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would restrict the use of apartment buildings to private residences . While office vacancies have fallen to 5%, Kyiv has an estimated 70,000 unsold apartments. Similarly, the arrival this spring of discount airlines from Europe – Ernest, Ryanair and Wizz Air – demand for hostels and two-star lodgings are expected to increase sharply.
9.1.6 Agriculture sector news
Ukraine’s grain exports should be up 23% this marketing year over 2017-2018 levels , Elena Kovaleva, deputy minister of Agrarian Policy and Food, said Monday in Geneva at the annual meeting of the Rapid Response Forum of the Agricultural Marketing Information System. Encompassing producing and consuming countries of corn, rice, soybeans and wheat, the forum promotes policy coordination for a food crises. “Ukraine remains a stable, reliable partner and exporter of agricultural products,” Kovaleva said. Raising her ministry’s forecast by 4%, she said: “In this marketing year, we expect that grain exports from Ukraine will reach 49mn tons.”
Ukrainian loggers last year cut 22mn cubic meters, or about 1% of the national forest , reports Volodymyr Bondar, deputy head of Forest Resources Agency. Forest growth is about 1.5% a year, or 33mn cubic meters. The Agency controls 73% of Ukraine’s 10.4mn hectares, or 15.9% of the nation. Due to an Electronic Wood Accounting System, Bondar says that illegal logging has been reduced to 17,700 cubic meters.
9.1.7 TMT sector news
In Ukraine, the most significant deals in IT in February included:
● Core Value was acquired by IT Kontrakt , a Polish company backed by
US firm Oaktree Capital Management and Polish Cornerstone
Partners;
● Local funds Dragon Capital and AVentures Capital invested in
software engineering company Ciklum ;
● Amazon subsidiary Ring opened a new R&D office in Western
Ukraine . (The first R&D facility, launched in 2016 with just three
employees, now has a team of 900 specialists.)
And Ukrainian tech investor Oleksii Vitchenko acquired Translate.com , a US-based publisher of enterprise translation solutions.
45 UKRAINE Country Report April 2019 www.intellinews.com