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GK Vamin
Between 2013 and 2017 two Tatarstan dairies passed from a bankrupt holding to its creditors' manager, then to a state leasing company, and finally to OOO Archa, owned by the holding founder's son and daughter. Rebuilt, they helped make GK Vamin third in Russian hard and semi-hard cheese in 2024.
Two plants bought back, and the farms around them
Lease first, buy second, rebuild third
In 2014 the dairy plant in Arsk, north-east of Kazan, dated from 1932, and its owner was in receivership. A newly registered company with a team of two leased it, together with a second plant at Baltasi, from the manager the owner’s creditors had appointed. The new company took the bankrupt owner’s name: Vamin (Вамин).
Third in Russian cheese
GK Vamin (ГК «Вамин») is a dairy group in Tatarstan. Its operating company, OOO Archa (ООО «Арча»), is registered in Arsk and owns the two plants that the 2014 company leased: the Arsk dairy, opened in 1932, and the butter and dairy plant at Baltasi, opened in 1961. Arsk makes cheese, butter and whey; Baltasi, further north-east, makes semi-hard cheese, butter and whey. Both towns lie in the north of the republic.
In 2024 the group made 23,000 tonnes of hard and semi-hard cheese, 16.1% more than a year earlier, and ranked third among Russia’s producers in that category, according to the industry ranking published in July 2025 by Souzmoloko (Союзмолоко), the national dairy producers’ union. The ranking covers hard and semi-hard cheese specifically, the category the group’s plants are built around. The same ranking puts the leader at 44,700 tonnes and the second producer at 31,600; the fourth made 22,300. Third place, in other words, sits closer to the producers below it than to the two above.
About 1,500 people work across the group, by its chairman’s own count for 2025. The group runs the chain from the farm to the shop shelf: its own farms, with 13,000 cattle on 25,000 hectares, its two processing plants and its own sales arm, which supplies Russia’s federal retail chains. Its cheese and butter are sold under the Vamin name, alongside the Archeese, Moy Milok and Aldo Elite lines.
OOO Archa is owned in equal halves by Mintimer Mingazov and his sister, Farida Fazlieva; she takes no part in the business, by his account. Mingazov has chaired the group’s board since 2016 and has been Archa’s general director since December 2019. The name the group trades under is older than the group, and older than the company that revived it.
The holding that came before
In 1994 a holding company was formed under Vagiz Mingazov, the chairman’s father. Renamed VAMIN Tatarstan, it grew to 28 dairies and 26 agrofirms, and the dairies at Arsk and Baltasi were among its plants. In its day it was a holding of a different order from the group that now carries its name: the group runs two plants where the holding ran 28.
In September 2012 VTB filed to bankrupt OAO VAMIN Tatarstan, at the time the largest agricultural enterprise in Tatarstan, Kommersant (Коммерсантъ) reported. In 2013 a receivership opened, and the holding’s assets passed to Prosto Moloko (Просто Молоко), the manager its creditors appointed. From then on the plants were run for the creditors, not for the family that had built the holding. The sequence took four years to complete: a petition in 2012, a receivership in 2013 and an auction of the property in 2016.
On 28 May 2013 OOO Archa was registered in Arsk. Four years later it would own two of the estate’s plants, but in 2013 it owned none of them.
The estate itself was sold in 2016. At auction, the state leasing company Tatagroleasing (Татагролизинг) bought about 97% of OAO VAMIN’s property, the Arsk and Baltasi plants among it. A sale of that share left almost nothing of the holding’s property outside the leasing company’s hands. By then a new company had been working those two plants under the VAMIN name for two years.
The plants passed through three hands in four years: the holding’s, the creditors’ manager’s and the state leasing company’s. From the receivership in 2013 until June 2017, no company of the Mingazov family owned them.
Leasing what it did not own
The new company was OOO Vamin Tatarstan, registered in 2014 by Mintimer Mingazov, Vagiz Mingazov’s son. It started with a team of two and leased the Arsk and Baltasi plants from Prosto Moloko. It ran plants that belonged to a bankrupt estate, under the name of the estate’s former owner, with no claim on the buildings beyond the lease. The lease lasted from 2014 until June 2017, and it ran on through the auction: when the estate was sold in 2016, the company was still working the two plants.
Mingazov described how the company handled that position in an interview with Business Online (БИЗНЕС Online) in November 2021. It was his first major interview, and he gave that account in answer to a question about where the company’s money came from. While the plants were leased, it put no money into the business, because the plants were not its own; it accumulated cash instead, and the modernisation came only after the plants had been bought. The rule was simple to state and slow to live by: run the plants as they were, keep the cash, and spend on the buildings only once they were the company’s.
