A brand for each city

According to AC Nielsen’s China Millennium Report, beer brands vary widely across cities. Each city market has a favourite label and, for many, it is a local brand. The survey found that half the people in urban China consumed beer in the "past three months". Seventy per cent of these were male and 30 per cent were female drinkers. Beer consumption was found to be highest in Fuzhou (69%), Qingdao and Beijing (62%) and Shenyang (59%), and the lowest in Nanjing and Wuhan (44%). Table

Joint venture e-commerce launched

At the end of January, Southcorp, Lion Nathan and United Distillers & Vintners, three of Australia’s leading alcoholic beverage producers, have formed a joint venture to provide a business-to-business e-commerce service for Australia’s AUS$70 billion hospitality and retail liquor industry. The company, Artesian Innovation (www.artesian.com.au) is owned equally by the three partners and will pilot an online liquor trading and information service, servicing about 3,000 Sydney restaurants. The service will be offered nationally within months. Southcorp will extend the concept to its operations in the USA and is investigating other Internet activities. In the domestic market, Southcorp has approximately 40 per cent of wine, Lion Nathan 40 per cent of beer and UDV 40 per cent of spirits sales.

Communication hitches overcome

Visitors to Sydney pubs this year should expect to have their grey matter challenged by the locals. Playing "pub trivia" seems to be the latest change in Australian pub culture. Gone are the days when people had a quiet one at the bar. These days they sit poised over blank sheets of paper with sharpened pencils in their hands, listening attentively to the questions. Trivia prizes are modest. The whole point seems to be to get people talking to each other again. Some clever ones have already made a business out of this development. White Lightning Entertainment which organises regular trivia nights for about 40 pubs has a pool of more than 130 hosts to draw from.

A good drop

The joke is beyond our comprehension. Who drinks a drop of beer only? Whatever the reason, Sydney’s Malt Shovel Brewery decided to offer Australian beer lovers a good drop of a Belgian style wheat beer (5% ABV). It is a slightly cloudy beer brewed with a large proportion of unmalted wheat in addition to malted barley. Infusions of orange peel and coriander enhance the flavour. The wheat beer is to be served with a slice of orange or poured over ice. Being a seasonal beer, there was a limited release in November.n

Potent bubbles

The Australian Soft Drink Association (ASDA) is lobbying the Australia New Zealand Food Authority (ANZFA) to limit the total level of caffeine from all sources in the energy drinks category. ANZFA presently looks into an application from Austrian energy drink manufacturer Red Bull which would limit direct caffeine but would leave the door open for more to be added in the form of guarana. ASDA is seeking a caffeine limit in energy drinks of 300 mg/kg which it says is approximately equivalent to 83 mg in a 250 ml single serve drink or about the same level of caffeine as in a cup of instant coffee. The present
maximum legal limit of caffeine in soft drinks at 145 mg/kg is below world cola manufacturing practice of about 200 mg/kg. Speaking of which..

Implementation delayed

As mandatory labelling for genetically modified foods is estimated to cost Australia’s food industry AUS$3 billion in the first year and AUS$1.5 billion each year thereafter, Australian and New Zealand Health Ministers have deferred making any decision on its implementation. The deferment means that labels will not reach the supermarket shelves until next year.
The proposed regulation would require companies to determine the GM status of each ingredient, additive and pro-cessing aid used in their products to accurately declare whether their products "do contain...", "may contain ..." or "do not contain..." GM ingredients. The British government has outlawed the commercial cultivation of GM crops for three years during which time further farm-scale tests on the crops will be continued.

It’s a hit success

Asahi Breweries Ltd. may have been the last of Japan’s big brewers to launch a Happoshu brand. Nevertheless, Asahi’s Honnama brand sold like hot cakes after its intro-duction to the market on 21 February. The success of the Honnama Happoshu brand has hit sales of Asahi’s premium Super Dry brand on the head. Sales declined 13% immediately after the launch. However, for the full year Asahi expects a 3% decline only of its Super Dry sales.

Wine, please

For its financial year ended 30 September 2000, Asia Pacific Breweries (APB) reported a decline in turnover by S$14.5m to S$343.9m (US$190m), due to lower Heineken exports from the Singapore brewery and a 3% volume decline in the Singapore beer market. APB’s CEO, Koh Poh Tiong, was reported as saying that young people were drinking more wine, coffee, water and other beverages. Also the decline in numbers of foreign construction workers by as many as 100,000 in the past year hit sales negatively.

Popularity of Low Malts rising

The so-called Low Malt Beers (beers with a reduced malt portion) are gaining significant ground in the Japanese market. Their market share exceeded the 20% mark for the first time last year. Low Malts are less expensive compared to conventional beers, due to tax concessions in view of the lower malt portion in the grist. Recent statistics indicate that domestic sales of beer in Japan fell 0.7% in 2000. The Japanese beer market continues to be saturated, partly on account of the declining portion of younger people and the rising portion of elderly people in the population, so that increases in demand are limited.
Price-conscious consumers additionally shift from standard beer to Low Malts. According to statistics, sales of standard beer dropped 4.5% whereas sales of Low Malts rose 15%..

Consolidation of the brewing sector

It is becoming apparent that there is a trend towards emergence of just a few brewing groups in the Peoples’ Republic of China. Even though supply of beer exceeds demand, domestic breweries are expanding capacity in order to be better positioned in a more competitive market. Foreign machine suppliers are deriving less benefit from this modernisation and expansion. In total, about 220 million hl of beer will have been produced in the PR of China in 2000, up from 209 million hl in the previous year, according to figures from the China Alcoholic Drinks Industry Association (CADIA). 40 million hl capacity was said to have remained unused in 1999.
In the next five years the brewing industry will change considerably.
There are over 800 breweries in China currently.
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