"I’ll shortly present the company. AXPO is a Swiss based company. Our roots are from electricity. In Ukraine, we are known as active natural gas player. But we are actively looking into the power market since its opening several years ago. And now with this ENTSO-E integration we are looking at the power market and its opportunities. We are going to become a big part of this market. To the moment there are still a lot of problems in the market, but we hope that the problems will be resolved soon. Also, one of solutions to many problems we see in the possibility of export with this integration. We are looking forward to see market principles here, so that anyone here could get access to the capacity, and that it’s free access, and so on.
Despite these opportunities, we still see some very crucial problems. For example, we have also a Ukrainian company, and if we want to export power we will need somehow to resolve the issue of VAT. Because currently during the war, the VAT is not reimbursed. And VAT is 20% of the price, which is quite an amount. It’s also a problem for state companies now to export huge volumes of electricity.
The second. We are ready to offtake power from the European side. And then we are looking for partners here. We know that the state companies have to sell their power in auctions. But there is no possibility to buy this power in the auctions for foreign companies if we buy it on the border, for example. We work in Hungary, in Slovakia, in Romania, but because of the VAT problem we cannot buy big volumes in Ukraine, export it and take the VAT risk on us.
And still in general we see a lot of opportunities in this integration and opening up of the export market. But all these opportunities also depend on approach. Will it be market approach or some regulated approach: this is very important for us".