More Than 3,000 Foreign Companies Opened in Wartime Ukraine

Open-sourced data from Opendatabot, a Ukrainian company that provides open access to public registers, showed that more than 3,000 companies with foreign owners have opened in Ukraine since the 2022 invasion.

Opendatabot said among them were nationals from 101 countries, with Turkey taking the top position with 396 companies, or 12.9 percent of the total number, followed by Uzbekistan taking up 10.1 percent and Poland taking up 7.3 percent.

US citizens took up 7 percent of the total number.

“Citizens of the USA, Kazakhstan, Germany, Azerbaijan, Israel, Great Britain and China also made it to the top 10. Note that one company may have more than one owner,” read the report.

Almost half of the foreign companies are registered in Kyiv, a preferred location for most Uzbek business owners. The Lviv region in western Ukraine, favored by Polish citizens, took up the second place.

The Odesa region, which is favored by Turkish nationals, took third place in terms of the number of registrations.

Opendatabot said wholesale trade is among the most popular business categories for foreign owners, taking 30.7 percent of all foreign-owned companies opened after Russia’s invasion, followed by real estate (6.7 percent) and computer programming (5.8 percent).

The report did not list defense or arms manufacturing in its data.

It said that an Armenian citizen owned the largest business opened by foreign nationals in wartime Ukraine.

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“The company "TENS1MA" with a charter capital of Hr.1.28 billion ($31 million) has become the largest business opened by foreigners since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. The owner of the business is a citizen of Armenia,” the report read.