Major shake up at Glenmorangie

Jul 1 2008

£45 million investment programme includes new headquarters and bottling plant

Glenmorangie has unveiled plans for a major shake up including a phased withdrawal from blended whisky making, the sell off of its Glen Moray Distillery at Elgin and a £45m investment programme including a new bottling plant.

The company was bought by French group LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton in 2005 to concentrate on building up sales of single malt Scotch whisky brands – Glenmorangie and Ardbeg.

Now it has signed an agreement to sell its 33 acre bottling plant and cask warehousing site at Broxburn, West Lothian, to rival Diageo though it will continue to operate there over the next two years.

Diageo will use the site mainly for cask warehousing and the bottling plant which is currently used for blends will close.

Glenmorangie plans to build a state of the art bottling plant in the Lothians and also open new headquarters in Edinburgh.

Chief executive Paul Neep said he hoped to preserve jobs at the group which employs 420 people in Scotland.

Some 290 of its staff are employed at Broxburn and another 17 are based at Glen Moray.

He said: “We very much hope that the vast majority of staff will transfer from Broxburn to our new headquarters in Edinburgh or  to the new bottling plant we will build or to Diageo.

He added that it would be a condition of the sale of the Glen Moray Distillery  that the employees there will transfer to the new owner.

Neep said the investment programme is in response to rapidly growing demand for its malt whisky brands in markets such as Asia, Continental Europe and the USA.

The new bottling plant will provide the capacity for a significant increase in production of both single malts to meet the demand.
 
Its plans include a multi-million pound investment in Glenmorangie’s flagship Distillery in Tain, Ross-shire.

In addition to the increase in distilling capacity, new whisky cask warehouses will be built and the popular visitor centre will be restyled, enhancing its attraction as a tourist destination.

Further development is also planned at the company’s Ardbeg Distillery on Islay, off the west coast of Scotland. The distillery and visitor centre will be further upgraded and new cask warehousing will be built.  

Neep, said the plan represented significant capital investment by the company in Scotland.  

“We believe that these proposals will deliver long-term additional growth for both the company and also, importantly, for the local and wider Scottish economies,”
he said.

It plans a phased withdrawal from the bottling and sale of most of its blended Scotch whisky brands and is likely to either sell or stop making blends like Highland Queen which is sold mainly in Africa and the Middle East.

However Neep said it plans to keep its James Martin’s de luxe blend which sells well in Portgual and development brand Bailie Nicol Jarvie will also be kept.