The publicly traded Swiss tech giant ABB is a multinational company, giving the company’s Ukrainian employees a rather cosmopolitan feeling.
“We’re not a Swiss company, or a Ukrainian one either – we’re something in-between,” says Sviatoslav Belei, ABB’s country integrity officer. “We’re global, and don’t have a marked nationality.”
Indeed, ABB, which operates mainly in the robotics, power and automation technology areas, currently employs 130,000 people in 100 countries. You rarely get more multinational than that.
In Ukraine alone ABB has three offices: in Kyiv, Zaporizhzhya, and Lviv.
“We locate where we have a job to do, and that’s usually industrial areas,” Belei says of the placing of ABB’s offices in Ukraine.
As well as producing robots and power engineering goods, ABB is the world’s largest builder of electricity grids, according to the U.K.’s Financial Times newspaper. The company’s net income in 2016 was $1.96 billion.
But Russia’s war on Ukraine has forced ABB, which has been present in Ukraine since 1992, to close some of its service centers here – in Donetsk and Kharkiv in the east. No Swiss nationals now work for the company in Ukraine. All 100 employees here are Ukrainian.
Nevertheless, ABB has long been interested in the Ukrainian market, and plans to stay. Ukraine’s energy sector is vast but run down, and has seen only partial upgrading since Soviet times. Since all of the other big countries in Europe upgraded their utilities a long time ago, Ukraine has become an especially interesting market.
“The market is oversaturated in Europe,” Belei says. “The Ukrainian energy sector remains both immense and complex, while still requiring serious modernization.”
The second reason the Swiss started operating in Ukraine was quality of the workforce. According to a report in Ukraine Digital News, the country’s universities annually produce over 130,000 graduates, of whom 36,000 obtain technical degrees.
And although Ukraine’s comparably cheap labor force has always been a draw for foreign companies, including those from the engineering industry, Belei says ABB was more attracted by the quality. “There are a lot of places where human capital is cheaper. So besides there being an open market niche for us, it’s all about the qualifications of the people.”
There are downsides though: ABB, like other companies, sees Ukraine as a place with an uncertain future, which “slows down Ukraine’s prospects,” Belei says.
Fewer companies are coming to the country, he says. And ABB has no plans to open new offices.
“The bad financial situation affects us. Fewer offices and development centers are opening, because we need good economic conditions to do business here.”
Belei, however, is certain that conditions in Ukraine will improve.
“We see a positive ending,” he said. “It’s getting easier to work with the public authorities. Various barriers are coming down, and we having to go to court less often.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Denys Krasnikov can be reached at [email protected].
