Interpipe Group

In 1932 the factory began producing drilling pipes, and by 1933, it employed 7,020 workers and 420 engineers.

It was destroyed during World War II. The factory's reconstruction began in 1943, and production was entirely resumed by 1948. The plant operated under the name Karl Liebknecht until the collapse of the USSR and Ukraine's subsequent independence.

In 1990 the Interpipe group was founded and the factory became a key asset of the company.

In 2012, Interpipe launched the steel factory with a production capacity of 1.32 million tons per year. The mill was equipped with an electric furnace for generating steel from scrap metal produced from the waste of pipe and rail wheel production. The construction took 5 years and cost $700 million.

Interpipe began supplying steel to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) market in the early 2000s with up to 16% of global sales coming from this region. In early 2016, the company registered its trademark in the UAE.

Also in 2016, Interpipe completed a $16.2 million upgrade to facilities in Dnipro with a focus on increased railway related products and production.

In mid-2016 the company announced plans to expand its business presence in Qatar.

Awarded a long-term contract in 2016, in 2017, Interpipe delivered an initial order of 3,000 wheels to the Saudi Railways Organization (SRO).

USA

In 2014, the U.S. Department of Commerce and Interpipe signed a price undertaking agreement on pipe products. This agreement resulted from an anti-dumping investigation into Interpipe's activities in the U.S. market and required Ukrainian pipes to be sold at a fixed price. This agreement was renewed annually but ended in 2019 as it was not extended.

In July 2021, the U.S. government imposed an anti-dumping duty of 23.75%, leading Interpipe to announce its exit from the market.

In 2023, the Ukrainian government reported the removal of all anti-dumping restrictions.

However, in the summer of 2024, the U.S. government imposed a new anti-dumping duty of 4.99%. This decision followed an investigation initiated by Vallourec Star, which found that Interpipe had sold approximately 40,000 tons of pipes in the U.S. in 2019 at dumping prices totaling over $40 million.

Criticism

Quality problems

In June 2023, Ukrnafta issued a tender for casing pipe. Roughly 80% of the pipe supplied by Interpipe in response to a contract signed under this tender were rejected for poor quality. This pipe was deemed totally unusable due to severe issues with threading. Interpipe was the only company that responded to the tender. An industry expert called the supplied materials "scrap metal" and blamed Ukraine's Ministry of Economy for allowing Interpipe to exercise de facto monopoly power over the steel pipe market.

Over-pricing investigation

As of August 2024, Interpipe was involved in a pre-trial investigation by the Ukrainian government regarding the overpricing of casing pipes, causing substantial damage to the state. Officials from Ukranafta are nominally the subjects of the investigation. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) conducted the investigation. During a raid, NABU seized a mobile phone from an Interpipe director. The phone was encrypted. The NABU sought and received permission from the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) to crack the phone. The phone belonged to Denys Morozov. The HACC determined in a pre-trial ruling that the overpricing, amounting to about UAH 18 million, was conducted through the abuse of transfer pricing by subsidiaries of Interpipe and other companies.

Russia

Interpipe's subsidiary in Russia is known as Interpipe-M. In 2022 alone, Interpipe-M had a revenue of 131.66 million rubles and paid 36 million rubles to the Russian Federation in income tax. Interpipe also continued operating in Russia after the limited invasion of Ukraine in 2014. In 2017 and 2018, the company earned about $200 million for each year. Interpipe's financial filings are publicly available online from Russian government websites. These filings list Interpipe's business locations, tax payments, senior executives in Russia, certain expenses, etc. Both the Russian and Ukrainian subsidiaries of Interpipe are owned by the Cypriot company Interpipe Ltd. which is in turn owned by another Cypriot entity called Interpipe Holdings PLC. Through a complicated web of other companies, Interpipe is primarily owned by Viktor Pinchuk.

However, Interpipe denied all claims about being present on the Russian market following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The company stated that after February 24, 2022, it was not involved in any business operations in Russia and launched the elimination process of the subsidiary trading company.