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Azbuka Syra
A cheese plant at Mamadysh, working since July 1974, outlasted a bankrupt holding, its creditors' lease and a 2017 break-up that took every other plant and the brand from the company running it. Renamed Azbuka Syra, that company narrowed to cheese under a hired director; after a dip in 2024, output reached 13.5 thousand tonnes in 2025.
One plant at Mamadysh, run from Kazan
The company kept one plant and rebuilt itself as a cheese maker
In August 2017 the company running the plants of a bankrupt Tatarstan dairy holding lost almost all of them. The plants were sold separately, and its own consumer brand, Prosto Moloko (Просто молоко), was sold to Agrosila (Агросила). The company kept one site, its cheese-and-butter plant at Mamadysh, and in December it took a new name.
One plant, one category
That company is Azbuka Syra (Азбука сыра); the name reads “the ABC of cheese”. Its management company sits in Kazan; its one plant, at Mamadysh, makes cheese, butter, tvorog and dry whey. The company has owned the plant since the 2017 purchase and runs it as a branch, Filial Mamadyshsky zavod. In 2025 the plant made 13.5 thousand tonnes of cheese, according to the Top-20 cheese producer ranking compiled by Milknews, Soyuzmoloko (Союзмолоко) and Streda.
The company is run by Aleksei Fatykhov (Алексей Фатыхов), its general director since February 2018 and a former sales executive in federal retail. It has made cheese its business: the brand it launched in 2017 carries the company’s own name, and since mid-2023 it has shipped Parmesan to retailers.
The plant before the company
The plant is older than the company by almost four decades. It began production in July 1974. In 2006 it became a branch of OAO VAMIN Tatarstan (ВАМИН Татарстан), a Tatarstan dairy holding, under the name Mamadysh Syrmolkomb, and in 2007 a new production complex was built on the site.
By 2013 VAMIN was bankrupt. In January of that year Marat Muratov was sent into the holding as its executive director. On 25 March a management company, UK Prosto Moloko, was registered; Tatagrolizing (Татагролизинг) held 99% of it and Muratov 1%. In May VAMIN’s creditors transferred the holding’s production complex, the Mamadysh plant included, to the new company under lease and safe custody, and in June it announced Prosto Moloko as its consumer brand.
In 2014 the management company recorded its first net profit. In July 2015 a registry entry raised Muratov’s stake from 1% to 63%, with Tatagrolizing’s falling to 37%.
The break-up
The bankruptcy was completed in October 2016, when Tatagrolizing acquired 97% of VAMIN’s property. Muratov bid for seven of the plants. That month, in words BUSINESS Online quoted secondhand in 2018, he spoke of paying in instalments: “We are looking at options for payment by instalments; we could talk about instalments over three years. If they gave ten, I would be happy.”
The bid was not accepted. In August 2017 the former VAMIN plants were sold separately, and the Prosto Moloko brand went to Agrosila. The company kept a single site, the Mamadysh plant, which it bought with a loan from VTB. In November 2017 Muratov returned to government service, and Sergei Zhuravlev (Сергей Журавлев) ran the company in the interim.
What remained was one plant, without the brand it had sold its milk under.
Narrowing to cheese
On 4 December 2017 UK Prosto Moloko was renamed Azbuka Syra and launched a Soviet-styled cheese and butter brand under that name. Fatykhov took over in February 2018 and still runs the company.
In 2022 a closed line from the Austrian maker Bertsch was installed at Mamadysh, raising the plant’s capacity by a quarter, from 400 to 500 tonnes of milk a day, by the company’s own figures; by mid-2023 it was using 96% of it. The same year it began to learn how to make Parmesan. “Our company only began mastering Parmesan production technology in 2022,” Fatykhov told Milknews in July 2023, “and by mid-2023 I can tell you we have started shipping it to retailers.” In 2023 X5 Group, the retail chain, named Azbuka Syra its best brand in the cheese category.
Output fell in 2024: 12.7 thousand tonnes of cheese, 6.7% less than a year earlier, by the Milknews, Soyuzmoloko and Streda ranking. It recovered in 2025, rising 5.9% to 13.5 thousand tonnes. The ranking counts cheese output alone, so the fall and the recovery are measured on the same footing.
Who owns it
The company’s ownership has two dated states on the registry. In 2017 Muratov’s 75% stake was placed in trust management with his wife, Gulnara Muratova; since December 2020 she has held it directly. Since an August 2024 registry entry she has held 90.1% and Fatykhov the remaining 9.9%.
Muratov was First Deputy Head of the Apparatus of the President of Tatarstan from November 2017 to September 2020. Since September 2020 he has been an assistant to the head of the Republic of Tatarstan on a non-staff basis.
One site, kept working
Of the plants the management company ran in 2013, one is still its own. The Mamadysh plant has outlasted the holding that once owned it and the brand its operator once sold under. More than fifty years after it opened, it is a cheese plant, and the company that kept it is named after cheese.
Researched 27 sources in Russian.