Buying a Company in Ukraine: What the Evidence Shows

In November 2024 Kyivstar first applied to Ukraine's competition authority for permission to buy Tabletki.ua, a pharmacy search and reservation platform. Clearance came on the third attempt, on 29 January 2026, and carried behavioural commitments on data use and pricing. Published estimates of the price during that period had ranged from USD 30 million to USD 80 million. When the transaction closed on 10 February 2026, VEON disclosed a consideration of USD 160 million, payable in hryvnia inside Ukraine, against last-twelve-month net profit of USD 20 million.

Every element of that sequence recurs elsewhere in the record. Ukrainian deal values are frequently estimated rather than known, regulatory timing can outlast commercial negotiation, and the assumption that Ukrainian businesses change hands cheaply is poorly supported by what completed transactions show.

The transaction record, and what it cannot settle

KPMG has tracked Ukrainian transactions above USD 5 million for more than a decade, which makes its series the longest consistent measure available.

Transactions above USD 5 million as reported by KPMG. The underlying database is revised retrospectively.

Deal counts collapsed in 2022, recovered through 2023 and 2024, and reached their highest post-invasion level in 2025. The first half of 2026 held that level. KPMG did not publish a 2021 edition because of the invasion, and the figures for that year entered the record afterwards.

Three qualifications matter as much as the direction of travel. Disclosure is partial, covering 57 per cent of deals in 2025 and 45 per cent in the first half of 2026, and no value was ever disclosed for 54 per cent of known Ukrainian transactions between 2013 and 2025. The database is also revised as information emerges. KPMG first reported the first half of 2025 as 34 deals worth USD 716 million. A year later the same six months read as 35 deals worth USD 1,029 million. Definitions differ between publishers as well. A study by the law firm Aequo with Forbes Ukraine, counting deals above USD 5 million in which the buyer took at least 10 per cent, recorded 41 transactions in 2025 rather than 63.

Counts produced by other institutions measure a different population again. The Antimonopoly Committee reviewedroughly 600 applications concerning control over petrol stations alone in 2025, a volume with little bearing on strategic acquisition. The strategic market itself is concentrated, with around half of disclosed 2025 value sitting in three transactions above USD 100 million. None of this makes the direction of travel wrong, but year-on-year percentage movements in Ukrainian deal value carry less information than they appear to.

Domestic capital set the pace, and foreign buyers were mostly already there

Forty of the 63 transactions in 2025 were domestic, worth USD 671 million and the highest domestic figure since the invasion. Inbound volume was unchanged at 13 deals in both 2024 and 2025, while disclosed inbound value fell 59 per cent to USD 232 million. Inbound deals then doubled to ten in the first half of 2026 and disclosed inbound value rose to USD 415 million. KPMG treats that as a possible early signal rather than a confirmed recovery, which is the correct reading of one half-year measured from a base of five.

Aequo attributes part of the domestic surge to the currency restrictions introduced in February 2022, which blocked foreign-exchange purchases for dividends to foreign owners and left hryvnia liquidity accumulating inside large Ukrainian companies. Kyivstar's cash position rose twelvefold over three years. That is consistent with the pattern, although those restrictions coincided with a great deal else.

The foreign buyers that did commit were largely incumbents. Bunge acquired the remaining 85 per cent of oilseed processor ViOil having bought 15 per cent the year before, and MSC was already operating in Odesa through a local subsidiary before taking a reported 51 per cent of the TIS container terminal.

The distressed market did not arrive, and the supply that exists comes from specific sources

The Aequo study states the 2022 expectation plainly. Many foreign investors anticipated owners forced to sell at heavy discounts. It concludes that this materialised only in part. Businesses unable to adapt lost value or stopped trading, while those that rebuilt supply chains, relocated production, secured backup power and held their teams became scarce, and their owners have not accepted an automatic war discount. Horizon Capital describes preparing portfolio companies with vendor due diligence for a future window rather than conducting forced exits or fire sales.

No systematic Ukrainian dataset on distressed transactions exists, so the scale of genuine special-situation supply cannot be measured. Its sources can be identified. Confiscated sanctioned assets sold through privatisation are one, and the detergent producer Vinnytsiapobutkhim was sold this way for USD 15 million in 2025. The government has since approved terms for four auctions in October 2026 covering Sumykhimprom, the Odesa Port Plant, Motordetal-Konotop and the Demurinsky mining and processing plant, industrial assets of a scale that rarely reaches the market. Portfolio decisions inside foreign groups are a second source. DP World sold its stake in TIS and left Ukraine in March 2026, Getin Holding sold Idea Bank, and MetLife agreed to sell its Ukrainian life business to PZU. Agricultural operators are a third, rebalancing land and processing assets away from regions closer to the front.

