and is integrated with a universal translator from foreign languages into Ukrainian. It contains modules for identifying stamps, signatures, contextual analysis, document classification, data verification, and extraction. At its core are advanced AI models.
“For example, a company is importing goods from an Italian factory. The automated process receives a package of documents in Italian and English, compares them with the accounting system data, generates an authentic translation into Ukrainian, adds it to the package, and transfers it to the electronic document storage system. For financial departments, this has been a real breakthrough in the speed and convenience of document flow,” said the CFO.
The CFO added that the company has implemented a unified solution for SPAIS computer vision systems. This system helps to identify safety violations in production, such as employees being in hazardous areas or without personal protective equipment. When a violation is detected, the program signals it and stores the data in the appropriate systems. This solution is already being used at several Ukrainian enterprises of the group. SPAIS also helps detect damage at Metinvest’s production facilities using drones.
Another solution from the family of computer vision systems at Metinvest enterprises, which has undergone pilot testing and is being implemented for industrial use, is automatic slab quality control.
Dankova emphasized that the group’s assets operate exclusively on proven, uncompromised licensed systems. Microsoft solutions and in-house developments based on the Microsoft technology stack are recognized as priority technologies in this area.
Shareholders of PJSC IC “PZU Ukraine Life Insurance” (Kyiv) at a meeting on June 6 decided to allocate UAH 84.549 million of the profit received in 2023-2024 to the payment of dividends.
As reported by the company in the information disclosure system of the National Securities and Stock Market Commission (NSSMC), the total amount of dividends per one ordinary registered share of PJSC IC “PZU Ukraine Life Insurance” has been set at UAH 452.10.
Dividends will be paid directly to shareholders in accordance with Ukrainian law.
As reported, PZU Ukraine Life Insurance collected UAH 312.913 million in premiums in 2024, which is 29.2% more than in 2023. It paid out UAH 55.6 million to customers, which is UAH 9.2 million more than in 2023.
The insurer’s pre-tax financial result amounted to UAH 104.136 million, compared to UAH 176.805 million a year earlier.
The company also reported that it ended last year with a net profit of UAH 84.136 million, which is 41.8% less than in 2023.
PJSC “IC ‘PZU Ukraine Life Insurance’ has been operating since 2003. It is part of the PZU Group, one of the oldest and largest in Poland in terms of gross premiums written (according to the Polish Financial Supervision Authority).