The plants changed hands under the lease when they passed with the rest of the estate to Tatagroleasing. A year later the lessee’s family became the owner. In June 2017 Tatagroleasing sold the Arsk and Baltasi plants to OOO Archa, the company Mingazov owns with his sister, and Deputy Prime Minister Marat Akhmetov confirmed the sale on 30 June 2017. The price was not made public.
The plants the family had run for three years as a tenant were now its own. Nothing about the buildings had changed in the sale, and the money that had not gone into them while they were leased was still to be spent.
The first measure of the two plants under their new owner came within a season. By September 2017 they were processing 580–600 tonnes of milk a day, 21% of Tatarstan’s volume and more than any other processor in the republic, according to Business Online. Three months after the purchase, the plants leased out of a bankrupt estate led the republic where that estate’s owner had once been the largest agricultural enterprise.
Rebuilding once it owned
Ownership let the company widen its base. In November 2017 Archa signed for an idle dairy in Aksubaevo, its first plant beyond the two it had bought, and restarted it on 1 February 2018 after repairs. The Aksubaevo plant has been idle again since 2022 and is offered for sale; the business stayed centred on Arsk and Baltasi.
The year after the purchase was not a straight climb. In 2018 daily processing at the two plants fell from 490 to 420 tonnes and capacity utilisation was 68%. ZMK (ЗМК), the Zelenodolsk dairy, overtook Archa as Tatarstan’s largest processor that year. The first place won in 2017 lasted a single season.
The rebuild came next, and only on property the company owned. Reconstruction of the Arsk plant began on 27 February 2021. A year and a day later, on 28 February 2022, it made its first cheese, on Fibosa lines built to take 420 tonnes of milk a day, after ₽563M of investment. The sequence Mingazov had described in 2021, lease, accumulate, buy and then modernise, had reached its last step at the plant where it began.
The company grew around the rebuilt plant. OOO Archa, one company within the group, went from 216 employees in 2020 to 615 in 2025, according to registry data. The group added farms in 2024, at Kukmor for dairy cattle and around Nizhnekamsk for grain and feed. By 2024 its cheese output had reached third place in Russia in its category, a ranking measured against producers across the country rather than within the republic.
Most of what it makes is sold at home. By Mingazov’s January 2026 figure, the group exports about 2,500 tonnes of cheese a year. The rest goes to Russian buyers, through the group’s own sales arm and the federal chains it supplies.
Four companies, one name
The Vamin story runs through four companies and five names, and they are easy to confuse. OAO VAMIN Tatarstan was the father’s holding, the one that went bankrupt. OOO Archa, registered in Arsk in 2013, is the company that bought the Arsk and Baltasi plants in 2017 and owns them today. OOO Vamin Tatarstan, registered in 2014, is the company that leased those plants before Archa bought them. Vamin R was a company 99% owned by Vamin Tatarstan. Unimilk is the name Vamin Tatarstan carried by the end of 2024. The group’s plants never belonged to Vamin Tatarstan: that company leased them, and Archa bought them.
GK Vamin, the group, is the business built on Archa’s plants. Its brand name is the old holding’s, but its assets came to it by lease and then by purchase, not by inheritance: the family company bought the plants from the state leasing company that had bought them at the estate’s auction.
In May 2024 Vamin R, a company 99% owned by Vamin Tatarstan, completed the purchase of Danone’s Russian business. On 6 December 2024 Ruslan Alisultanov became the sole owner of Unimilk, as Vamin Tatarstan had been renamed, and the company left the group.
Toward its own milk
The group’s latest step is upstream, in the milk itself. Its own farms supplied about 17% of the milk it took in during 2025, roughly 120 tonnes a day of about 700, by Mingazov’s account, and the stated goal is half or more. That share is a goal, not a result; for now, more than four-fifths of the milk the plants take in comes from other farms. The farms the group added in 2024, at Kukmor and around Nizhnekamsk, sit alongside this effort: one for dairy cattle, the other for the grain and feed a herd needs.
Mingazov has explained the turn upstream in terms of steadiness. In a review of 2025 for Business Online in January 2026, he said that for a cheesemaker the most important thing is stability, and that the group had reconsidered its direction and chosen to go as far as possible into its own raw material. Through its own milk, he said, the group is trying to reach that stability. He set that against falling raw-milk prices, which weigh on a cheesemaker whose cash turns over in about 90 days.
The step took physical form at the end of 2025. In December 2025 the first section of a 5,200-cow dairy complex in Arsk district began milking, with 1,500 head. The complex is planned in sections, and the first holds a little under a third of its intended herd. The complex sits in the same district as the Arsk plant, the first of the two the company leased.
The district where a company with a team of two first leased a plant in 2014 now holds the group’s own herd as well.
Researched 31 sources in Russian.