United Romanian Bereprod Breweries (URBB), which makes Tuborg and Carlsberg beer under licence for the Romanian market, will invest nearly 1 million dollars in a new campaign to promote Skol. URBB is the number five on the market.
"Against last year, we have set out to achieve a 30% increase in sales for Skol beer in 2005. Skol is the fourth best-selling brand in the world. In Romania it is one of the leading premium brands, with 97% awareness," says Mihaela Necula, Skol brand manager.
The Skol brand was first developed on the Brazilian market and is now present in 31 countries as part of Carlsberg Group's portfolio.
The beer market has witnessed an accentuation of the difference between premium and superpremium brands on the one hand, and PET-bottled beers, which grew by more than 30% last year, on the other.
This was one of the reasons behind URBB's announcement early this year that they were considering launching PET-bottled beer, though they later denied this.
URBB reported higher sales for last year: an 11% increase in terms of volume to 975,000 hectolitres, and an 18% increase in terms of value to 52 million euros.
URBB took out a 40 million-dollar loan two years ago in order to buy equipment to expand production capacity at its facility in Bucharest to 1.4 million hectolitres a year. It also invested 1 million euros in renewing its fleet of transport vehicles that operate within Bucharest, following the decision by local authorities to prohibit the access of heavy vehicles to the centre of Bucharest.
The domestic beer market was worth around 600 million euros or 14 million hectolitres last year, representing a slight increase on the 2003 results of 550 million euros and 12.8 million hectolitres. The big four continued to call the shots last year: Brau Union Romania (the Romanian branch of Holland's Heineken Group), CBR (a member of SAB Miler Group), Interbrew (member of Inbev) and Tuborg (a branch of Denmark's Carlsberg Group). They were joined by European Drinks, which leapfrogged directly to fourth position, coming very close to third, and Bere Mures, which consolidated its number six position.
stelian.negrea@zf.ro
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