Becoming one of the industry leaders due to the critical business restructuring was the focal point of the lecture delivered by Dmytro Skorniakov, the HarvEast agricultural holding CEO for the SE MBA students.

Dmytro joined the company as the CFO when he was 32. As an outsider, he saw the routine practices from the different angles. As a result, he managed to start restructuring from the financial function. When he was appointed the CEO, he scaled the changes in the different functions. In particular, he concentrated on the effective lines of business and got rid of underperformers. Dmytro has established three main successful lines: crop production, dairy farming, and compound feed production and seed crop rearing.
One of his main challenges was overcoming the negative legacy of the Soviet-style way of doing business in other words inefficiency and even stealing. Implementation of the current monitoring and control systems helped but the introduction of the efficient logistic system had the most positive impact.

The HarvEast’s main assets are located in the Donetsk region. Although most of the assets remained in Ukraine, the war has become a serious test of the company’s resilience. Due to the management team efforts, the HarvEast operation was stable even in the territories close to the military action zone.