Bravo

"Within a year of selling to Pepsi and setting up Bravo, we controlled half of the Russian market for alcopops and the venture was profitable. However, the volumes were small, there was a lot of competition on…"

"Play reminds me of Bravo, my Russian beer company, in its early days. Both are consumer companies that are youth-oriented in their users and their employees. Their advertising is similar. They have hungry young sales people, and even the same kinds of offices. The atmosphere is frugal and energetic. Play is still a start-up growing at double-digit percentage rates, though the bond issue means it now has to slow down the growth and become more profitable."

"Some investment bankers I’d met through fundraising for the Bravo venture came to me and said they knew two entrepreneurs of my age in Bulgaria who were having a hard time finding somebody to invest in their company. ‘It’s a privatisation,’ they said, and my ears pricked up. For me, eastern European privatisations meant the…"

"Branding is a personal passion of mine, dating back all the way to the Bravo venture in St Petersburg, and it felt exciting and invigorating to be essentially building a start-up again. But what should we call our new baby? After discarding an initial notion to use the Play brand, we looked for a similarly dynamic name behind which to build a challenger, customer-centric culture and asked half a dozen marketing agencies to pitch their best ideas. None of them came up with anything that we liked, but another firm which had not been invited to pitch came up with a left-of-field suggestion that resonated with us straight away. Its concept was to brand the challenger around the ‘word-of-mouth’, viral way that we wanted to grow through personal recommendations offering great value and customer-centred service. ‘Word of mouth’ was shortened to WOM and that became our brand. My idea was to build a new Latin American challenger mobile telecoms brand using the playbook of Play in Poland and Nova in Iceland. I could use the same management team and external consultants who worked on both. The partners at Novator responsible for telecoms, who had worked with me since 2010, focused on financing the new venture and acquiring the necessary spectrum and telecoms licences. Chris Bannister, a personable Brit who became Play’s first chief executive in 2005 and had already lived and worked in nine countries, was brought back into the fold as chief executive. And the Icelandic chief technology officer oversaw the technical build-out design, along with his Swedish colleague. Members of our trusted teams from both countries helped in the beginning to transform a failed old-school US telecoms operator into a state-of-the-art ‘kick-ass’ mobile challenger. None of us spoke Spanish and most had never set foot in Latin America before, let alone Chile. It didn’t seem to matter. When we launched, Chile was the most expensive country in the Latin American region in mobile telecommunication, so we saw a market that was fertile for a new approach. Conventional new entrants like Nextel and a venture headed by US telecoms billionaire John Malone had failed to crack the nation. We needed to do things very differently. To achieve the maximum impact and truly disrupt the market, we knew that a key differentiator had to be price. Indeed, we priced our services so aggressively that Chile immediately became the cheapest country in South America for consumer mobile telephony. Alongside this value offer, we promoted WOM as an independent challenger offering honesty and integrity. We set out to be brave, innovative, bold and passionate."

"Alcohol had long been a major cause of early deaths in Russia, so the government knew there was a lot to gain by trying to change people’s drinking habits. There was also a lot of fake vodka for sale, made from petrochemicals and very often deadly. One manager at the plant was hospitalised for five weeks after drinking such store-bought fake vodka. This was the situation when Bravo was started and it was probably one of the reasons that the World Bank gave a $100 million loan facility to the brewery. It was there to support the government, and this was one way of doing so."

"I was seven months into the construction of the new Bravo brewery in St Petersburg when the currency crisis hit, having ploughed everything that I owned into this hole in the ground of a brewery. ‘What’s our position without this investment?’ I asked Bravo’s finance director. He explained: ‘We owe millions to our suppliers, and our customers, particularly the 3,000 shops in St Petersburg and 4,000 in Moscow that we distribute to directly, owe us millions too. The problem is that we owe in dollars and they owe in roubles and this is where we are screwed.’ All of a sudden, instead of those assets and liabilities matching, they were massively apart. It was a hugely volatile time: South Korea was also in crisis, the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund had imploded and there was a lot of talk about financial meltdown. South Korea and Russia, to an extent, were both rescued by the International Monetary Fund; Wall Street was forced by the US Federal Reserve to bail out LTCM."