Page 68 - UKRRptJan21

investors, Serhiy Ovchinnikov, the company project manager, told the centre for Transportation Studies.
Signaling a revival of Ukraine’s aircraft building industry, the defence Ministry has ordered three An-178-100R military transport jets from Antonov, ​the first such order since Independence in 1991. Powered by two domestic turbojet engines, this version of the An-178 can carry 18 tons of cargo, cruise at 825 km/h, and fly a maximum of 5,000 km. For comparison, the flight distance between Uzhgorod and Kharkiv is about 1,000 km.
UIA is ending this year with a passenger count of 1,787,000 – only 22% of the level of 2019​. Transit passengers declined with UIA’s hub system, falling to 14% of last year. The number of flights was 17,000, 28% of last year’s levels. To survive, the airline laid off 1,000 employees last summer.
9.2.4 ​Construction & Real estate corporate news
Dragon Capital has acquired Lviv Industrial Park located on a 23.5-hectare land plot on the M10 highway, 60 km east of the Polish border. ​Five years ago, CTP, the largest developer and operator of warehouses and industrial parks in Central and Eastern Europe, bought the site — the Czech company’s first foray into the former Soviet Union. For Dragon, the Lviv site complements their 49-hectare site on the Kyiv-Zhytomyr highway where an industrial park is in the planning stages. “We are ready to start construction of new Class A facilities in our industrial parks in the coming years,” says Dragon CEO Tomas Fiala.
9.2.7​ TMT corporate news
Betting on the growth of e-commerce, Ukrposhta plans to start building a 600,000 square meters of mail and package sorting centres in 2021. Largely funded with EBRD and European Investment Bank loans totalling 93mn euros, the state post office plans to build 62 depots and eight 8 sorting hubs, in: Kyiv (on the left and right banks), in Lviv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Khmelnitskiy, Odesa and Pokrovsk, the rail hub city in Donetsk region. The first tenders will go out in coming days, Igor Suhodubovsky, head of construction for Ukrposhta, told a logistics conference yesterday.
Investment company Quarter Partners has launched an IT venture fund, promising to invest $100mn in Ukrainian start-ups ​or international ones with Ukrainian ties. Acting as an ‘angel investor,’ the fund provides funding from the pre-seed round to Round B, when a company expands its market “with maximum value and a sustainable business model,” Denis Valvachev, CEO and Managing Partner of the fund, QPDigital, said in a press release. Focusing on IT-logistics, digital healthcare, game development, blockchain and artificial intelligence, QPDigital already has invested $2.6mns into six start-ups
AxDraft, a fast-growing Kyiv startup that automates the preparation of legal documents, has been acquired by Onit, a Houston-based legal technology company​. Founded only three years ago, AxDraft has worked in Ukraine with Carlsberg, Dragon, DTEK, Glovo and OLX. In 2018, AxDraft participated in Y Combinator, the famous US startup accelerator, then, in 2019, it raised $1.2mn from Silicon Valley venture capital investors. “This makes us
68​ UKRAINE Country Report​ January 2021 ​ ​www.intellinews.com