The high key rate and severe wear and tear of production assets make the government assistance that domestic bakers receive insufficient. About it RIA News said the President of the Russian Union of Bakers (RSB) Alexey Lyalin.
Barring minor exceptions, everything in the industry today was designed in 1954, he said. Because of this, an integrated approach is needed to modernize and reformat production as a whole.
Bakers appealed to the Ministry of Agriculture with a request to adopt a program for the development of the baking industry until 2035. At a minimum, it is necessary due to changes in the centers of people’s residence and their working conditions. Currently, enterprises are operating on the edge of profitability, there is not enough support, and associated costs are rising.
At the end of 2023, state support is valid only in certain regions. Government regulations on compensating part of the costs to producers of flour, bread and bakery products were adopted at the end of 2020. At that time, the key rate was 4.5 percent, and now it is 15 percent. Low prices for grain within the country, Lyalin explained, do not automatically make flour cheap, because the industry cannot use every variety of wheat.
And most importantly, the cost of flour affects prices less and less. Other factors are more acutely felt, namely the rise in prices for fat and oil products and sugar, transportation costs, deficit personnel and rising labor costs, the cost of energy, packaging materials, spare parts.
Lyalin pointed out that the share of “social” products, the prices of which cannot be increased, is growing, and premium varieties, which provide some income for enterprises, are in much less demand, since the purchasing power of the population is not increasing. The head of the RSP emphasized that without increased support, bread factories will again begin to go bankrupt. According to him, to modernize the industry in Russia about a trillion rubles of investment will be required.
The general director of Murmansk JSC Khlebopek, Ivan Bogushevich, called finishing the current year with zero profit a great achievement. At the same time, the enterprise cannot take advantage of state support, because it is unable to fulfill the conditions not to increase prices, which otherwise would be below the cost of production.
https://musicnewsfirst.com/