CEO of Ukraine's IMC to become board chairman, be replaced by COO

MOSCOW. June 18 (Interfax) - The chief operating officer of Ukrainian agribusiness group IMC, Alexander Verzhikhovsky will replace Alex Lissitsa as CEO on July 1, while Lissitsa will become chairman of the board of directors, Ukrainian media reported, citing Polish website inwestycje.pl.

IMC's board decided that Lissitsa, who joined the group in 2012 as a nonexecutive director and became CEO in 2013, will now be responsible for the company's long-term strategy and oversee its implementation.

"The area of my responsibilities will be more focused on strategic issues and possibilities of receiving additional funds from international financial organizations. Operational issues and the implementation of strategic activities will be handled by Alexander Verzhikhovsky, who has held management positions at the group for seven years, while we've been working together at the company since 2013," Lissitsa was quoted as saying in the report.

Verzhikhovsky said IMC will continue to work on the current areas of its business and focus on implementing the Smart Green strategy that it announced last year. The main goal will be to increase efficiency and transition to more material and energy efficient technologies with an emphasis on protecting the environment.

"Furthermore, as was announced earlier, in the near future we will not focus on buying agricultural land, but will focus more on strengthening the logistics component of our business in order to earn a higher margin on the sale of our harvest," Verzhikhovsky said.

IMC is an integrated agribusiness group that farms crops and has elevators and warehouses in Sumy, Poltava and Chernigov regions in northern and central Ukraine. The group has about 120,000 hectares of land and 554,000 tonnes of storage capacity, and harvested 1.002 million tonnes of grain and oilseeds in 2023.

IMC closed 2023 with a net loss of $21.03 million compared to $1.12 million a year earlier, while its EBITDA plunged more than 90% to $3.22 million. The group's revenue grew by 22.3% to $139.45 million, but the share of exports shrank to 68% from 73% a year earlier.