War for Whisky 17 Years Old.

‘Grasp Windsor 17 years old’

Whisky industry is in the severe competition for the share of 15 – 17 years super premium whisky market that is dominated by Windsor 17 years.

In whisky industry call it ‘17 years War’.

At 26th, according to whisky industry, Doosan will introduce a 17 year-old super premium whisky in the middle of the next month and will launch whisky business again in 4 years. In 1998, Doosan sold 50% of the shares of Doosan Seagrams to Seagram headquarters and ceased whisky business. Doosan decided Scotch Morrison as import source of undiluted solution of whisky and prepares new products.

Doosan employed Chung Won-kyung, senior officer of Diagio Korea as Vice President of Operation before re-entering the market.

According to Doosan, it will introduce 17 years and 12 years, but the main target market will be 17 years old that is popular explosively recently.

High Scotch, a subsidiary of Height Beers will introduce a new product ‘Lanslott’ at 3rd of the next month to replace Deemple. High Scotch has a marketing strategy to sale 12 years and 17 years concurrently. However it will focus on 17 years.

At the moment domestic super premium whisky market is dominated by Windsor 17 years of Diagio (old Doosan Seagrams) with 79%.

Jinro Valentine, number one in this year, marked 18% of market share by introducing ‘Valentines Master’ in the end of last year when ‘Imperial 15’ had been behind of ‘Windsor 17 years’.

The reason for whisky industry desiring of 17 years is that the trend of consumption become luxury and the market is expected to increase explosively in the future.

Actually, in case of super premium whisky, 244,448 boxes of whisky (18 bottles of 500㎖) were sold from January to July and increased by 41.8% compared to the same period of last year.

On the other hand, the turnover of premium whisky 12 years increased only by 13.5% for the same period and others of 5 years such as Something Specials’ decreased by 23%.

Chi-Young Shin higgledy@donga.com