Edwin Botterman leaves Heineken with a 30% market share

During Edwin Botterman’s four-year term, Heineken Romania saw its revenues from sales double, multiplied its income nine-fold and got the first market share increase of the past nine years after having sealed a deal worth above 150m euros.

“Of course, I’ll leave Romania with some regrets, but above all with a feeling of joy and pride because I’m leaving behind a stronger company,” states Edwin Botterman, who will run Heineken Romania until the end of March. He came at the helm of the company, then called Brau Union Romania, at a difficult time for it, as it had lost almost 5% of its market share in two years. When Botterman took over the chairman and CEO positions, Heineken held a 27% market share domestically, from over 32% in 2003, or 36% in early 2000. The strong market share decrease was led by a sales drop in volumes from 4.1 million hectolitres in 2003 to 3.6 million in 2004 as Brau Union’s domestic operations were restructured after the international takeover by Heineken Dutch group. Shortly after Botterman came at the company’s helm, in November 2005, the Dutch group decided to close Grivita brewery in Bucharest. “The domestic subsidiary had been recently acquired by Heineken when I arrived in Romania and there were still a lot of problems to sort out, but it was a challenge, both in terms of competition, and of business efficiency boosting, of cost reduction and of finding a way to make people think positively about the future,” Botterman told ZF. Though at that time Botterman knew very little about Romania, he was the right person to stop the brewer’s decline, after having run Heineken’s subsidiary of western Zaire, a market with huge fluctuations. In the spring of 2007, just one year after taking over Heineken’s management, Botterman announced a 24% turnover increase and a 20% sales surge in terms of volume year-on-year, while market share was just 0.3% lower than in 2006. Starting April, Botterman will take over the CEO position at the Italian subsidiary of the Dutch group, a company with a situation similar to that of Romania in 2004. Heineken Romania’s management will be taken over by Jan Derck van Karnebeek of the Netherlands, who has held a CEO position with Heineken Zagorka Bulgaria in the past three years.