A contract for the local manufacturing of Winston is to be signed shortly by Japan Tobacco and Belarusian cigarette maker Tabak-Invest.

The Minsk-based joint venture Tabak-Invest is already making two of JTI’s brands, Magna and Monte Carlo, by license, with 850 million sticks to be produced by the end of the year. JTI hopes that next year the government will increase the quota for license production to 3 billion cigarettes. Winston meant to make up two thirds of the volume, says Gennady Brusnikov, head of JTI’s Belarusian office. In 2004, 20 billion cigarettes were consumed in Belarus, 3.5 billion accounted for by import, 12.6 billion and 4.4 billion made correspondingly by the Grodno-based Neman tobacco plant and Tabak-Invest. This year, after the quota for cigarette import was cut, BAT placed manufacturing of Alliance with the Grodno plant. (vt)