Henkel Bautechnik (Ukraine) retains its plans to open a dry construction mixture plant in Lviv region in January 2009.
"At the start of 2009 a new plant in Mykolaiv in Lviv region will be launched. The stoppage of the plants and dismissals of employees are not planned," the company's director general, Volodymyr Sokha, told Interfax-Ukraine.
Earlier the company said that investment in construction of the plant with the capacity of 200,000 tonnes of Ceresit products were EUR 10 million.
Sokha said that sales of construction materials of the company in H2 2008 considerably fell.
"In the middle of this year, the construction sector became one of the sectors of the Ukrainian economy that were most affected by the crisis, which evoked a slump in sales on the construction market – now sales growth are negative compared to last year," he said.
Sokha did not disclose the pace of fall in sales, referring to the fact that the financial results of 2008 will be announced only in late February 2009.
He said that the situation on the dry construction mixture market in Ukraine would remain complicated in 2009, although the company plans to use next year for business structuring.
"Unfortunately, we don’t expect revolution changes next year. On one hand, we expect a rather difficult year, but we're preparing to it. We're drawing up various anti-crisis models, and we also plan to use this year as a possibility... to structure business and strengthen of our positions on the market," he said.
As reported, in September the company launched a new dry construction mixture line with a capacity of 80,000 tonnes of products per year at a plant in Tsiuriupinsk in Kherson region. Investment in the launch of the line was EUR 2.5 million.
With the launch of the new line, the total capacity of the plant has risen to 230,000 tonnes of products per year.
Henkel Bautechnik (Ukraine) was founded in 1998.
The company is part of the Henkel Group. Its core business is the production of Ceresit and Thomsit construction mixtures, and glue for Metylan wallpapers. It also imports and sells Moment glue for household purposes and Polybit professional waterproofing materials.
In 2007, the company increased sales by 59% year-over-year, to UAH 903.889 million, and its investment in production in Ukraine by late 2007 was EUR 28 million.
