(Yicai Global) March 1 -- Shares of Beiken Energy Engineering plunged after the Chinese gas drilling service provider said it halted its business in Ukraine due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Beiken [SHE: 002828] was trading down 8.7 percent at CNY9.61 (USD1.52) as of 10.45 a.m. today, after soaring to a 25-month high yesterday. Its stock gained over 31 percent last month.

Operations were suspended on Feb. 26 and it is still unclear when work will resume, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region-based company said in a statement late yesterday. The staffers and the CNY188 million (USD30 million) worth of fixed assets in Ukraine are relatively safe, it added.

Beiken won the bid for Ukrainian oil and gas company Naftogaz’s gas drilling engineering service project in June 2017 and later signed a CNY399 million contract to enter the Ukrainian market. Thereafter, it won other bids for more projects in the country, becoming the foreign drilling company with the largest business scale in Ukraine in 2019.

The drilling project of Beiken’s unit in Ukraine was under contract construction before the conflict, the company said, noting that the suspension of operations may have a material impact on its financial data.

The proportion of the Ukrainian business revenue in the company’s total was 23.8 percent in 2020, according to Beiken’s data. In the first half of 2021, its Ukrainian business achieved revenue of CNY155 million, accounting for 35.8 percent of the total.

The Ukrainian city of Poltava was one of the four main business regions for Beiken, with the other three being in China, Yicai Global learned from the company’s 2020 annual report.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione