Yuksel did not provide any details about the growth rates of the company’s products such as Pepsi, Mirina, 7Up, Lipton, Lay’s and Star.
The company did have some problems on the soft drinks segment, but that was because of the decline of the entire market caused by the lower disposable income and by the rainy summer. “If we look at the entire product portfolio, we did well last year,” Levent Yuksel, business unit general manager PepsiCo Balkans told ZF.
The region he supervises consists of 11 Balkan countries (Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Republic of Moldova etc.) where the US group has five soft drinks and snacks plants and a total of 3,000 employees.
PepsiCo’s main rival on the Romanian soft drinks market, which amounts to 2.8 billion liters a year, is Coca-Cola HBC, a company that posted decline in sales volumes by up to 15% for three quarters in a row.
Quadrant-Amroq Beverages, the company operating the beverage division of PepsiCo in Romania, is the second leading player on the soft drinks market in the country. In 2012, it posted some 633 million lei (EUR140 million) in revenue and a net loss of RON66 million, according to the latest available data. The company slipped into the red for the first time in a more than a decade that year.
Its brands include Pepsi, Mirinda, 7UP, Mountain Dew (carbonated drinks), Prigat (non-carbonated drink), Adrenaline, Rockstar (energy drinks), Lipton (ice tea), Valea Izvoarelor (mineral water).
PepsiCo also owns the Star Foods EM (snacks), which posted EUR77 million revenue. Its portfolio includes Lay’s, Star and Krax. Star Foods has its own plant in Popesti-Leordeni near Bucharest.
Snacks are PepsiCo’s strong suit in Romania, on a market that is very small. Salty snack consumption in Romania stands at 0.7 kilos. lower than in almost every other European market. On the other hand, the soft drinks market was affected by the low purchasing power and the rainy summer in the past year.
“Romania is the number one market in the region for us,” Yuksel said.
The beverage division of PepsiCo operates two plants, one in Dragomiresti, Ilfov County (south of Romania) and one in Covasna, central Romania, where it bottles mineral water and soft drinks sold in glass containers.
Even though he would not say how high the revenue and profit of the company he runs were last year, Levent Yuksel says the soft drinks unit made progress in terms of profitability. “We made some progress last year, that’s all I can say.”
Although the PepsiCo plant in Dragomiresti is one of the biggest the group has in Europe, Levent Yuksel says the business he runs focuses on the local market rather than exports.
“We export significant volumes of ice tea to Turkey and Greece, but export is not necessarily a key goal in the two businesses.”
The plants are there to cater to local consumption and the company wants to grow the local market, the executive explained.
More than 80% of the production of the salty snacks plant, which makes one million bags a day is sold in Romania, according to the information previously provided by the company.
The two soft drinks plants cover more than 95% of the consumption of PepsiCo beverages in Romania.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)