Beer sales dropped in 2014: just a blip or serious trouble?

It’s how you see it. The volume of beer produced in China decreased in 2014 for the first time in 24 years, falling by 2.7 percent to 490 million hl, according to the country’s National Bureau of Statistics.

In 2013, China’s beer production broke the 500 million hl mark to reach 506 million hl, but in 2014, beer was the only alcoholic drink in the country that registered a drop in production, Taiwanese media reported on 17 May 2015

According to a business report, the market share of beer in China’s alcoholic drink sector declined by 1.6 percentage points to 75 percent in 2014. “The development of the beer business is at a turning point,” China Alcoholic Drinks Association chair Wang Yancai reportedly said at the 2015 congress of Chinese beer breweries.

The association attributed the lower production volume mainly to a saturation of China’s beer consumption. Other factors include the cold temperatures in mid-2014 during the usual peak season for beer, a slowdown in China’s economic growth, and an expansion of the range of available alcoholic drinks to include wines.

Other industry sources, however, expressed a different opinion, saying that per capita consumption of beer in China is only 34.2 litres annually, which is far below the global average of mature markets at about 66 litres.

At the end of this year we will know if 2014 was just a blip in China’s unstoppable beer consumption increase or if it was a sign of things to come.