The owners and CEOs of Ukrainian companies were assessed based on the scale and profitability of their businesses, using publicly available financial data as well as information provided by the companies themselves. At the same time, an expert jury evaluated each candidate against three additional criteria: business resilience and growth, social responsibility, and leadership through example. The 100 entrepreneurs who received the highest overall scores were named the award winners.
As Ekonomichna Pravda since Yuriy Ryzhenkov took over the leadership of Metinvest in 2013, the company has successfully navigated several major crises, including the war in Donbas, the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while retaining its position as one of the country’s largest taxpayers and exporters.
Under Ryzhenkov’s leadership, Metinvest has implemented large-scale programmes to modernise production, improve energy efficiency and accelerate the environmental transformation of its operations. Despite the loss of assets in Mariupol, the blockade of seaports and the disruption of logistics caused by the full-scale war, the Group restructured its operating model, redirected exports and maintained operations at most of its facilities.
According to Ekonomichna Pravda editor Mykola Maksymchuk, Ryzhenkov combines two qualities that are uncommon in the steel industry:
“The first is that he is a Western-style manager. Fifteen years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine that a company bringing together Ukraine’s major steelmaking assets would be led by someone who had not begun their career at a blast furnace in the Soviet era.
This is probably the main reason why the owner entrusted Ryzhenkov, at the age of 36, with managing one of his two largest businesses. A talented and forward-looking finance professional with a UK management education, he thinks not in terms of Soviet-style five-year plans but focuses on results while adhering to the principle of transparency. Just as in Western business practice, which Metinvest seeks to emulate, he attracts financing and, wherever he turns, achieves success.
The second defining quality is his humanity. His colleagues describe him not as someone who simply gives orders, but as a leader who listens to alternative viewpoints before making decisions.
This quality is perhaps best illustrated by things that the wider public either does not know about or simply overlooks. For example, Metinvest provides support to individual military units and to the Armed Forces of Ukraine as a whole that the company does not publicise. Or the fact that, after 2022, Ryzhenkov switched to speaking Ukrainian, which, it seems, he has now mastered perfectly,” Maksymchuk concludes.