Metinvest, the largest Ukrainian mining and metallurgical holding, owned by Ukraine’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov, last year made a whopping $ 1.2 billion in net profit – 93 percent more than in 2017 – the company’s press service announced on March 21.
“In 2018, Metinvest showed the strongest results in the past four years,” CEO of Metinvest Yuriy Ryzhenkov said in the report.
Akhmetov’s holding increased production for cast metal by three percent, coal by nine percent, and coke for 11 percent. For crude steel and iron ore concentrate the figures remained unchanged in 2018, while in 2017 Metinvest ranked 42nd among the world’s largest steel producers, with a volume of 9.6 million tons, according to the World Steel association.
Altogether, the holding made $11.88 billion in revenues from its metallurgical products, and paid a total of $58 million in dividends to its main shareholders – Akhmetov and Russian-friendly oligarch Vadim Novinsky.
However, in 2019 Metinvest faces a couple of bumps in the road.
Ryzhenkov said that global market prices for iron ore and steel are fluctuating and unpredictable due to the trade war between the United States and China.
Other risks for Metinvest are the upcoming presidential election in March and parliamentary elections in the fall.
“This may cause some turbulence,” Ryzhenkov said.
Meanwhile, another Akhmetov-owned asset, Ukraine’s largest private energy holding DTEK, made Hr 5.2 billion, or some $190 million, in profit in 2018, compared to Hr 2.92 billion, or $106 million, in losses the year before, Concorde Capital reported on March 5, 2019.
In a successful year, Metinvest started a modernization program, injecting $900 million in strategic projects and equipment repairs in 2018 – a record amount for the past seven years, according to the report.
However, there have been many complaints about the company’s operations causing poor air quality in Mariupol, a city of 450,000 people and some 640 kilometers southeast of Kyiv. The city was named the dirtiest in Ukraine in 2018, according to a pollution study carried out by the Kyiv-based Central Geophysical Observatory.
