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Chelny Kholod
A Soviet-era engineer has run a Tatarstan cold-storage plant since 1987 with no majority of its shares on record. Through the 2021 marking mandate that briefly halted production lines and the 2022 sanctions supply shock, Chelny Kholod reached eighth place nationally in ice cream by 2024, at a net margin of about 22%.
One City, Eighth Place Nationally
Thirty-nine years under one director, and a top-eight ranking in ice cream.
Gazilyan Shakirzyanov has run the same cold-storage plant in Naberezhnye Chelny since 1987 — through a Soviet collapse, a privatization, a 2013 board change, and thirty-nine years in the same chair. No record shows him holding a majority of the company he leads. He stayed, and his is the largest single block of shares on record.
A director with no majority on record
Chelny Kholod (Челны Холод) is registered as an open joint-stock company with no listed founders in Russia’s corporate registry. Shakirzyanov’s own stake, reported at 31.4% in 2014 from SPARK-Interfax data, is the largest single block on record, and it falls short of a majority. The other ~69% is not attributed in public filings, and that share includes a 19% block whose buyer is unnamed. What stands out is that the largest shareholder has also run the business, uninterrupted, since before the company existed in its current legal form. The company was registered as an OAO in 2000; Shakirzyanov’s tenure as director predates it by thirteen years.
Twenty-six years, then a board change
In 2013, Ilshat Fardiev — a former Tatarstan energy minister with a half share in ZAO MEKT, which held 19% of Chelny Kholod — was elected to the board. By early 2014 the block had left the register. The buyer is not named in public filings. BUSINESS Online, the regional outlet that reported the exit, valued Fardiev’s sold share at roughly ₽207 million by analogy to a comparable transaction. In 2013 revenue dipped 0.3% and profit from sales fell 12%; the company drew its bank deposits down from ₽41 million to ₽23 million to fund ice-cream output (BUSINESS Online), on a balance sheet that was 90% equity, and still booked a net profit in line with its five-year average. A year later, Slavitsa (Славица) — a competitor from Krasnoyarsk — opened a factory in Chelny Kholod’s home city.
Through all of it a new member joined the board, a 19% block left the register and a rival opened a plant next door, while Shakirzyanov kept running the company.
Two more shocks, then a national ranking
The pattern repeated twice more, each time with the company emerging larger rather than smaller. In June 2021, Russia’s mandatory Data Matrix product-marking regime came into force and briefly halted production lines nationwide; Chelny Kholod’s net profit fell 26% that year even as revenue kept climbing, with marking costs and input inflation (corrugated packaging up 100%, per the Union of Ice Cream Makers) eating into margins. The company had already committed, six months earlier, to an interest-free ₽250 million loan from the Monotowns Development Fund to build new waffle-cup and cone packing lines (BUSINESS Online). Then, in April 2022, as Western sanctions scrambled packaging and spare-parts supply chains across Russian manufacturing, Shakirzyanov personally reported the company’s position at an anti-crisis meeting convened by the Naberezhnye Chelny mayor: a standing stock of about two thousand tonnes, which he put at ten percent of output, packaging still arriving from Belarusian suppliers of fifteen years’ standing.
In 2024 revenue reached ₽4.58 billion, up ten percent on the year, with net profit of ₽1.02 billion — a margin above twenty percent — on a balance sheet funded almost entirely by equity (autonomy ratio 0.94, per RBC Companies). Independent industry data from Milknews and the Soyuzmoloko dairy union put the company’s 17,200-tonne output eighth nationally among Russian ice-cream producers. In 2021 the deputy director general of the Union of Ice Cream Makers had already called Chelny Kholod one of the pillars of the national market, with a 3–4% share by her estimate. An affiliated dairy, Alabuga Sote (Алабуга Соте), which Chelny-biz reports as under Shakirzyanov’s control, was registered in September 2024 as an eligible dairy exporter to China. Chelny Kholod’s Vkusnyaevo (Вкусняево) trademark is registered to the company and is used on Alabuga Sote’s dairy products.
What the growth didn’t change
The company grew leaner as it grew bigger. Headcount fell from 621 employees in 2019 to 578 in 2024 even as revenue rose roughly 75% in nominal rubles over the same stretch, at a company that, according to regional business press, had largely exited semi-finished foods and, by its own account, installed Italian and Danish lines. The business today is vertically integrated end to end: Chelny Kholod owns its production plant, a cold store the company describes as the largest in the Prikamye region, at 14,000 pallet places, and two wholly owned wholesale arms that, by the company’s own count, serve more than 160 partners across 69 regions. The cold store does more than serve Chelny Kholod’s own output — the company has offered its spare capacity to store goods for other local food producers, including the poultry, bacon and bread producers Chelny-Broiler, Kamsky Bekon and Chelny-Khleb.
What has not changed, through thirty-nine years and three shocks, is who signs for the company: Shakirzyanov is its director and, on the latest figure on record, its largest known shareholder. In the same period net profit rose from ₽208 million in 2013 to ₽1.02 billion in 2024 (nominal rubles), on an equity-funded balance sheet — the record of a director who has run the company without a recorded majority.
Researched 31 sources in Russian.