Havana Club is rising star among liquor brands
By Doreen Hemlock
Havana Bureau
Posted January 12 2007
HAVANA ? The restaurant serves chicken with rum sauce. In the courtyard,
a bartender whips up a new cocktail: fresh-squeezed sugar cane and
orange juices with white rum. The guided tour concludes with a tasting,
complete with the finest blends.
Tourists flock daily to the Havana Club Rum Museum in this Caribbean
capital, just one plank in an aggressive marketing push that has made
the government-backed brand Cuba's top selling rum and a rising star
worldwide.
Sales are so brisk that industry tracker the IWSR of London just named
the brand the fastest growing internationally in the decade ended 2005.
Havana Club sales jumped 16.4 percent a year during the period, reaching
2.6 million cases in 2005, the ISWR said in its latest Elite Brands
List. A case has nine liters.
"If you consider that Havana Club is excluded from the United States,
due to a trademark dispute and the Cuban embargo, the brand's
performance is even more impressive," the ISWR said in the Elite Brands
report. The United States is the world's biggest market.
Within Cuba, Havana Club dominates rum sales, its growth closely linked
to the surge in tourism, now topping 2 million visitors a year.
But it's in Europe where the brand is making its biggest inroads and now
ranks No. 2 among all rums, the company said.
Growth stems partly from a marketing campaign that associates Havana
Club with Cuba's vibrant music and culture.
"More and more people in Europe are dancing salsa and cha-cha these
days, so that's helping Havana Club sell," said Portuguese tourist Artur
Santos, 39, during a visit with his family to the rum museum.
Havana Club said it ranks as the top-selling liquor in Italy, outpacing
Bermuda-based rum rival Bacardi Corp. and all other types of spirits.
The brand also is strong in Spain and growing fast in Germany.
Sales worldwide likely topped $200 million in 2006, with profits up to
20 percent, industry analysts said.
Key to the success is the 1993 joint venture between Cuba's government
and France's liquor giant Pernod-Ricard to market the brand
internationally, though not in the United States. Sales are banned to
the U.S. market because of Washington's decades-old economic embargo
against communist-run Cuba.
The partnership lets Havana Club tap Pernod-Ricard's distribution
network and its marketing savvy worldwide. Together, the duo has boosted
Havana Club sales to more than 120 nations. New marketing approaches run
the gamut: the rum museum, the International Cocktail Grand Prix, held
every two years in Havana, and master classes on rum taught overseas to
thousands of bartenders.
Still, exclusion from the vast U.S. market and a late start in
international marketing has hurt.
Bacardi sold about eight times as much rum as Havana Club in 2005, with
nearly half of Bacardi's sales in the United States. That made Bacardi
No. 1 among world rum suppliers, compared to a distant No. 7 for Havana
Club, the IWSR said.
Bacardi also is staking a claim to the Havana Club name in the United
States, now selling a clear rum made in Puerto Rico as its own "Havana
Club" in Florida and waging a legal dispute with Cuba over the trademark
in U.S. courts.
Far from the court battle, tour guide Osvaldo Mandina, 38, focused on
the history and process of rum-making as he walked visitors through the
Rum Museum one afternoon.
He cited the 1600s and 1700s when sugar cane was king -- before the
advent of beet sugar and other sweeteners.
"Sugar was like oil today," said Mandina, "the most important commodity."
He showed off a model of a sugar mill town -- complete with moving
trains; and pointed to rows of oak barrels, where rum is aged before
blending and bottling. Some 6 percent of every barrel evaporates yearly
during aging -- "the angels' share," he said.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/cuba/sfl-zhavana12jan12,0,2342256.story?coll=sfla-news-cuba
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