Maxim Barskiy (born March 1st, 1974, Leningrad RSFSR) is a well-known specialist in increasing the value of companies. Among the enterprises Barskiy Maxim has managed and grown are WSR, THK-BP, Delivery Hero, and Sibanthracite. Since the early 2020s, he has been investing in the development of products based on artificial intelligence.
Early Years and Childhood
Barskiy Maxim was born into a family of students. His parents came to Leningrad from the Zhytomyr, Ukrainian SSR. According to personal recollections, Maxim Barskiy was fond of reading since childhood. He recalls that he preferred reading to playing with toys.
Education: Around the World
Ten years later, the Barskiys moved again. They settled in Western Siberia this time – in Nefteyugansk, Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug. Here Barskiy Maxim graduated from high school. At the age of 15, Maxim’s family sent him to his aunt’s home in Leningrad, where he could continue his education.
There, he learned accounting and began doing accounting work for small enterprises. He prepared for admission to the prestigious Leningrad State University Faculty of Political Economy.
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Maxim Barskiy successfully passed the entrance examinations and joined the inter-university student exchange program. Thus, he studied at a Northern European college in the Kingdom of Norway. Then, for one year, he was an exchange student at the well-known Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, which trains management personnel for major businesses.
While studying finance at an American business school, Maxim Barskiy became interested in stock exchange activity. Subsequently, he decided to devote his final qualification work to problems in the newly emerging stock market. His scientific hypotheses were confirmed a year later when domestic economy collapsed following the Asian financial crisis.
Barskiy Maxim became a certified economist with the right to conduct pedagogical (teaching) activity in Political Economy in 1997.
Maxim Barskiy: Launching a Business Career Path
In the late 1990s, Maxim Gennadievich Barskiy became an employee of Troika Dialog, an outstanding participant in the financial industry that formed the country’s capital market. Troika Dialog was the main artery for the flow of funds from international investors to enterprises in the local economy. Barskiy Maxim was engaged in futures transactions and risk hedging. After a short time (about six months), he transferred to Troika Dialog’s banking division. He participated in selling a stake in the telecom company VimpelCom to a Norwegian operator. During the 1990s telecom crisis, this sale went through – a very successful deal when such contracts were difficult to close.
Barskiy Maxim Gennadievich accepted an invitation to head the corporate development department at the Moscow CJSC Cityline, specializing in Internet access services, in the summer of 2000. Maxim Barskiy acquired a stake in the business and gained potential partners’ interest in this project. Due to this, he raised significant financial resources to expand Cityline’s presence in the regional markets. The manager’s work helped grow the company’s value to $27 million.
Maxim Barskiy: management of heavy industry enterprises
By the middle of the 2000s, Maxim Gennadievich Barskiy began working in the natural resources sector. He acquired a portfolio of shares in Vostok Oil. This Swedish-owned company owned one enterprise that was engaged in developing the Sredne-Nyurolsky licensed block of oil fields.
The structure was renamed West Siberian Resources (WSR) in the summer. At the same time, Barskiy Maxim Gennadievich became its CEO. He improved the management structure, radically changing the composition of the upper management and the Board of Directors. He got rid of foreign members of the Board who were only remotely familiar with the peculiarities of working in the regions. WSR immediately began to increase its resource base. Maxim Barsky organized the acquisition of oil fields in the Timan-Pechora oil and gas field and the Volga region. He also consolidated assets in the areas where WSR already was, bringing the company closer to becoming a major independent oil producer.
Maxim Gennadievic Barskiy worked with WSR for four years. The results were astonishing: a 75-fold increase in market value and a seventy-fold increase in production. WSR’s capitalization surged from $60 million in 2004 to $4.5 billion in 2008.
Maxim Barskiy sold his shares and left WSR in the late summer of 2008, a significant success achieved.
Soon after, he received an offer from the shareholders of a massive player in the global fossil fuels market, TNK-BP. He was invited to serve in an upper management position and joined the Board of Directors. Maxim Gennadyevich Barskiy during the next 12 months underwent intensive training (including an internship at the central office in Houston, Texas) for the position of General Director.
