About a decade after the first bottle of Beluga vodka was produced in a small Russian town, its owners are seeking global leadership in the superpremium vodka segment. The flare-up in relations between Russia and the West is doing little to dissuade them.
“We are playing long-term and a year or two years don’t make a difference for us,” OAO Synergy Chief Executive Officer Alexander Mechetin said in an interview at the company’s Moscow headquarters. “The current political tensions will be solved sooner or later. Russia will continue integrating into the world and will play a meaningful role there.”
Beluga plans to more than triple output to 1 million cases in the next five years, according to Mechetin, exporting more of the spirit to the US and other countries where people are willing to pay up while the Russian market contracts. The brand would rank third globally among superpremium vodkas, or those that sell for more than $30 a bottle, based on today’s figures.
“Our ambition is to build as strong a reputation in the vodka world as Patek Philippe has among watches or Hermes does in fashion,” Mechetin said.
The label, which means ‘great sturgeon’ in Russian, is named after the fish from the Red List of threatened species whose roe is sold as caviar. First produced in the Russian town of Mariinsk in December 2002, Beluga only entered Europe in 2009. The US and east Asia followed a year later.
Bloomberg News edited by ESM
