The capital trade and production company “BUDZIRKA” is known and respected by domestic furniture and construction workers as the official representative of the Austrian factory “Fundermax”, which is famous for its HPL panels that occupy a leading position in a wide range of its material products.

The current year started with the completion of a series of last year’s projects for the company and work continues on this year’s projects, which actively replenish its professional portfolio. Despite the difficulties of wartime, the company is successfully restoring and stabilizing its pre-war trade and production conditions. Last year, it resumed its exhibition activities, increasing foreign sales of materials and the number of implemented projects, updating its product range, and its educational and promotional “BUDZIRKA” Academy is once again operational. It is hard to believe that just a year ago, the company could have faced the brink of existence when Russian occupiers were wreaking havoc in Kyiv. However, the company’s processing centre was spared from such a fate. The director of the company, Svyatoslav Shylin, recalls that period as follows:

– When the company resumed its operations, the absence of a certain number of employees, especially female employees who were still refugees outside the capital, practically did not affect the company’s viability due to reliable IT communication, which is at a high technical level within the company. This applies to the main office. However, the Lviv branch was in a better position, so in the early stages, it took on a larger share of sales and projects because searching for clients in western regions was more effective in the first months of the war.

– If we consider the furniture and construction components of your current sales, which one is more successful?

– Furniture turned out to be more flexible and mobile than the construction industry, where projects are larger in scale and require a greater investment, so furniture makers are demonstrating a faster recovery potential for their companies. Today, some of our furniture clients have already reached pre-war levels of work, judging by the volume of material purchases they make from us.

– Of course, it is clear that for your suppliers, especially Austrian plate manufacturers, the situation was much better last year than for Ukrainian entrepreneurs, so they systematically introduced new products to the market. Did their new products manage to reach Ukraine, including your warehouses?

– Yes. It is primarily about Fundermax tile materials for countertops, which stand out with new surfaces. And not only surfaces but also the core, which is offered in different colours that correspond to the colours of the tile surface. This means that the tile edges no longer need to be edged – it is enough to polish them, which reduces the cost of producing countertops.

But we are grateful to the Austrian company (and everyone who uses its products) not only for such an attractive tile novelty but also for the fact that against the backdrop of total price increases, they maintained pre-war prices for us.

I will tell you more. To the credit of most of our suppliers, especially from Austria, and the Baltic states, they immediately responded to our call to help Ukraine, our army in the most critical period of Russian aggression. In particular, they helped with transportation. “BUDZIRKA” did not remain outside the volunteer efforts either: they handed over a significant amount of particleboard to one of the UAFM’s companies for the construction of housing for displaced persons.

– Did the war last year significantly disrupt the company’s development plans?

– Last year’s war significantly disrupted the company’s development plans. Some of those plans were postponed to better times, while some of the things that were not a priority for us in peacetime became a priority. For example, we focused on increasing our export sales. Despite the difficulties caused by the state of war, we actively participated in three international exhibitions last year, namely the furniture, construction, and design exhibitions. And at the beginning of this year, we also took part in two other Polish exhibitions. We were pleased to see that the Ukrainian furniture industry also revived its famous “KIFF” exhibition this year, which we did not miss in March.

At last year’s “Meble Polska” exhibition, it became evident that the best export opportunities on the European market would be for Ukrainian companies that have their own offices, for example, in Poland, to be closer and more convenient for foreign customers. Therefore, we immediately registered our subsidiary “Budzirka Polska” upon returning from the exhibition. We already have both an office and a warehouse for our products in Warsaw. And at this year’s “BUDMA” exhibition, our construction products were represented by “Budzirka Polska”.