IHT Profiles Russki Standart Group
MOSCOW -- Business consultants at McKinsey were aghast when a Russian entrepreneur, Roustam Tariko, told them he wanted to call his new bank - for which they had drawn up the plans - the same as his vodka brand, Russian Standard.
He overruled them and Russian Standard Bank, created in 2000, is now among the top three most profitable banks in Russia and the largest specialized consumer finance bank, according to the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's.
"The vodka business is an excellent business and the credit business is brilliant," said Al Breach, a Moscow-based economist and strategist for Russia at UBS.
Market research commissioned by Tariko at the time showed that Russians trusted the vodka brand enough to borrow from a bank with the same name - highlighting the differences between consumers in Russia and in developed markets, where alcohol and banking are never mentioned in the same breath.
Click here to read the rest of the article from the International Herald Tribune.
Russki Standart Group CEO Rustam Tariko (left) with Miss World 2006 Tatiana Kucharova
Photo by: RIA Novosti
Comments
Hey what a great idea! Russian Standard Vodka & Banks. Now that shows that there is a new breed of thinking cat running Russia's business world today!
And when the h--- are we going to get some decent vodka to drink over here in lumpen proletariat land? Can I have the import rights?
btw, Bill Gates has his own dictionaries and a shit load of other non-computer stuff named for Microsoft- (what could be more antithetical) wtf, why does the biggest (computer)information monopolist geek get control over dictionaries? If I were the Queen of England, I would be indignant about that one. Besides, whatever happened to the Sherman Antitrust Act? We are talking about monopolizing the information industry here. Hats off to the Luxembourg court as sanity still reigns in Europe.
Lois DuPey
(monitoring the monitors)
Posted by: Lois DuPey | September 18, 2007 5:55 PM