#From the 1 st Person
DEAR COLLEAGUES,
As we close the 2017 Imperial financial year, I would like to reflect with you on
the highlights and key achievements of our Cluster team.
It wasn’t a simple or easy year, with pricing in the market being one of our key
challenges. Imperial, though, was able to show its key strength – the ability
to adapt quickly to changes on the market and remain competitive. We set
out at the beginning of the year to improve our share position. I am delighted
to report that, through your hard work across the year and particularly in the
fourth quarter, we have been able to achieve that goal, gaining momentum for
next year.
With your help we have significantly transformed our business in Russia.
We simplified our portfolio and established a very strong international
brand available, P&S. It is one of the fastest growing brands in Russia. We
have improved our KA position. The share of our volume in the KA channel
increased from 16 to 24% in one year. Furthermore, we improved our coverage
to 120,000 outlets, and we have now furniture in half of them available.
In Kazakhstan we faced a large price compression due to a minimum price
increase. Our low price brands are now selling almost at the same price as
premium brands. The team has worked on various solutions how to drive
our business in this environment and there was a number of initiatives
implemented and a few more to come. One of the first encouraging results is
that we tripled our Davidoff sales volume in Kazakhstan in FY 2017. Talking
about Central Asia, it is also important that the team demonstrated a very
stable performance in Kyrgyzstan and our strong share growth in Mongolia.
We will continue to focus on increasing our market share as we have everything
we need to achieve this goal: Strong brands, right investment and, most
importantly, our highly professional and dedicated team. In order to further
support our growth agenda, we have developed a new tool which defines the
way we work and, which we already started implementing. It is called MRM,
or Market Repeatable Magic. I hope you enjoy reading about it in this edition.
I would like to thank you for your great work. Without your personal
contribution and engagement we would not be able to achieve such positive
dynamics in our Cluster. I am sure that FY2018 will bring new opportunities to
retain and promote this positive trend in Russia and Central Asia!
Oliver Kutz,
General Manager, Russia and Central Asia Cluster
The Империалист | | 3