Ukraine’s “Metinvest” Steel Group Currently Operates At 30-50% Capacity – CEO

Metinvest Mining and Metallurgical Group is currently operating at 30%-50% of the pre-war levels and will be able to restore its previous volumes within six months to a year after the end of the war, Metinvest CEO Yuriy Ryzhenkov has told the British edition of The Economist.

According to him, two metallurgical plants in Mariupol were badly damaged.

“We don’t know how badly damage is, but they are definitely not operational right now. And definitely after the de-occupation will take place, it will take time to get them operational again… Now when we are talking about the mills that are in the occupied territory, specifically Azovstal and Illich [Iron and Steel Works], we have to see what sort of damages they sustained during the bombing. I would suspect that the damage was substantial there, and it will take us some time until we can restore pre-war operations,” the CEO said in the Money Talks podcast of The Economist entitled “How to rebuild Ukraine.”

At the same time, he said that most of the mills under control of the group have not been damaged or substantially damaged, so gaining them back to the pre-war levels it’s a matter of months: “within half year or a year, we will definitely can get all of our mills that under control to the pre-war levels.”

At the same time, the top manager pointed out the substantial difficulties of working in wartime.

“We are operating at 30% to half of the pre-war levels. Even that capacity is difficult to achieve because of logistics, as the Black Sea ports are not available for the shipments of iron ore, steel and coal for Ukraine. We have to ship via land routes, and the capacity of land routes unfortunately, is either inadequate for the substantial shipments, or too expensive for some of the goods that we are selling,” Ryzhenkov said.

Asked about how Metinvest contributes to the country’s defense, the CEO aid that since the beginning of the invasion, all enterprises started to produce military use materials, like barbed wire, fences, concrete blocks or anti-tank hedgehogs. Also, as the war progressed, the group’s enterprises were turned towards the military needs – they started to produce armored steel for the bulletproof vests. Over 150,000 bulletproof vests from Metinvest will protect the soldiers of the Ukrainian army and territorial defense.

“We started to produce special armored bunkers for soldiers that will use at the front line. The latest we are producing the stoves which can be used in winter to heat the food and to warm up in the field. So all of those things we were doing in quiet substantial volumes in the last eight months. At the same time, there are lots of things that we are buying and supplying to the military. Like for example, we have supplied more than a thousand drones to the Ukrainian military we’ve supplied tens of thousands of protection helmets, we’ve supplied medicine and other equipment that is necessary at the front line,” the CEO of Metinvest said in Money Talks, announcing the group’s adaptation to the conditions of the war and the time it would take to resume production after the war.