Studennikov was born in the village of Levokumsky, located on the bank of the Kuma River in the north-eastern part of the Stavropol Territory.
After the birth of their son, his parents moved to the small town of Bakal in the Satka District in the west of the Chelyabinsk Region.
After finishing school, Sergei Studennikov entered the technical specialty at the Mining and Ceramics College in the city of Satka.
Due to the lack of funds, friends and family ties, he lived at the train station for a couple of weeks in the winter and worked as a loader at the market.
“My mother would send me to buy groceries every day, and I was jealous: this man at the checkout didn’t have to stand in line, while the others stood there for hours,” Studennikov said in an interview with RBC magazine in 2019.
Studennikov began his entrepreneurial career in the 1990s with the retail sale of alcoholic beverages, tobacco products, and building materials.
In 2006, Studennikov opened the first “Red&White” liquor store in the city of Kopeysk, which is located ten kilometers from Chelyabinsk.
In liquor stores, the share of alcohol sales is 80-90%, and for us it is less than a quarter; everything else is food, drinks, everyday goods, tobacco.
[14][15] According to Sergei Studennikov, this deal will not affect the work of the “Red&White” chain in any way, and the shares of Mercury Retail Group Limited shareholders will remain in the same proportion.
“The partners of Mercury Retail Group Limited decided to focus on the development of the “Red&White” and Bristol chains in order to strengthen their position in the market,” Studennikov said.
[18] At the end of 2022, the turnover of Mercury Retail Group (manages the “Red&White” and Bristol chains) amounted to 993 billion rubles.
According to Forbes estimates, the net profit of the Mercury Retail Holding group at the end of 2022 exceeded 48 billion rubles.
These data were provided by the INFOLine working group, which completed updating the TOP-200 Largest FMCG Retail Chains of Russia database.
[6] He is a citizen of Montenegro He was included in the Forbes magazine rating of "200 Richest Businessmen of Russia 2021", where he took 78th place with a net worth of $1.8 billion.
That same year, Studennikov's wife Elena Soboleva was among the top ten richest self-made women in Russia, with her fortune estimated at $250 million.