Pinsky and Timati will unite Domino’s Pizza franchisees under a new brand

Rapper Timati and restaurateur Anton Pinsky will unite ex-franchisees of Domino’s Pizza in Russia under a new brand. On August 30, this will be officially announced, a representative of the team that is preparing this project told Vedomosti. He did not disclose other details.

Dutch company DP Eurasia, the owner of the master franchise Domino’s Pizza in Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, filed for bankruptcy on August 21st. The next day, Timati offered the owners of the company to buy out all the pizzerias in our country, rebranding the network. On August 29, he posted a photo with a Domino’s Pizza branded bag on his Vkontakte page with the caption: “We decided to get into pizza. From today it’s official.” In response to this, the chairman of the board of directors and head of DP Eurasia, Aslan Saranga, in an interview with the Food Service Russia trade publication, said that he “has no idea” what kind of deal the businessmen are talking about. According to him, the company’s own assets have not been sold, and all Russian sub-franchisees will have to change their name, as they do not have the right to continue operating under the Domino’s Pizza brand.

As of June 30, 2023, the chain closed all its own outlets, leaving only 142 franchised pizzerias left in Russia. They are still taking orders, Vedomosti was convinced, but they did not respond to requests.

Pinsky and Timati saw a very promising business opportunity – without paying anything to anyone, to get a strong large franchise network and develop it under a new brand, that is, in fact, they received a startup with more than 100 points for free, the CEO of Infoline Analytics believes » Mikhail Burmistrov. He considers building a new brand out of the ruins of Domino’s a “great business idea”. According to Burmistrov, Pinsky and Timati will have to invest about 100–150 million rubles in marketing and IT infrastructure. over the next year, but it’s still an order of magnitude less than the real value of Domino’s Pizza’s assets in Russia. Its analyst estimated at about 500 million rubles. (including brand value).

Burmistrov believes that at the first stage, the franchisee will not pay the team of Pinsky and Timati in the same amount that they paid DP Eurasia. But as investments in the promotion of a new brand grow, the obligations on their part will increase.

At the end of July 2022, Pinsky and Timati bought out the Russian business of the Starbucks coffee chain for about 500 million rubles. The opening of the first point of the updated network called Stars Coffee on Novy Arbat took place on August 18, 2022, and already in January, according to Pinsky, the Stars Coffee network overtook Starbucks in terms of performance.