Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has laid waste to housing, infrastructure and agriculture, sending millions of Ukrainians westward. One homegrown company has used this as a stepping stone for international expansion.

“The war was a great incentive for Ukrainian businesses to expand their operations,” Vyacheslav Klymov, co-founder of private courier and postal company Nova Post, tells fDi. “It is very uncomfortable to understand the war as an opportunity, but it has been a great chance for Ukrainian businesses to go to European markets.”

With its sorting facilities destroyed all over the country, Nova Post had to rethink its future. “We understood we had to do two things: rebuild our operations in Ukraine ... and expand into the West to serve customers who had left the country,” he says. 

Nova Post’s globalisation

Established in 2001, Nova Post only had one foreign subsidiary, which was in former USSR country Moldova, prior to Russia’s invasion. Now, in neighbouring Poland, where the majority of Ukrainian refugees first fled to, the company boasts 31 branches in more than 20 cities. It has also expanded into other EU member states: the Czech Republic, Romania, Lithuania and Germany.

The main services the company provides are express delivery, fulfilment services and cross-border express delivery. The latter enables Ukrainian refugees to send goods, such as clothes, to their family back home — and vice versa. “It’s very fast to send [parcels] from Warsaw or Prague to Kyiv,” he stresses.

When asked whether Nova Post had to raise capital to finance this expansion, he said that the company did it all on its own before stressing that “we tried to be very lean in our expansion”. “But I’m absolutely sure that we will need capital from Western funds as we expand further,” he adds, citing a future expansion in the US. The immediate next step, however, is to establish a cross-border delivery network in central and eastern Europe.

The company logo has remained unchanged, though its name has undergone a slight alteration: swapping from ‘Нова пошта’ (‘Nova Poshta’) to simply ‘Nova Post’ to make the name easier for an international audience. “I actually want to change our name in Ukraine to ‘Nova Post’ as a symbol of our globalisation,” he says. 

Ukraine’s reconstruction

Back in Ukraine, Nova Post has also been part of the war effort. After Kherson was liberated on November 11, the delivery company was there the following day with food, generators, medicine and other humanitarian aid. After the the dam of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station collapsed, the company delivered cargo and parcels at its own expense to the affected areas in Kherson oblast. 

Ukraine is still the “mother market”, Mr Klymov says proudly. “The company is growing in Ukraine, not just in these new markets. We believe in Ukraine. Small businesses are growing, especially in e-commerce which is a key driver for express delivery,” he says.

The World Bank has estimated that the cost to rebuild the country will be at least $411bn over the next 10 years. More than 400 companies pledged support at the Ukraine Recovery Conference held in London in June. Last year, Switzerland and Ukraine hosted the international Ukraine Recovery Conference 2022 in Lugano, which was dubbed the “international kick-off for the recovery process in Ukraine”.

But Mr Klymov insists that “it is Ukrainian businesses that will play the most important role in the reconstruction of Ukraine, not international businesses”.

“Just now, we are finishing rebuilding two of our biggest sorting hubs, one in Kyiv and another in Odesa. We are building Ukraine now. The true reconstruction is not [going to take place] in Lugano or in London, but rather inside Ukraine.”

This article first appeared in the August/September 2023 print edition of fDi Intelligence