Last year, the share of cars assembled in Ukraine on the primary market was only 7%, while in 2008 this figure reached 42%. Over the past ten years, export volumes have practically dwindled to nothing. Currently, of the twelve enterprises engaged in car assembly in the country, only seven are operational. During this time, the Kremenchuk car assembly plant of the AIS corporation, the Vipos enterprise in Kherson, and the Ilyichevsk auto-aggregate plant, where ZAZ cars were produced, have closed. Only in the passenger car segment did the industry lose the ability to produce 135,000 units annually.
At the beginning of the year, ZAZ's debt to banking institutions reached 3 billion UAH and 24 million USD, the Bogdan corporation had debts of more than 4 billion UAH, and Eurocar had 2.7 billion UAH. At the same time, before the crisis, ZAZ invested 380 million USD in production development, Bogdan invested 345 million USD, and Eurocar invested 250 million USD.
In 2018, there is a high probability that a number of Ukrainian car manufacturers will go bankrupt, since in the current economic conditions they are unlikely to stay afloat.
The situation is becoming even more complicated due to the fact that the state is not taking any steps to overcome the crisis, which is why one cannot count on a favorable development of events in the domestic automotive industry.
And all this is happening at a time when the global car market is growing and requires the global industry to increase additional capacity.
In this regard, the created and updated Ukrainian enterprises can still count on revival if they establish partnerships with world leaders of the automotive industry, raise the technological level of the country, provide new jobs and replenish budgets at various levels through taxes.
However, to implement such a scenario, it will be necessary to create a special investment climate that would give Ukraine noticeable advantages compared to neighboring states.
