Baltika, the brewer owned by Baltic Beverage Holdings, itself owned by Carlsberg and Scottish & Newcastle, is eyeing the Chinese market for growth.
The company said yesterday that it was opening a plant in Russia’s far east, just a few miles from the Chinese border, which would become a staging post, providing a distribution link for the Chinese market.
“On the 11th, we are going to be opening a plant in Khabarovsk,” Baltika president Taimuraz Bolloyev said yesterday. “We believe the adjacent region in China has 120 million residents.”
The Khabarovsk plant cost US$50m to build and will produce 10m hectolitres annually.
The investment comes while another of Baltika’s foreign projects, its aim to launch production in Belarus, has fallen on difficulties. Baltika said that the officials from Belarus had pulled out of the deal, which was launched in 2001 to begin production at the Krinitsa state brewery in Belarus, without explanation.
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By GlobalData“This project was vital to bring us closer to Western markets,” Bolloyev said. “We have not received a single answer from the Belarussian side to our many requests for information, even though these were sent to all the authorities.”
