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Alexander Medvedev
General Director
When the previous director was removed for embezzling 11.9 million rubles through fake contracts, Alexander Medvedev stepped into a Chelyabinsk factory that made jet chronographs but had abandoned consumer watches. Within 18 months he registered a personal retail company, within 4 years restored caliber 3603 production, and by 2024 won Russia's top watch award twice.
Alexander Yuryevich Medvedev arrived at the Chelyabinsk Watch Factory on June 7, 2013, to replace a director who had embezzled nearly 12 million rubles through fictitious contracts. The factory he inherited had not produced a consumer watch in six years. Its main floor was a shopping mall. What remained was a small military workshop, a dormant caliber, and a defense license.
Over 70 years, production at Molnija was never stopped — it operated through the difficult 1990s and 2000s.
Within seven months, Medvedev registered Molniya-Taim LLC in his own name — a personally owned retail vehicle deliberately separated from the regulated defense manufacturing business. The architecture was simple and strategically precise: keep the defense JSC for credibility and cashflow; build the commercial brand through the retail entity on agile commercial terms. It was a structural bet made before a single wristwatch had been designed.
By 2015, consumer production had restarted. By 2018, the factory’s heritage 3603 caliber was back in production, now powering modern 41–44mm wristwatches rather than the pocket cases it was designed for. By 2024, Molnija had won two categories at Russia’s top watch competition in the same year — Heritage and Men’s Watches — on revenue that had nearly doubled in the preceding twelve months.
Medvedev’s public profile is minimal — no social media, no public biography, and a single substantive interview on record, given at the factory’s 70th anniversary in November 2017. What drew him to Molnija, what he risked to secure the appointment, and how he navigated the skepticism that greets any outsider inheriting a fraud-scarred institution remain unanswered. What is documented: 47 percent net margins on the retail side by 2023, and three consecutive Best Russian Watches wins.