While many Ukrainian tech companies consider locations abroad, Ukrainian IT outsourcing company Binary Studio has chosen western Ukraine as an escape from Russia's war in the eastern Donbas.
The company was started by Donetsk Oblast native Artem Goncharov and his university friend Anton Duzenko. They began it with no outside funding in 2005.
They had just one weekend to escape the Russian-backed separatist Donetsk People’s Republic in May 2014. The office building, equipment, computers and employees’ homes were left aside.
The situation was unstable throughout the winter and spring of 2014, according to Goncharov, the company’s CEO. But when in May 2014 he was on a business trip to London, he received the news that the separatists started heavy shelling on the Donetsk airport.
“I couldn’t even fly back to Donetsk because of that. That was the right time to use, as we called it, ‘plan B.’ We were thinking about opening a new office, but didn’t consider it very seriously until spring. Then we knew for sure that we had to leave Donetsk for good.”
It took company’s managers a couple of days to find and rent apartments in Zakarpattya Oblast’s central city, Uzhgorod, for around 30 employees and their families. Out of about 60 company’s employees in total, only the half decided to move to Uzhgorod. Some stayed in Donetsk, some moved to Kyiv and a few moved to Russia.
On arrival to Uzhgorod the team worked in a rented apartment, but a few weeks later they moved to a rented office space. While the initial transportation and accommodation costs were relatively small, only about $6,000, the company incurred significantly higher expenses down the line, due to Goncharov.
“We lost most of our tangible assets in Donetsk’s office – our computers, commercial and private properties were all gone,” says the company’s CEO. Not only the company had to invest heavily into equipment and the new office space, but it also simultaneously lost several big clients because of the continued turbulence in the region.
Within a year the company managed to overcome the financial losses that came with the move. The clients that were scared away by the war image in global media were replaced by the new ones that came with the new year of 2015. Not a single employee was fired despite the difficult times.
“Our company had a mission to become the best tech company in Donetsk. We also had social values we wanted to implement, so while in Donetsk we had launched an IT academy for tech beginners who wanted to learn programming,” Goncharov tells. “With our move, we had to switch our priorities to a different angle. First – settle in Uzhgorod, and second – build up a new strong team and re-shape our new vision.”
Now the company has around 40 employees, all of them Ukrainians, some locals from Lviv and Zakarpattya Oblast. Goncharov says they plan to open a new office in Lviv, as it is not far from Uzhgorod and it has plenty of talented human resources.
“I still carry the warmest memories about Donetsk. I was born in Sloviansk (the first city in Donetsk Oblast occupied by DPR), I studied at the university in Donetsk and always wanted our company to be there, but now it’s clear that we’ll never be coming back there,” Goncharov tells.
Because of the war image, the country lost its attractiveness for many of the companies who wanted to set up their offices in Ukraine or were interested in investing into the country. “More and more big tech market players tend to open offices in stable countries like Poland and Bulgaria. It’s calmer there,” Goncharov says.
Binary Studio also has recently opened an office in San Francisco, but its core office is to stay in the Western Ukraine. As Goncharov states, “I don’t want us to flee from Ukraine. I still want our company to give back to Ukrainian tech community.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum , FISON and SoftServe.
