The owners of a large meat producer GK KoPitaniya, which was part of the Ru-Сom group of the ex-Minister for Open Government issues, Mikhail Abyzov, put the business up for sale. It will be difficult to find one buyer for all enterprises with a capacity of more than 60 thousand tons of pork, 40 thousand tons of poultry meat and 60 thousand tons of meat products per year, experts say. But individual assets may be of interest to market participants.

The owners of a large meat producer, GK KoPitania, are considering the possibility of selling 100% of the group to a strategic investor. This is stated in the presentation available to “Kommersant” for potential buyers, prepared by Rosselkhozbank, which was chosen as the exclusive financial consultant for the transaction. The company did not provide a comment. The bank did not disclose details, but noted that they see a wide list of potential interested parties, and they hope to complete the deal in early 2022.

KoPitania was part of the Ru-Сom group of Mikhail Abyzov (Forbes estimates his fortune at $ 650 million). In 2012-2018, Mr. Abyzov served as Minister for the Open Government, and in 2019 he was arrested on suspicion of organizing a criminal community and fraud. Now the beneficiary of "KoPitania" is Alexander Rogozhin, who was previously the general director of Ru-Сom, follows from the company's reporting.

As stated in the presentation of "KoPitania", the group manages enterprises in the Volgograd, Saratov and Tver regions. Includes pig-breeding complexes "Khvalynsky", "Krasnodonskoye", "Zavolzhskoye" with a total capacity of 61 thousand tons of pork per year, meat-packing plants "Zavolzhsky" and "Novopushkinsky" for 66 thousand tons of products and the poultry farm "Krasnodonskaya" with a capacity of 43 thousand tons of poultry meat in year. In addition, it owns a feed mill, an elevator with a capacity of 85 thousand tons and 28 thousand hectares of land.

In 2020, the total revenue of the group's meat production enterprises exceeded 15.7 billion rubles, Kommersant calculated on the basis of reports.

Yuri Kovalev, General Director of the National Union of Pig Breeders, recalls that the most attractive assets of KoPitania - pig farms in Siberia - were acquired by the Sibagro group in 2019. Of the remaining, the most interesting may be a relatively new division in the Saratov region, he notes. According to Mr. Kovalev, most likely, it is necessary to look for a separate buyer for each asset of KoPitania. The head of Unicorn Capital Advisers, Sergei Moiseev, agrees that KoPitania is "a heterogeneous set of assets that can be sold in parts."

According to a Kommersant source, a part of KoPitania's assets may be of interest to Viktor Nauruzov's Resource Group. This large producer of poultry meat this year also began to actively develop processing, becoming the owner of the company of meat products "Integra" and the Saratov meat-packing plant "Familnye kolbasy". Resource Group declined to comment. Sibagro did not answer questions. In the Cherkizovo group, the Mikhailov families said that today this asset is not of interest to the company.

Maxim Basov, CEO of Rusagro, in an interview with TASS in September 2019:

"Competition in the market (meat. - Kommersant) is increasing."

Agrifood Strategies President Albert Davleev says that, on the one hand, rising meat prices indicate the unsaturation of the domestic market, on the other hand, the industry has the highest production cost over the past ten years. As the expert notes, although KoPitania's assets are located in different regions, the business has an optimal structure in terms of synergy, including feed production, pig breeding, poultry farming and meat processing. But, adds Mr. Davleev, the biological protection systems at some of KoPitania's complexes do not correspond to modern risks. In his opinion, if meat holdings may be interested in individual enterprises of the group, then the business as a whole can attract a large non-core investor.