Soyuz Tobacco Group

Alexander Plastinin arrived in Zambia in late 2023 on a commercial assignment — selling fertiliser for Delta Bio — and stayed for what the country offered. Over recurring seasons and dinners with industry veterans, one idea kept returning: green-leaf threshing. Zambia’s crop was growing every year; its processing capacity was not. By March 2025 the vision had taken shape — Soyuz Tobacco Processing, a modern GLT at Lilayi, Lusaka. Plastinin founded STP and spent the next year carrying it toward financing.

In early April 2026 he brought in Maksim Uspenskiy and Nikolai Gaichenia. The three came from the same world — commodities — and had dealt with each other long before Zambia. They joined forces, divided the roles, and went to work.

Working through the project with the Group’s consultants and senior advisers, one conclusion kept surfacing: in tobacco, margin is lost at every handoff. The farm sells its leaf, the processor buys a crop it didn’t control, the trader moves product it never saw in the field — and each seam costs money and quality. The answer was to own the seams. The partners expanded a processing plan into a vertically integrated platform — farm, plant and trading desk — and became co-founders of Soyuz Tobacco Group. STP, the Lilayi plant, remains Plastinin’s founding project within it.

In the first two weeks of June 2026 the partners took the plan to the industry’s heartland: four days in São Paulo with banks and industry principals, then ten days in Santa Cruz do Sul, the GLT capital of Brazil. They walked nine facilities — seven GLTs and two primaries — every one of them commissioned by SUR Engenharia, the manufacturer behind the Lilayi plant. Proof of the equipment, at industrial scale, nine times over.

Around dinner tables and churrascos, factory owners told the same story from every side: Santa Cruz is saturated — too many plants, too few farmers. Zambia is the mirror image, and the veterans agreed on where the industry’s future lies: Africa. The Group flew home with working trade relationships — Brazilian primaries and GLTs whose leaf STT Trading will help place — and with senior Brazilian industry expertise drawn toward the project.

Zambia has long been the quiet third market of southern African tobacco — Zimbabwe the historic heavyweight, Malawi world-renowned for its Burley. Zambia grows both, to a quality the trade rates, in a comparatively stable operating environment. The national crop has grown year on year; processing capacity has not kept pace. That structural gap is the platform’s founding thesis — and the letters of intent and expressions of interest already secured for processing capacity and offtake say the trade sees it too.

We sell to the trade only. Our customers are leaf merchants, manufacturers and regional buyers who need consistent grades and a clean paper trail — one accountable counterparty for Zambian leaf.