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this point," she added. According to Badritdinova, in 2019, McDonald's opened five new restaurants in Ukraine, and the company plans to maintain that pace this year.
9.2.6 Agriculture corporate news
9.2.7 TMT corporate news
New York-based Argentem Creek Partners LP is investing $75mn in Odesa’s GN Terminals in a bid to push the Ukrainian grain handling and trading company into the nation’s top 10 next year. Moving to strengthen corporate governance and transparency at the privately-owned company, Argentem has installed two independent board directors, Bohdan Chomiak and Oleksiy Pavlenko.
Nova Poshta Global is doubling its frequency of Kyiv-Beijing-Kyiv cargo flights to twice a week. “Now the Chinese direction is one of the most promising in international trade,” the delivery company’s press service reports. “In May, we delivered almost 2.5 times more orders from Chinese online stores than in April.”
Shipments from China to Ukraine by Alibaba’s Cainiao Smart Logistics Network are up 74% y/y during the first five months of this year, reports Ukrposhta. Of the 665,000 kilos of goods, the most popular categories were: electronics, clothes, children, beauty, health, home and garden.
9.2.9 Utilities corporate news
State-controlled power generation company Centrenergo generated UAH1.98bn of losses in 2019, after UAH0.50bn net profit in 2018, Dmytro Sennychenko, the head of State Property Fund, told journalists on June 19. The company’s payables reached nearly UAH4bn, while the value of its net assets were negative UAH1.4bn as of end-2019, Sennychenko said, as reported by the epravda.com.ua news site.
The company has yet to report its annual financials. In 2019, it boosted power generation 17% y/y to 10.2 TWh. In 9M19, it reported a 4% y/y decline in net revenue to UAH10.90bn, posted negative EBITDA of UAH1.44bn (vs. positive UAH0.85bn a year before) and net losses of UAH1.49bn (vs. UAH0.49bn profit a year before). Its payables swelled 3.9x YTD to UAH2.36bn as of end-September 2019.
Recall, the State Property Fund, which owns 78.2% of Centrenergo shares on behalf of the state, managed to replace acting CEO of Centrenergo in late May, as a result of a “blizzard operation" that withstood enormous pressure from insiders related to tycoon Ihor Kolomoisky.
Two subsidiaries of DTEK Group abused their market power to boost the price for their electricity, according to the preliminary conclusions announced on June 2 of an investigation by Ukraine’s Antimonopoly Committee. The committee initiated the investigation in October 2019, suspecting the two companies of abuse of their market power in July-October 2019 at the
74 UKRAINE Country Report July 2020 www.intellinews.com
