July 21 (SeeNews) - Bulgarian brewer Kamenitza's market share rose to some 30% at the end of June, a senior company official said.
"Currently, Kamenitza has a market share of some 30% - this is end-of-June data of market researcher AC Nielsen," Anton Karlov, corporate affairs director at the company, told SeeNews on the sidelines of a news conference organised by the Union of Brewers in Bulgaria (UBB) on Wednesday.
This is up by some three percentage points from a year earlier, Karlov said, adding that the company hopes to keep up the growth pace and become a market leader by the end of the year.
The main rivals of Kamenitza, part of the StarBev group, on the local market are Carlsberg Bulgaria, part of Danish brewer Carlsberg, and Zagorka, part of Dutch group Heineken.
"In January-June we have 6-7% growth of sales on the domestic market and some 25% growth on foreign markets, which we consider a very good result on this stagnating market," Karlov added. No information about the size of the company's sales in the first half of the year was immediately available.
The January-June sales of UBB's members, which account for more than 95% of the local beer market, totalled 2,436,700 hectolitres. Of the total, 2,402,200 hectolitres were sold on the local market.
UBB expects the beer market to stay more or less unchanged this this year. Last year its members sold some 4.8 million hectolitres of beer.
Kamenitza has breweries in Haskovo and Plovdiv, both in the south of the country, and malt factories in Haskovo and in Pleven, in northern Bulgaria. It employs some 760 people.
(1 euro=1.95583 Bulgarian levs)