Gumdrop growth, gingerbread profit

Three years after Mieszko's majority stake was bought by the Central European Confectionery Holding and the reins of the company taken over by Marek Moczulski, the sweets manufacturer has made a big leap from being deeply indebted to becoming a profitable organization with tasty prospects for development.

In Q3 this year the company posted a net profit of zł.103 million against just zł.144,000 in the same period the year before. Revenues grew 13.5 percent year-on-year, to zł.48.3 million. In the first three quarters of the year the company registered sales revenues of zł.135.2 million, a record result for Mieszko.

"We're growing faster than the market and we've got the highest growth rate among all sweets producers. According to AC Nielsen we had a 10-percent increase in sales in terms of volume and 13 percent in terms of value," Marek Moczulski, Mieszko's CEO, said.

The company doesn't provide financial prognoses, but Moczulski suggests this year will be much better than the year before, when Mieszko posted zł.180 million in revenues and zł.1.5 million in net profit.

Mieszko has recently signed an agreement with Lambertz, a German producer of gingerbread.

"Since October we've been responsible for the distribution of six types of Lambertz gingerbread in the wholesale channel," Moczulski said. He added that in a couple of years the sale of Lambertz's products could account for 10 to 20 percent of Mieszko's turnover.

"We gained a distributor and thanks to this it might be easier for Mieszko to get through to the CEE market where we already sell our gingerbread," commented Marek Kretek from Lambertz Polonia.

Lambertz sells its products in 14 countries, including Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Russia.