MOSCOW, June 30 (RIA Novosti) - Heineken recently filed a request with the Federal Antimonopoly Service on the acquisition of Stepan Razin brewery in St. Petersburg, an official at the service told Vedomosti, a leading business daily.
The talks between Heineken and Stepan Razin's owners have reached the final stage, said a source close to the deal.
Stepan Razin is one of the last attractive independent breweries in Russia and Heineken will have to pay for it, analysts told the paper. The Dutch will pay $120-130 million, said Marat Ibragimov, an expert at the UralSib investment company. Yelena Borodenko, an analyst with Alfa Bank, said the Russian brewery was worth about $80 million.
The brewery is a highly attractive asset for strategic investors. "There are enterprises on the market that might be ready for sale, but their low production volumes do not interest big investors," said Vyacheslav Mamontov, chairman of the Executive Board of the Union of Russian Brewers.
Heineken started working on the Russian market in St. Petersburg three and a half years ago. In 2002, it bought a local brewery, Bravo, from two Icelandic businessmen for $400 million. In the past six months, it has bought Patra (Yekaterinburg), Shikhan (Sterlitamak), Volga (Nizhni Novgorod), and Sobol Beer (Novosibirsk), spending a total of about $170 million, analysts say.
Experts believe that Heineken wants to become firmly established on Russia's second most attractive market, St. Petersburg. Stepan Razin is the unquestionable leader of the city's beer market, where it holds about 31%. Even Baltika, Russia's biggest brewery, controls only 20% of the St. Petersburg market. The city accounts for 7% of the beer sales in Russia.
Vedomosti cites a research company, Biznes Analitika, as saying that Stepan Razin controls 2.8% of the nationwide beer market, and Heineken controls 8.6%.
