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Another interesting location for Heineken is Italia Mia.
Its owner is called Andrei Becze. He is another of Romania's
new entrepreneurs and started his own business in 1992.
Andrei Becze bought an ice machine in that year and start
ed selling ice creams to passers-by. Four years later a fine,
modern restaurant stands on the same spot. With an Italian
atmosphere. And Heineken Beer.
Irishman David Larkin is the owner of the Dubliner Irish
Pub. Night after night his pub is packed with Irish and
British expatriates and tourists and so it is not surprising
that - in addition to Heineken Beer - he also serves a lot of
draught Murphy's Irish Stout. Larkin is a real globe-trotter.
He worked in the Netherlands, Egypt, South Africa, Bulgaria
and various other places before finally settling down in
Bucharest. "I really like it here", says Larkin. And a glance
around his busy pub shows why he is so pleased with life.
SERVICE
In Bucharest Heinro itself handles the distribution work.
Andrei Busila is in charge of the logistics operation. Heinro
employs five drivers who make the deliveries and collect
the payments. Dan Vlasceanu has a clear-cut opinion about
the service that Heinro has to provide: "We are working for
the best beer brand in the world and so we must have a
clean presentation and offer the best service. The word
'tomorrow', which we tend to use quite a lot in Romania, is
not in our vocabulary. We make deliveries in Bucharest on
the same day if necessary. In very urgent cases we can even
supply within an hour. That extra little bit of service is
absolutely essential, as we are four times dearer than other
beers. But it does have an effect, as that service has taken
us to where we are now: the number one position in the
luxury beers."
All Heineken Beer for Romania is sent to a central
Heinro warehouse and then transported further to custom
ers. Heinro decided on this centralised approach because of
the simpler customs formalities and also because volumes
are still so modest that separate deliveries to each customer
would be too costly.
Seven of the eleven distributors come and collect the
beer themselves. Heinro delivers to the others. Transport by
road in Romania is quite a difficult job. The highway
infrastructure is poor and it takes a whole day to truck the
beer from Bucharest to a town in the North West of the
country. "The roads are narrow and often they are also very
badly maintained. One of the jokes you sometimes hear in
Romania is: The number of holes in the road has been
halved over the past year because two smaller potholes
have changed into one big crater!"
OWN REGION
Heinro applies the same Heineken Beer prices for all distri
butors. "Big differences make our distributors uneasy and
tend to encourage selling activities outside their own
region. Everyone has his own region for Heineken and we
want to keep it that way."
Heinro's role towards the distributors is that of 'protec
tor' of the Heineken brand. Plans by distributors to adver
tise Heineken at local level are first submitted to Heinro to
check whether the advertisements are in line with the
requirements set by Heineken and Heinro. In addition,
Heinro's sales reps outside Bucharest monitor the freshness
of the beer (making sure that the first-in first-out principle
is observed on shop shelves and in on premise outlets) and
they also provide training sessions for the representatives
employed by the distributors.
BUCKLER AND MURPHY'S
Heinro also has Murphy's Irish Stout in its product range.
Heinro sells Murphy's on draught and in the draughtflow
can. Dan Vlasceanu is cautiously optimistic about the pos
sibilities for Murphy's in Romania. "The main turnover now
is still in the Irish and the English pub, as Romanians don't
know the beer at all yet. Several years from now I expect
that it will mainly be the Romanian yuppies who start to
show an interest for Murphy's Irish Stout."
The third Heineken product is the non-alcohol beer
Buckler, which was introduced via the shops in what were
then still the state-owned filling stations. Buckler perform
ed excellently. That was not surprising, firstly in view of the
product's quality and, secondly, given the strict regulations
against drinking and driving in Romania. "It's something
left over from the Communist era. Anyone driving with a
blood-alcohol level of more than one per mille ends up in
the cell. For each percentage point above 0.1%, you lose
your driving licence for three months. So people are very
careful and Buckler was an excellent alternative."
But that alternative did not last long. First, the
Romanian government ruled that a non-alcohol import
beer would be taxed at the same rate as a soft drink, i.e.
25%. Later on, they decided for protectionist reasons to
increase those import duties to 80%. That in turn made
Buckler too expensive for many people. None the less, many
on premise outlets in Bucharest still want to include
Buckler in their range as a service to their customers.
