March 01, 2007

EBA Executive Director Anna Derevyanko said that the EBA continues to build its efforts lobbying its members’ business interests and improving Ukraine’s investment climate. Despite Ukraine’s never-ending political chaos and an underdeveloped legislative base still averse to healthy trade and cross-border market relations, the country’s economy has continued to see unexpectedly strong growth.

© KP Media, photo by Konstantin Klimenko

This has attracted a burgeoning host of new investors looking for a forum from which to pitch their interests and help them capitalize on potentially lucrative business opportunities in Ukraine’s still uncertain investment climate.

Enter, the European Business Association (EBA), a non-profit business organization with a stated mission of lobbying the interests of its members and improving the country’s investment climate.

Growing together with the Ukrainian economy, the EBA has reported a steady increase in its membership ranks, growing from 180 European, multinational and Ukrainian company-members five years ago to 650 today. This growth, according to the EBA, reflects the increasing value of networking and partnership relationships in Ukraine’s maturing business community.

It has also presented the association with new challenges in its efforts to help its members network and develop their business while improving the overall investment climate in Ukraine.

Maryna Rymarenko, EBA Marketing Committee chairperson, and the marketing director of DEOL Partners, a commercial real estate services company, said that since her company became an EBA member, she entered a community of business professionals committed to pushing for positive changes, and mutually supporting each other’s business interests, on the Ukrainian market.

“We [DEOL Partners] are involved in quite a number of committees, and each one of these committees holds monthly meetings that are useful in terms of making positive changes, discussing possible joint projects and sharing experiences, as well as for networking, of course,” Rymarenko said.

“I can think of many examples when partners found each other with the help of these meetings,” she added.

While Rymarenko finds the EBA’s committees and the work they do highly useful, she said the committees could be reorganized to make them even more effective.

“Even though committees sometimes hold joint meetings, in most cases each committee holds events on different days, and I think the EBA should somehow reorganize the way that committees work in order for the EBA to become more productive and increase the quality of its work.”

Rymarenko said that both foreign and Ukrainian companies, which are members of the EBA, also try to be active in several other international organizations in their drive to promote inter-business communication and build their networks.

“Even though the EBA is a leader in terms of lobbying the interests of its members, our company is also a member of the American Chamber of Commerce.”

“The profile committees that are of interest to us [Real Estate and Marketing Committees] are more developed at the EBA, while membership in the American Chamber also opens up a lot of doors,” she said.

As to why some of the EBA’s 14 committees are more effective in their work than others, active EBA members say that the strength of a committee could either be a function of how early the committee was created, or how strong its leader is.

According to Tom Cradock-Watson, a partner and the head of the assurance and advisory business services department at Ernst & Young in Ukraine, and a longstanding EBA board member, the EBA’s Health Care Committee was among the first to be established at the association.

“Some foreign pharmaceuticals companies had trouble with obtaining the necessary permits here in Ukraine. At that point in time, they thought it would be good to have such an organization,” Cradock-Watson said.

He said that as a result, those pharmaceutical firms became active in using the EBA to achieve their goals in the long and arduous process of adjusting to regulations in Ukraine’s healthcare sector.

In addition to Kyiv, the EBA has expanded its presence to five other cities in Ukraine since its establishment in the capital in 1999, making it easier for company-members from the regions to take an active part in the EBA’s regular events, according to Cradock-Watson.

“One of the first cities where we opened a subsidiary was Lviv,” he said. “The city is close to the European border and … there were a lot of companies that had an interest in trying to improve customs regulations by becoming EBA members, but at the same time, couldn’t manage to come to Kyiv every time there was a meeting.”

Like DEOL Partners’ Rymarenko, Cradock-Watson said the EBA needed improvement in some areas, particularly with respect to its marketing and public relations activities.

“They [the EBA] regularly update information about the investment climate in Ukraine, but I think there’s a better way to do it,” Cradock-Watson said.

“It’s important for the EBA to stay focused on its goals and values,” he added. “I can tell that we stepped away from our objectives a little bit in the last years. Fortunately, we reformulated our goals during a recent meeting.”

Cradock-Watson said that since the EBA has been representing the interests of an increasing number of companies, the association should think of developing more services to meet those companies’ needs, such as advisory services.

Internal changes at the EBA needed to be complemented with some changes to the association’s external policy, according to Cradock-Watson.

“Relationships with other organizations, such as the American Chamber of Commerce, for example, should be improved for these organizations to enhance, but not to duplicate, each other’s activities,” he said.

EBA Executive Director Anna Derevyanko said that she’s open to constructive criticism and was ready to make every effort to improve the EBA’s performance.

“Every year we set up priorities for each of our committees for a period of the nearest three years and analyze the results at the end of each year,” Derevyanko said. “It’s not easy to lobby and it’s not easy to improve the investment climate in Ukraine, still, that’s what we work on.”

She said that compared with last year, the EBA’s activities in Ukraine have become better organized, in part due to the work of the association’s five subsidiaries in the regions.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have enough resources to provide enough communication to all the members of the organization. We would like to have an individual connection with every member,” she said.