ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, November 12, 1996 TAG: 9611120077
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MEGAN SCHNABEL STAFF WRITER
BOTH COMPANIES ARE struggling to create successful brands in highly competitive marketplaces and battling low productivity.
With some help from a business exchange program, a Russian vodka distiller and a Virginia water bottler discovered they have more in common than just mixing possibilities.
For the last two weeks, Roanoke-based Quibell Corp. has played host to Alexander Roubtsov, an economist and translator at Tulaspirt, one of Russia's largest alcohol manufacturers.
The exchange, one of dozens sponsored by the nonprofit Legacy International, was designed to give the Russian businessman insight into the American beverage market. But the match of interests turned out to be a better-than-expected fit.
"We both are faced with a lot of the same problems and didn't know it," said Debbie Custer, Quibell's director of sales and marketing.
Both companies, she said, are struggling to create successful brands in highly competitive marketplaces. They're battling low productivity - each company's plant is operating at just a quarter of its capacity. And, perhaps toughest, both are trying to overcome problems over which they have little control.
Each company, Custer said, is learning how the other copes with all those challenges.
"It's always interesting to see new approaches to different problems," Roubtsov said. "And everybody has problems."
Tulaspirt faces uniquely Russian challenges. It must contend with a huge network of illegal distillers, who undersell legitimate companies. There are laws to combat these manufacturers, Roubtsov said, but they have no teeth.
Russian distillers also must compete with inexpensive imported alcohol. And they have trouble exporting their own products because many foreign companies are reluctant to chance the unstable Russian economy.
Tulaspirt has won numerous international quality awards in recent years, but all the accolades mean nothing, he said, if the company can't sell its products.
Although it isn't faced with law-dodging competitors, Quibell, too, is struggling to find a market. The troubled water bottler fell on hard financial times this spring and was forced to close for months. The company filed for bankruptcy protection and was sold to Matrix Capital Markets Group Inc., a Richmond investment group.
The new owner has settled most of Quibell's debts, and the company expects to emerge from bankruptcy by January, Custer said. But distributors, who were caught in the middle of the financial wranglings, are still wary, she said.
This is the sixth "Community Connections/Business for Russia" program that Legacy has sponsored in the past two years, according to project director Marlene Ginsberg in Bedford. Almost 80 Russians have spent time in Virginia.
Other Roanoke companies participating in the exchange program are Kroger Co., Wildflour Market and Bakery, Hanover Direct, Ferguson Enterprises, the Virginia Employment Commission and WVTF public radio.
Roubtsov, 27, will spend the next two weeks at Blue Ridge Beverage Co. Inc., where he'll observe the distribution end of the beverage business.
Because American and Russian companies operate in such different environments, he said he isn't sure how much of what he has seen here can be translated for the Russian company.
"I will share my American experience with [the company]," he said. "But how it will work is difficult to say. It will be useful for me most of all. I will do my best to use all that I have seen here in my own daily job."
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON\Staff. Alexander Roubtsov, an executiveby CNBfrom a Russian vodka maker, has been visiting Quibell as part of a
business exchange program. color.