Trouble at the brewery
The brewery at Ostrow Wielkopolski which was put up for sale last July by Kompania Piwowarska (KP) is to be closed. This decision was made as the board at KP was unable to find a buyer. Around sixty of the eighty employees will be laid off at the end of next month. This will cost the company PLN1.5m in redundancy payments. The real estate, brewing equipment and other machinery will be sold. How much is likely to be raised is unclear. The price set by KP was clearly considered to be too high for potential buyers. The value of the real estate and other assets was considered to be around PLN25m, KP would have taken PLN20m. Nonetheless this was too much for those that were interested in buying it. Probably the closure is the best decision for KP, otherwise the brewery at Ostrow Wielkopolski could have fallen into the hands of a competitor. This is something that the Poznan based firm certainly could not have accepted. Its competitor Zywiec also went through the same process when it decided to close its brewery at Gdansk despite an attempted employee buy out. The Ostrów Wielkopolski brewery has a production capacity of 20m litres annually. Kompania Piwowarska is the second largest beer producer in Poland and belongs to the South African brewing concern SAB and Euro Agro Centrum. Last year it placed 700 litres of beer on the market.