A fund associated with Gleb Fetisov may acquire Dairy Culture

The fund associated with the structures of ex-senator Gleb Fetisov has a growing interest in the agricultural business. In addition to vegetable farms, the portfolio of assets may include the Dairy Culture Group, which includes a dairy plant and a farm in the Leningrad Region. Demand for some modern dairy products remains lower than a year earlier, but market participants note a recovery in consumption.

LLC Produkty Pita, controlled by ZPIF Signet-Investments 1, requested prior approval from the Federal Antimonopoly Service for the acquisition of 79% in three structures of the Dairy Culture Group. Notifications about the receipt of applications appeared in the database of the service. We are talking about shares in Dairy Culture LLC, Trade House Dairy Culture LLC and Wismar Estate LLC. In “Dairy Culture” and the fund manager “Signet Capital” “Kommersant” did not answer.

Dairy Culture produces milk, yoghurts, kefir, sour cream, cottage cheese in the Leningrad Region. Built in 2013, the plant is designed to process up to 50 tons of raw materials per day, in 2022 the production of curd cheeses, yogurts and desserts with a capacity of 5 thousand tons of finished products per year was launched. The complex also includes a farm for 2 thousand heads and more than 2.5 thousand hectares of agricultural land. In 2022, the revenue of TD Dairy Culture increased by 15.2%, to 1.3 billion rubles, net profit was 2.2 million rubles.

One of the investors of Dairy Culture was Evgeny Chernyshev, co-owner of Artis-Agro Export, which was previously one of the ten largest grain exporters. In 2022, the press service of the courts of St. Petersburg reported that Mr. Chernyshev was put on the international wanted list on suspicion of embezzlement of 42.24 million rubles. through illegal VAT refunds. At the same time, Artis-Agro Export was declared bankrupt, and in June 2023, Bank Saint Petersburg filed an application for declaring Yevgeny Chernyshev personally bankrupt.

Signet Capital is owned by Pavel Polukhin, the owner of 0.01% of the Gubernsky consortium, whose beneficiary is considered to be ex-senator Gleb Fetisov. Signet Investments 1 also owns Irriko LLC, which manages the Yakhroma agricultural holding with assets in the Moscow region and the Tambov region and the Stavropol Irriko Group of Companies. The total land bank is more than 40 thousand hectares, where potatoes, open-field vegetables and grain are grown. This year, the Irriko structures were also interested in buying three potato farms with 40 thousand hectares of land in the Nizhny Novgorod, Bryansk and Astrakhan regions (see Kommersant of February 1). This summer it became known about the possible transfer under their control of the Komsomolets agricultural holding specializing in the cultivation of rapeseed in Transbaikalia with 188 thousand hectares of land (see Kommersant of June 26).

Alexei Gruzdev, CEO of Streda Consulting, says that Dairy Culture is a small manufacturer with a clear assortment, whose products were in good demand, so the asset could be attractive to an investor. A Kommersant source who heard about the deal says that negotiations with Irrico’s structures are still ongoing.

Demand for some dairy products is under pressure today. According to NielsenIQ, in January-June 2023, sales of drinking yoghurts in physical terms decreased by 3.4%, yogurt — by 6%, hard cheeses — by 1.8% year-on-year. In money terms, category sales grew by 3%, 3.2% and 5.1%, respectively. As noted by the Association of Retail Companies (includes X5 Group, Magnit, Lenta, etc.), in large retail chains in the first months of 2023, sales of such dairy products decreased by 2-6%, and sales were redistributed towards traditional categories – drinking milk, butter, sour cream, kefir. In Soyuzmolok, in June, they talked about the beginning of the restoration of consumption.

Anatoly Kostyrev