Between the buildings that dominate a giant chess board, a trampoline area and a food truck, some young Ukrainians cross the largest park dedicated to the country’s high-tech sector, UNIT.City. Before the war, this “city within the city”, according to Denys Shymanskyi, the site’s communication manager, it welcomed more than 3,000 employees and 110 companies. Created in 2016 on the site of an abandoned factory in the capital, the space aims to be an ultramodern center combining work, life and education with high technologies. “The idea is an ecosystem in which everything goes faster, where start-ups can find money and investors directly on site,” explains Denys Tuchkov, the sales manager.
UNIT.City is beginning to pick up some color and regain some semblance of activity since its reopening in early June. At the start of the war, throughout the country, tens of thousands of employees specializing in the information technology sector, IT, relocated to the west of the country, to regions far from the fighting, where the stranger. If UNIT.City has only regained 15% of its normal activity, the apparent calm that reigns between the towers equipped with “intelligent cameras” in no way reflects the dynamism of the environment.
In a situation where the economy has collapsed and where, according to World Bank forecasts, Ukraine could see its GDP plunge by 45% by the end of the year, the country’s third economic sector represents a windfall. important to the authorities. According to the National Bank of Ukraine, for the first quarter of 2022, IT provided the Ukrainian budget with a record $2 billion in export revenue compared to $1.44 billion in the previous year, in the same period. . According to the association IT Ukraine, the volume of exports even increased by 28%. Additionally, the association said the number of IT specialists reached 285,000 in 2021, up from 244,000 a year earlier.
“The pandemic has prepared us to work like this”
For Dominique Petiot, CEO of UNIT.City for three years, this sector is the one “who is doing the best”. The Franco-American entrepreneur who left the country a few days before the start of the invasion considers that companies have learned from the experience of the pandemic. “We have been very prepared for remote work. And tech lends itself quite well to it since you don’t need to be in an office to develop. » There is also a second factor: “The majority of Ukrainian tech customers are foreigners, explains the man. Those who had Ukrainian customers necessarily had to stop. But those who had foreign customers were able to continue, because their sources of income did not stop. »
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