RE: RNS25 Jul 2022 22:46
Robust tonic firm could knock Fever-Tree off its perch
25 JULY 2022
By Ron Emler
Hot on the heels of Fever-Tree’s woes, a younger, ultra-premium mixer company could be set to shake up the sector.
The shares of a small New Zealand company have been listed on the London stockmarket for the past year but few have taken any note of them.
But Tony Burt, the founder and chief executive of East Imperial Superior Beverages, has plans to change that.
His ambition is that his very upmarket mixers will have a big impact on the ultra premium sector and propel the shares upwards.
Hovering just above the 2.7p mark, East Imperial’s shares have slumped from 20p last autumn, but Burt is unfazed as they have been hit by the general dislike of small cap companies during the stockmarket slide and this spring’s further coronavirus shutdowns in the Far East, his main market.
Burt is confident that East Imperial is on track to meet its 2022 targets and has sufficient funds to meet its expansion plans.
He says his backers are fully behind the company, which is valued at about £9m, and that as it continues to expand and make inroads at the very top end of the mixer market “the share price will look after itself”.
A former ad man who previously headed up agency M&C Saatchi, Burt created the East Imperial story and brand in 2011 in New Zealand and co-founded the company in 2013.
He was driven by a desire to recreate mixers using the finest quality Asian and East African natural ingredients that would have been used in the heyday of luxury travel when companies such as Imperial Airways offered only the very best.
At East Imperial the watch words are ‘heritage’, ‘tradition’ and ‘authenticity’.
“We took tonic from what it was 100 years ago and that’s where we started from,” he says.
“The overly sweet, citric acid soft drinks of our time have replaced genuine, traditional tonic water. These modern drinks completely mask the herbaceous aromas of premium gin and other spirits, manipulating the role that tonic water plays in modern mixology.
“We believe the spirit should do the talking.”
To that end, the East Imperial range comprises some dozen tonics, sodas and other mixers.
Burt also has a strong commitment to providing a sustainable product and to minimising the environmental impacts at every stage of the manufacturing process.
Talk of superior natural ingredients (East Imperial collaborated with the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew to produce its Royal Botanic Tonic) prompts comparisons with Fever-Tree, which launched in 2003 and is now valued at more than £1 billion, even after the recent traumatic profits warning that hit the shares by a further 30%, taking their fall this year to more than 60%.
Fever-Tree has been hit by bottle shortages, sky-high transport costs and labour problems at its US bottling facility. Analysts wondering whether customers will trade down to lesser brands to help cope with inflation also depresse
Sign In
Follow the stocks