Only privatisation is advertised in advance. A buyer that defines its target universe by what is publicly listed for sale is examining a different population from the one in which these transactions occurred, and approaches in the other categories begin without a process, a timetable or a stated price.

What buyers have been paying for

In most of the larger transactions the object of purchase has been a scarce operating position rather than current earnings alone. Bunge's ViOil acquisition lifted its share of Ukrainian oilseed crushing capacity to around 15 per cent, against roughly 25 per cent held by Kernel. Kapenata, affiliated with the Enselco group, bought Agro-Region for more than USD 100 million, adding about 41,000 hectares of farmland and 200,000 tonnes of grain storage. MSC took control of Ukraine's deepest container terminal. Medlog acquired stakes in the intermodal operator N'UNIT and the Mostyska border terminal, and HHLA bought 60 per cent of the Eurobridge terminal at Batiovo. The retailer EVA bought the Omega-1 logistics complex to strengthen its own distribution. Kyivstar bought 105 MW of operating solar capacity to reduce its exposure to power disruption.

The common feature is replacement time. Crushing capacity, a deep-water berth, a gauge transfer point, a consolidated land bank and an established customer position would each take years to reproduce, and several could not be reproduced at all under current conditions. The comparison with organic entry therefore turns on a named asset rather than a general proposition. Whether owned capacity in Ukraine makes sense at all is a prior question.

Where market evidence stops and the target begins

Market data can establish scarcity. They cannot establish transferability. Nothing in the national or sector record indicates whether a plant retains its customers once the founder leaves, whether reported earnings survive normalisation, whether capacity utilisation reflects demand or its absence, whether key staff remain through mobilisation and a change of control, or whether permits and contracts follow the transaction. These are enterprise-level questions, and no aggregate Ukrainian dataset answers them. They are settled through commercial due diligence on the specific target and through testing the acquisition logic itself before the price is fixed.

The same limit applies to the choice between acquiring shares and acquiring assets. Commercially, the question is how much of the operating business sits inside the legal entity rather than in the plant and equipment, weighed against the historical exposure that follows ownership of a company. Which rights, permits and obligations actually transfer under either structure is specific to Ukrainian law and to the target, and belongs with Ukrainian legal and tax advisers before the structure is settled.

Thin price evidence, and the constraints that decide completion

Ukrainian valuation evidence is too thin to support a market-level conclusion. With fewer than three transactions in five disclosing a value in recent periods, and no published series of Ukrainian multiples, any claim of a country discount is unverifiable. The Tabletki.ua disclosure of 8.0 times last-twelve-month earnings is one of the few multiples that can be checked against a primary source, and a single transaction in a single sector establishes nothing about the market.

Deal structure has become as consequential as price. Aequo records transactions built around deferred payments, phased transfers of shareholdings, escrow, earn-outs, seller financing and options, and argues that the bidder offering the most realistic route to completion often prevails over the highest headline offer. How common any individual mechanism is in Ukraine remains unmeasured, and no standard period or proportion should be assumed. Where buyer and seller disagree on value, the disagreement usually concerns which future each is underwriting, and structure can sometimes carry a difference that a lower headline price cannot.

Two gates stand between agreement and completion. Merger clearance has become substantive rather than procedural, as the Tabletki.ua timetable showed, and competition review is a subject in its own right. The second gate is newer. A Cabinet resolution of 28 January 2026 established an interim interagency commission to screen foreign investment on national-security grounds, while the standing regime remains a draft law in committee, placed on the parliamentary agenda on 1 September 2026. As drafted, it would take effect six months after publication and would not apply retroactively. In critical infrastructure, extractive industries and defence-related production, screening is already a practical consideration and will later become a formal requirement.

What the evidence supports

Transaction counts have recovered from the 2022 collapse and held, and 2025 was the most active year since before the invasion. Domestic buyers and incumbent foreign groups account for most of that activity. Buyers have paid for scarce operating positions rather than for cheapness, and well-prepared businesses have not sold at automatic discounts.

The record does not support a general opportunity claim. It does not show that Ukrainian companies are undervalued, that a distressed market exists at scale, or that foreign buyers as a class are returning. It cannot indicate whether a particular company's performance would survive its sale, which is the question on which the price depends.

That narrows the useful work. Market evidence is sufficient to decide whether acquisition is a plausible route to something that cannot be built quickly in Ukraine. Everything beyond that has to be established about one company.