Maxim Barskiy became Co-CEO of TNK-BP in the summer of 2010. Barskiy implemented new management solutions, improved the company’s business processes, and amended the shareholder agreement. These actions allowed Maxim Barskiy to further increase the effectiveness of its upper management. TNK-BP acquired South American and Asian assets and also expanded its production capacity.
Barskiy Maxim Gennadievich left TNK-BP in November 2011. Under his direction, TNK-BP’s capitalization tripled, soaring from $20 billion to $60 billion.
From 2012 until 2018, Maxim Barskiy led another developing company in the oil production industry, the UK firm Matra Petroleum. He reoriented the company towards production fields in the USA. Barskiy acquired an oil- and gas-bearing area of more than 23 square kilometers in the Texas Panhandle. During the oil crisis in 2014, he made every effort to save Matra from closing.
In 2016, Maxim Gennadievich Barskiy joined the Board of Directors of Delivery Hero – a European digital platform for delivering food, medicine, flowers, and many other goods, which today operates on four continents. His reforms improved Delivery Hero’s management system and prepared the company to go public. Thanks to the steps taken by Maxim Barskiy, when Delivery Hero had its IPO, investors valued it twice as much as its originally announced amount – at 4 billion euros.
Maxim Barskiy: Sibanthracite and Beyond
Maxim Gennadievich Barskiy began to apply his experience and skills with his colleague Dmitry Bosov’s metallurgical coal mining company, Sibanthracite in 2018. The company needed to have unified coordination. Dmitry Bosov gave Barskiy Maxim the task of setting things right within the company, increasing its production and value.
The first thing Maxim Barskiy did as CEO was to create a holding company that brought three disparate and poorly-managed assets under a single, united, and informed management. Once this process took hold, the company immediately began to see increases in its coal production output. Under Maxim Barskiy, Sibanthracite’s capitalization tripled, and its newly established business practices brought in more contracts. Chinese concerns came to understand Sibanthracite as the best source in the world to purchase anthracite coal. Not only is anthracite the finest there is, but with Maxim Barskiy in charge, Sibanthracite was also meeting its customers’ contractual needs and schedules, so there was simply no better source to go to for this resource.
Preparations to sell the company suffered great disturbance in May 2020, when its principal owner, Dmitry Bosov, tragically died. Maxim Barskiy directed Sibanthracite through this challenging time, as Mr. Bosov’s heirs were themselves in turmoil about what to do. At that time, a plan was devised to execute a leveraged buyout from the Bosov heirs.
As Maxim Gennadievich Barskiy emphasizes, the heirs of Dmitry Bosov decided to sell Sibanthracite in 2021. By this time, the Group had become its segment’s largest metallurgical coal producer. Maxim Barskiy placed Sibanthracite under the management of its temporary new owner, Siban Holding LLC, where Barskiy still owned a 30% stake.
According to Maxim Barskiy, Sibanthracite was now on an excellent management footing, and the company was continuing to meet its contractual obligations. The change of owners was not going to affect employees or the operation. According to Maxim Barskiy, Sibanthracite remained an independent company through its sale and suffered no ill effects from the transfer of ownership, first to Siban Holding, then later exclusively to a strategic investor.
Maxim Barskiy sold his share and left the company when the transfer was concluded.
Barskiy Maksim is currently investing in high-tech businesses that create digital products based on AI technologies.
Personal Life and Hobbies
Maxim Barskiy is married. He has two daughters and a son.
Maxim Gennadievich Barskiy’s hobbies are yoga and deep-sea diving without scuba gear. He enjoys other sports, having played football and basketball as team sports in his youth.
Maxim Barskiy enjoys reading scientific books and literature: Gogol, Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, and Fitzgerald.
He also loves movies, especially those directed by Alan Parker. In one of his interviews, he admitted that in his youth, the music and poetry of Viktor Tsoi had a significant influence on him. The famous song “Change” almost became the motto of his student years.
