MOSCOW, Russia, 2016-Sep-16 — /EPR Retail News/ — O’KEY Group S.A. (LSE: OKEY), one of the largest food retailers in Russia, announces the appointment of Milina Sevcikova Mikulova as Private Label Commercial Director reporting directly to the Company’s CEO Heigo Kera.
The new Commercial Director will be developing and implementing the Group’s private label strategy for supermarkets and hypermarkets. In her role, Milina will manage assortment, production, supply, pricing, positioning, promotion of the O’KEY private labels and control marginality of this business.
Her top priority is to improve quality of the O’KEY private label products by auditing production facilities and testing samples in independent accredited laboratories.
The Company started the private label relaunch project last year covering mainly the food categories. The first step was to launch the That’s What You Need! brand (November 2015) in the low price tier followed by an O’KEY line-up in the middle price segment (April 2016). Currently there are 1,000+ SKUs under both brands.
Mr. Heigo Kera, the Chairman of the Board and the Group CEO, commented: “Last year we gave a new life to our private label business, which is one of the key elements of our Commercial Policy aimed at growing our margin in this segment and maintaining traffic by offering the best value for money proposition to our customers.
Our plan is to increase the share of private labels to 10% of the total sales in the coming year, including non-food categories. Given the importance of this business and our ambitions, we decided to have this block reporting to a separate Commercial Director.
Milina and her team will work closely with the DA! discounters to enable synergies in design, ordering and promotion of certain products.”
Milina Sevcikova Mikulova has a proven commercial, marketing and project management track record in Russia, Eastern Europe and Africa. Born in Czechoslovakia, she started her career at Carrefour in 1998 when she was involved in the opening of the retailer’s first hypermarket in Eastern Europe. From 2000 to 2004, she worked at AHOLD, the largest retail chain in the Czech Republic, making her way from Buying Manager to Commercial Director for the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. Later she joined Metro Group to support the expansion of the Real chain in Romania as Commercial Director for Food. From 2005 to 2009, Milina served as Commercial Director & Management Board Member at Lenta. In recent years, she held various executive positions at Metrika (DIY), Yoo! Mart Ltd (Ghana, Africa) and 585 Gold.
Milina graduated from the University of Economics in Prague (International Relations) and holds a degree from the Commerce & Management School (l’ECG) in Orleans (France).
COMPANY OVERVIEW
O’KEY is one of the largest retail chains in Russia. Its primary retail format is the modern Western European style hypermarket under the “O’KEY” brand reinforced by O’KEY supermarket. The Group is developing the innovative discounter format under the “DA!” brand. O’KEY is the first among Russian food retailers to launch e-commerce operations in St. Petersburg and Moscow based on hypermarket assortment.
The Group opened its first hypermarket in St. Petersburg in 2002 and has demonstrated continuous growth ever since. As of September 15, 2016, O’KEY operates 159 stores across Russia – 73 hypermarkets, 37 supermarkets and 49 discounters.
For further information please contact:
Investor Relations e-mail: ir@okmarket.ru www.okeyinvestors.ru
Source: O’KEY Group