Ten beer plants with 9,000 employees and over 1.1 billion euros in annual turnover are the figures behind InBev's operations in Russia, managed since the beginning of this year by Mihai Albu, the Romanian who left the helm of Bergenbier in 2006.
"If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere in the world," Mihai Albu, 46, reasoned when weighing the proposal from Europe's largest beer producer InBev, a company with turnover worth over 14.4 billion euros last year, which Albu has been employed with since 1996.
"At the beginning of November 2007, I was flying to Havana with the InBev chairman of Central and Eastern Europe for a board meeting of our Cuban division, whose chairman I was at the time. Somewhere above the North Atlantic, he asked me directly if I wanted to take over the management of operations in Russia, and added that he would understand if I refused for personal reasons," recounts Albu.
As he was already an expat (he had been based in Prague for two years) and he knew what it was like to relocate and move your family from one country to another, in the week after the proposition, Mihai Albu consulted his family and they decided to accept.
"The decision making process took a week, and I am sure we would have made the same decision even if we had discussed things for another month. At the end of November, I was starting to take over operations and my wife was already looking for a home and a school for our son."
The factors that persuaded him to accept the position of chairman of Sun Interbrew Russia, a company which holds a 19.2% market share, were mainly professional ones: "Managing a mega-business, increasing my visibility within InBev, the possibility to replicate everything I had done in Romania and Central Europe in the biggest country in the world."
From his position as chairman of Sun Interbrew, Albu says the current dynamics of the Russian beer market is somewhat similar to what happened in Romania a few years ago.
"Market domination by 4-5 global players, a flood of new brands, the launch of regional brands nationwide, a lack of consumer loyalty, the fragmentation and consolidation of sales channels and the entry of international retail players on the market. All of these are happening now in Russia, but change is much more rapid and everything happens on an enormous scale compared with Romania," says Albu. According to the chairman of Sun Interbrew, in Russia, demand exceeds the ability to develop and adapt the infrastructure (transport, communications, workforce).
"We have 5 plants and over 9,000 employees, which cover a universe of sales points spread over an extensive area that covers 11 time zones. Our sales operations never stop, as when sales agents in Vladivostok come home, those in Kaliningrad go to work."
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