‘This is business as usual’: boss of bombed Ukrainian vodka maker seeks to expand exports | Ukraine
Businesses in Ukraine are “not sitting around waiting for the war to end” and are trying to expand despite bombs hitting shipments out of the country, according to one of Britain’s leading vodka exporters.
Yuriy Sorochynskyi, general manager of Nemiroff vodka, Ukraine’s largest spirits export brand, said its products continued to flow into major chains such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s as they cope with the harsh realities of almost four years of war.
Late last year, one of the brand’s shipping containers containing 17,000 bottles was hit by a bomb in the Ukrainian port of Odesa. A supplier’s shipment was also recently affected.
“One or two of our containers were destroyed due to missile attacks in the port,” he said. “This is now business as usual.”
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, maintaining production of major exports, from vodka to grain and sunflower seeds, has been a key part of the country’s combat capability.
The brand grew rapidly as Russian vodkas were withdrawn from most supermarket shelves in Europe in support of Ukraine. Sales in the UK rose 24% to £6.25 million last year and it is now one of the fastest growing premium vodka brands.
Nemiroff has sponsored Ukrainian heavyweight boxing champion Oleksandr Usyk and has partnered with Premier League football clubs Aston Villa, Fulham, West Ham and Everton. The brand is currently listed in Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Co-op, and returned to the duty-free market in October with products at Heathrow and Gatwick.
More than 40% of the brand’s sales are now in the west, after sales dropped from around 10 million cases worldwide in 2010 to 2.4 million cases in 2022 following its exit from the Russian and Belarusian markets. Global sales have partially recovered this year, reaching 4.4 million cases, as demand in Ukraine increased and exports to the west increased.
Sorochinskyi said that the company stopped sales in Russia, one of its largest markets where its products are produced under license, and that these sales were stopped immediately after the invasion of Ukraine.
Maintaining production since the start of the war has included measures such as purchasing a gas generator so the factory could continue operating when Ukraine’s power plants were attacked and finding spare space to rehouse the bottle cap supplier, an Italian company with a subsidiary in Sumi, in Ukraine’s northeast, near the Russian border, that came under direct missile attack in August last year.
Nemiroff also provided bottling facilities to some competitors to “support business in Ukraine,” Sorochinskyi said. “There are numerous examples of rivals helping each other to survive.”
Another potential move on the horizon is to provide bathroom facilities to workers trying to wash up at home due to power outages and outages due to attacks on electrical infrastructure.
Sorochinskyi said life is especially difficult for those living in urban apartments because they are less likely to install their own energy sources, such as wood stoves or solar panels. As a result, he said, it is not uncommon to see queues of cars heading to shopping malls for electricity or Wi-Fi connection as well as for shopping.
The distillery and bottling facilities are owned by Nemiroff, Anatoliy Kipish, as well as brothers Yakov and Bella Finkelstein, located in the town of the same name Nemyriv in the Vinnytsia oblast in the east of the country, where there has been a distillery since 1752. The three had retained control of the company since it was privatized by the state in the 1990s. Another shareholder, the Glus family, was ousted in 2013 following an internal struggle for control.
As ports were attacked, Sorochynskyi said Nemiroff had to reroute shipments more than once.
“We ship mostly by truck now. Before 2022, we were using a lot of sea containers, but when the Black Sea became blocked, we stopped that. It took us four months to find an alternative.”
With the help of the EU, the Ukrainian government is also building rail infrastructure to help provide other freight routes. New railway lines with European standard gauge will allow easier exports by train.
A road to the borders with Hungary and Slovakia opened in September, and a road to Poland is planned to open in 2027. Facilities to help transport goods to Romania’s Black Sea ports have also been increased.
In the first days of the war, production was stopped for about a month, and exports were also stopped due to borders being overcrowded with refugees and the transportation of military equipment.
