Businesses maintain restrained assessments of their operations: what are the expectations regarding prices and employees?

Ukrainian businesses maintained cautious assessments of their business activity at the end of 2025: the expectations index in December was 49.2 points, remaining below the neutral level, but became the highest indicator for December in the entire history of observations. This was reported by the NBU, writes UNN.

Details

In December 2025, the IODA was 49.2 compared to 49.4 in November 2025, but was significantly higher than the December 2024 level (45.9) and generally had the highest value in December for all years since the beginning of the surveys.

The economic activity of enterprises was constrained by:

• further deterioration of the security situation;

• prolonged power outages;

• increase in business production costs;

destruction of production and logistics facilities;

• shortage of qualified personnel;

• seasonal factor.

At the same time, positive factors remained:

• stable consumer demand;

• receipt of international aid;

• increase in the supply of food products;

• slowing inflation.

Trade enterprises were the most optimistic among all, positively assessing their economic results for the tenth consecutive month. At the same time, industrial enterprises were the most restrained for the second consecutive time.

Construction and trade enterprises expected a more moderate increase in prices for their own products / cost of goods purchased for sale, against the background of continued high rates of increase in purchase prices. In contrast, industrial and service sector enterprises increased their estimates regarding the increase in both supplier prices and prices / tariffs for their own products / services.

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