40% of state-owned companies were unprofitable in 2023

In 2023, 789 state-owned and state-run enterprises submitted financial reports. This represents only a quarter of all state-owned companies in Ukraine in 2024. The fewest companies reported their financial performance in 2021, with only 475.

«Unlike private businesses, state enterprises have significant advantages—not only are they state-owned, but they often operate as monopolies. This means that with effective management, they have the potential to be even more profitable than private businesses. However, according to financial data from the State Statistics Service, nearly half of state enterprises operate at a loss even under these conditions. We created the State-Owned Companies Register to make it easier to compare their financial performance and identify which state-owned assets are working most inefficiently», 

— commented Oleksiy Ivankin, head of Opendatabot.

We monitor the efficiency of state enterprises on the State-Owned Companies Register page.

On average, 40% of the state-owned enterprises that submitted reports operate at a loss. For example, last year out of 789 companies, 313 incurred losses (39.7%), in 2022 out of 797 enterprises, 389 were in the red. In 2021, among those who reported their financial condition, 30.9% were running at a loss.

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Last year, the largest losses were experienced by the “Boryspil” airport, totaling 1.4 billion UAH. And in terms of the pace of loss growth, “Dobropil’liavuhillia-Vydobutok” leads with an increase of nearly 12 times, from 122 million UAH to almost 1.4 billion UAH per year.

Despite a significant number of loss-making companies, there are also those that are increasing their turnovers. For example, the turnover of “Ukrspetseksport” grew by almost a third over the year, reaching 32 billion UAH. And “Pavlohrad Chemical Plant” has increased its turnover by 2.6 times since the beginning of the full-scale war, reaching 8.2 billion UAH.

Despite their high turnovers, the leaders in terms of profit are quite different companies. The most profitable state enterprise in the country is “Forests of Ukraine” with 2.8 billion UAH in profit. And the largest increase in profit was demonstrated by the seaport “Chornomorsk”: over the year, its profits increased 26 times, from 37.2 million to 986 million UAH.