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Ukraine Business News, Tuesday, June 09, 2020
- EU-Ukraine Integration: Big Jumps in Food Exports, Gas Storage, and Migrant Labor
- China to Supply Trains for Kharkiv Metro
- Reuters Consensus: Interest Rate Cut Next Week
- Tourism Boosters: Flights Resume Today; Zelenskiy Proposes Visa Free for Chinese, ‘Arabs,’ Aussies, and Kiwis
Ukraine had the biggest jump in food exports to the EU of any country in the 12 months ending in January, reports the European Commission. Ukraine’s exports increased 21% y-o-y, adding €1.2 billion. During that one year period, Ukraine was the third largest supplier of food to the EU, selling €6.8 billion, accounting for 6% of the EU’s food imports. The top two were: Brazil, supplying €10.7 billion, or 9%; and the US supplying €10.1 billion, or 8%.
Foreign traders have tripled their volumes of natural gas stored y-o-y in western Ukraine’s ‘Customs Warehouse’ reservoirs reports Uktransgaz, the pipeline unit of Naftogaz. Increasingly comfortable with the 2-year-old low duty regime, foreign traders now have about one third of their 2 billion cubic meters in the system as ‘short haul transportation.’
“We are confident that this trend will continue in the coming months,” says Serhiy Oleksienko, Ukrtrangaz general director. “The level of filling of European gas storage facilities is rapidly approaching the maximum…in Austria today it is almost 85%, Germany – 84%, Italy – 68%. In Ukraine, this figure is 58%.”
The flow of Ukrainian workers back into Poland rose to 94,000, nearly triple the 34,000 recorded in April by Poland’s border guards, reports the Warsaw daily Rzeczpospolita. Krzysztof Inglot, head of the Personnel Service employment agency, estimates that as many as 400,000 Ukrainians left Poland in March, when the coronavirus threat first loomed. Last Monday, Polish ambassador Bartosz Cichocki agreed in Kyiv with Ukraine’s Deputy Foreign Minister Vasyl Bodnar to simplify procedures for Ukrainians to obtain work permits and to cross the border.