Shop until you drop
Asahi Breweries, hotly tipped as a buyer of Foster’s beer business, raised a few eyebrows when it announced on 26 August 2010 that it will acquire P&N Beverages, the third-largest firm in beverage sales in Australia, for AUD 364 million (EUR 259 million) through Asahi Holdings (Australia).
Closely held P&N Beverages had sales of AUD 385 million (EUR 274 million) in the year ended 30 June 2010.
Asahi said it expects to close the deal by the end of November depending on approval by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Foreign Investment Review Board.
Already last year Asahi bought Australia’s Schweppes Holding for GBP 550 million pounds (EUR 657 million) from Britain’s Cadbury.
P&N will be integrated into Schweppes in the future.
Australia is certainly a good place for investment as its economy is stable. However, to please the analysts Asahi will have to look for more targets in emerging markets for growth.
That’s why Asahi’s overtures to South Korea’s Lotte, a food and retail conglomerate, if accepted, might receive a warmer welcome from the financial markets than the P&N deal.
In early August 2010 Asahi Breweries reportedly said it may sell its Seoul-based Haitai subsidiary and ally with South Korean giant Lotte in the soft drinks arena. To appease the anti-trust bodies, Asahi thinks it will have to sell Haitai, which is South Korea’s third-largest drinks maker.
Meanwhile in China, Tsingtao Brewery is in talks to acquire a 45 percent stake in Hangzhou Xihu Beer, which is 55 percent owned by Asahi through a Hong Kong subsidiary.
The 45 percent stake in question (valued at nearly 2 billion yuan/EUR 230 million) is currently controlled by Hangzhou Industrial Assets Management Co., which is run by the government of Xihu Beer’s home city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province.
The move is seen as part of the deepening cooperation between Tsingtao and Asahi Breweries in China. In early 2009, Asahi Breweries acquired about 20 percent of Tsingtao’s stock, which had formerly been held by Anheuser-Busch, for USD 667 million (or 14 times estimated 2008 EBITDA), raising its stake to 27 percent.
