Page 63 - UKRRptOct19

9.1.7​ TMT sector news
Nova Poshta, the delivery company, says it will record the second year of 20% growth in 2019​, hitting 200mn parcels delivered to 8mn customers. To reach this goal, the company is expanding its offices this year to 6,200, half of them in villages. Nova Poshta is halfway through a 2-year to build six high-speed sorting centres. On September 20, a $10mn sorting centre was opened in Lviv. Equipped with Dutch Vanderlande machinery, the Lviv centre can sort 250 parcels a minute.
“Next Morning” is Nova Poshta’s planned service to offer overnight deliveries for packages sent among Ukraine’s 500 cities. On September 5, Nova Poshta started nightly cargo flights between Lviv and Dnipro. Carrying parcels with a maximum weight of 1 kilo, the flights are performed by Eleron, using cargo versions of An-24 turboprop planes. Alexander Bulba, director of Nova Poshta, says: “Our task is to connect all the cities of Ukraine, there are about 500 of them, within a day.” For Kyiv, Nova Poshta is talking with Boryspil and Sikorsky (Zhuliany), but is considering creating a cargo hub at another airport in the region.
To bring financial services to the ‘un-banked’ portion of Ukraine’s population, Ukrposhta, the state postal company, has installed Verifone terminals for cashless payments to 5,000 post offices – all settlements with populations over 2,000. The next step for Verifone, a California-based company, will be to allow cash withdrawals from the terminals. The goal is to “bring Ukrainians closer to financial services and basic financial services,” said Igor Smelyansky, CEO of Ukrposhta, the state postal company. He said only two-thirds of Ukrainians live near bank branches, while access to post offices is universal.
63​ UKRAINE Country Report​ October 2019 ​ ​www.intellinews.com