Snaige, the troubled refrigerator maker based in Alytus, Lithuania, has announced that first quarter sales rose 7 percent year-on-year to 78 million litas (22.6 million euros). Losses for the quarter, however, doubled to 7.8 million litas, the company reported.
CEO Gediminas Ceika attributed the losses to a surge in prices of key commodities and operations of the company's plant in Kaliningrad. He said there are no financial instruments in Russia that the company can use as a hedge against currency fluctuations.
"Although the company's activities are valued rather skeptically by the public, the results are improving slowly, which makes us believe that this year's results will be much better than in 2007," Ceika said in a statement.
Sales in Russia have been growing since the last quarter of 2006, the CEO pointed out. In the first three months this year sales of refrigerators on the Russian market soared by 40 percent year-on-year.
The Snaige group reported 11.4 million litas in audited losses for full 2007, up 12.9 percent year-on-year as revenues grew 15 percent to 410 million litas.
As of Dec. 31, the company's largest shareholders included customers of Estonia's Hansabank with a 47.39 percent interest, Survesta, a company controlled by Hermis Capital, with 20.71 percent and customers of Sweden's SEB with 10.65 percent.
