TRANSFORMATION OF UKRAINE’S CEMENT MARKET STRUCTURE UNDER THE IMPACT OF TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS

Abstract

The article examines the impact of multinational corporate consolidation on the structure of Ukraine's cement market under wartime conditions. It provides a comparative analysis of the sales dynamics of leading global players (Holcim, Heidelberg Materials, CRH plc) against industry-wide trends in the national market. The focus is placed on identifying the ownership structure of the country's leading production facilities and assessing the extent to which a single multinational group has come to dominate the national supply side. Based on corporate registry data, it is shown that most of the country's leading production capacities belong to the CRH group, which substantially increased its market share following the acquisition of a national producer's assets. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index is applied to confirm a high level of market concentration, with the single corporate structure accounting for the dominant share of the overall index value. At the same time, significant gaps are emphasized between the pace of financial consolidation pursued by the parent company and the pace of adopting sustainability-oriented product strategies at the level of its Ukrainian subsidiaries, where public disclosure of low-carbon product shares remains absent.

The paper further demonstrates that the consolidation process was accompanied by institutional resistance from competitors and regulatory authorities, indicating that mechanisms capable of restraining excessive market concentration persist even in a capital-intensive, oligopoly-prone industry. It is established that the industry as a whole retained its capacity to increase sales volumes despite a decline in the number of active enterprises, with a synchronous drop in both indicators occurring only during the crisis year of 2022 under the impact of the full-scale invasion. The results suggest that ownership structure is a material factor shaping both the competitive position and the sales resilience of cement producers, providing a basis for further research into the statistical relationship between ownership type and sales stability, as well as into the pace of transfer of global sustainability strategies to national subsidiaries operating under wartime conditions.