Oleg Tinkov

Daria

Pelmeni and other frozen foods were produced under the brand name Daria, named after the Tinkov's daughter. A Greek called Athanasius, who distributed ravioli manufacturing equipment in Russia, gave Tinkov this idea while in the sauna. Production was launched in early 1998 in Peterhof and in the beginning it made products under the trademark Smak under license from the Andrey Makarevich company. After a conflict with the licensor, the brand name changed to Smak St. Petersburg. Economic crisis was the reason for creating its own brand; the new brand helped increase market share. The new plant, which opened in December 1998, at the site of a former Technoshock warehouse on Predportovaya street in St. Petersburg, originally produced only Daria. In addition, Tinkoff made products under the brands of Tolsty kok, Dobry product and Tsar-batyushka.

Daria first became popular due to an advertising campaign in which five billboards in St. Petersburg and two in Moscow showed an image of female buttocks covered with flour and the caption Your favorite pelmeni!. Another commercial included the phrase, From these raviolek you’ll get stomach cramps, which caused the Ravioli company dissatisfaction. In return they used a phrase Daria, shoo! in their advertisement campaign.

In 2001, Daria was sold to Roman Abramovich and Andrew Bloch's holding company Planeta Management for $21 million, of which $7 million were used to pay off debt.

Tinkoff Beer

In 1997 Tinkov could not find an investor for the construction of a brewery. Two meetings helped: an equipment supplier, with whom Tinkoff met at the Drinktec exhibition in Munich, proposed to combine the brewery with a restaurant and focus on the development of the brand; the other supplier suggested that their beer be called after Tinkov's family name according to the Bavarian tradition.

The initial investment amounted to one million Deutschmarks, and in August 1998 the first restaurant was opened in St. Petersburg on Kazanskaya street, 7. There soon appeared a line for beer in bottles. In 2001 a restaurant was opened in Moscow in Protochny lane, the investment in which amounted to $2 million. Other restaurants were opened in Samara in November 2002 and in Novosibirsk in January 2003; there were further openings in Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Ufa, Yekaterinburg, Vladivostok and Sochi.

The first plant was built by the summer of 2003 with the support of Zenit Bank, which opened a credit line for Tinkoff Brewery. For construction of the second plant the company raised the funds through a bond issue, as well as the loans from Zenit Bank and the German HypoVereinsbank. The second plant worth about $75 million was completely built on credit funds.

Tinkoff factories produced Tinkoff beer, Tekiza, and T. While expanding, the company invested significant funds in mass marketing. There was even a bad experience of collaboration with photographer and director Oliviero Toscani, author of the United Colors of Benetton advertising campaigns.

The Sun Interbrew group had shown interest in acquisition of the Tinkoff factories since, and in 2005 the transaction took place. It paid about $200 million for the factories and brand. After that Tinkov did a deal to sell and lease back the premises of the Tinkoff restaurants to the management company Troika Dialog for about $10–12 million. Finally in 2008–2009 the restaurants themselves were acquired by Mint Capital equity fund.

Tinkoff Bank

On November 18, 2005, on Necker Island, owned by billionaire Sir Richard Branson, Oleg Tinkov presented a draft or his proposal for a future bank. In 2006 he acquired the Moscow Himmashbank and based on it created an online bank, which was a first in Russia. Despite setbacks in attracting investment at the start of the project, during the crisis of 2008 the bank showed a 50-fold increase in profits.

Tinkoff Credit Systems reduced costs at the expense of marketing which was non-standard for the banking sector and the widespread use of computer processing of the data instead of human labor. For a long time the bank did not attract deposits and used its own capital for lending.

Tinkoff's technology platform played a major role in its growth. The IPO of the bank was listed as one of the largest deals in the 2013 Russian version of Forbes; Tinkov doubled his fortune and took position 1210 in the world ranking of billionaires. On 14 October 2013, TCS had its IPO and several days later Oleg Tinkov renounced his United States citizenship.

In the beginning of 2015 Tinkoff Credit Systems changed its name to Tinkoff Bank. The simpler and more concise name was intended to better reflect the full range of financial institution services.

As of February 2020 Tinkov owned 44% of the bank, and it remained his main project.

In December 2020, Tinkov sold 5.3% of TCS Group for $325 million, reducing his stake to 35%. He announced his intention to spend part of this money ($200 million) to create a fund for the study of leukemia.

In January 2021, his remaining shares were converted from class B to class A. As a result, the Tinkov family's voting rights in the group decreased from 84% to 35%.

In February 2022, sanctions imposed on Russia as a result of their 2022 invasion of Ukraine heavily impacted the ruble and Tinkoff's shares crashed. Tinkov lost the majority of his net worth, retaining under $1 billion.

Investments

A bne IntelliNews publication alleged that Tinkov was the investor of Plata, a Fintech startup launched by the former Tinkoff Bank employees. Plata became the first Latin American startup to reach over USD 1 billion valuation since 2022.

Tinkoff Restaurants

The Tinkoff Restaurants cycling team under command of coach Alexander Kuznetsov became historically the third Russian professional team. At the time of its appearance it was the only one in Russia. The team was launched in January 2006 at the headquarters at Kutzetnov's Spanish villa. It was composed of members of the Russian national Track cycling team, including Mikhail Ignatiev, Nikolay Trusov, Alexander Serov, Sergey Klimov, Pavel Brutt and Ivan Rovny. Airline Siberia was the joint team sponsorand the team's annual budget was $4 million.

In the 2006 season the team riders won first place in the team pursuit at the Track Cycling World Cup in Los Angeles, and Pavel Brutt won the Tour of Greece and the Cinturón a Mallorca.

The reason for the team disbanding was the conflict between Alexander Kuznetsov and Tinkov.