Bain & Company, regarded as one of the top three management consulting firms in the world, announced on May 15 that it has opened up an office in Kyiv.
More than seven years of steady economic growth, mounting activity by foreign investors and bold expansion plans
by domestic businesses have prompted one of the world’s leading consulting firms to set up shop in Ukraine.
Bain & Company, regarded as one of the top three management consulting firms in the world, along with McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group, announced on May 15 that it has opened up an office in Kyiv.
Bain also announced that it has reopened its office in Moscow, which was closed in the late 90s. But it’s the Kyiv office that makes Bain stand out from its competitors McKinsey and BCG, both of which still handle work for Ukraine-based clients out of their offices in Moscow and other countries.
“With the continuing strength of the economies in the region, our clients are increasingly seeking our help with their most important opportunities,” said Michael de Csillery, Bain Partner in the CIS.
“Local and foreign investment is increasing across all sectors of the economy, and not just in oil and gas. We have seen tremendous growth across the board: in financial services, in construction, and more recently in consumer goods and retail,” he added.
Headquartered in Boston, Bain provides strategic, operational, technological, organizational and merger and acquisition consulting. Founded in 1973, presently Bain operates 36 offices in 22 countries.
Bain has been advising clients in the CIS region for more than 15 years. But robust domestic growth and greater foreign investment inflows into Ukraine have raised client demand across a variety of industrial sectors, laying the groundwork for Bain to expand its presence by opening an office in Ukraine, as well as Moscow, company officials said.
As its Ukrainian partner, Bain has chosen a local consulting company with which it has collaborated in the past, Spektor, Sachs & Company. The Kyiv-based consultancy was founded in 1996 by Bain alumni Robert Schaus and Yury Spektorov, who will be the two partners of Bain’s new Kyiv office, Bain & Company Ukraine.
Schaus, who is also a technology, telecommunications and strategy expert at Bain CIS and Bain & Company Ukraine, believes that after the longstanding relationship between the two firms, it was logical for Spektor, Sachs & Company to rejoin Bain & Company.
“Our goal is to participate and be part of real success stories in Ukraine, to see Ukrainian companies rising to the next level in terms of size, efficiency and value,” he said.
Spektorov said that the demand for professional consultancy services has surged in Ukraine. A large number of Ukrainian companies that have demonstrated high growth in the past few years – especially those planning to float their stock on foreign exchanges through initial public offerings – are potential clients. These companies have a lot of work ahead in terms of defining their future strategy and restructuring and this will require professional consultancy, according to Spektorov.
“We do believe in this market and this is why we are here,” Spektorov said.
According to research of the Ukrainian Association of Management Consultants (UAMC), a joint project of the World Bank and Ukraine’s State Property Fund, more than 500 consulting companies operate in Ukraine. The lion’s share of these are domestic consulting firms. Twenty percent are branches of foreign consulting companies, joint ventures, or are affiliated with foreign consultancies and tend to snap up the most lucrative consulting contracts, giving them control of around 80 percent of the Ukrainian consulting market.
The most rewarding clientele for consulting firms are large, high-paying Ukrainian enterprises, a UAMC report published this year says. But the segment of medium-sized business companies seeking consultancy is growing rapidly, according to the report. Some 13 percent of consulting firms’ clients are foreign companies working in Ukraine, the report reads.
The four leading global accounting and auditing firms – Ernst & Young, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu – have had offices in Ukraine since the 90s. In addition to auditing and accounting services, they also offer legal counsel and consulting services through their Kyiv-based offices.
