Media’s coolish response to the Peroni sale

Given that in Italy, a country of about 60 million drama queens, bad news tend to be greeted by loud screams of “the end is near”, the quasi silence which followed the announcement that the beer brand Peroni was to be sold, still appears remarkable.

After all, did not SABMiller market Peroni as quintessentially and eternally Italian – much like Sophia Loren, la Vespa and Giorgio Armani (that have been around like forever too)?

Perhaps the Italian media’s reluctance to turn this sale into a “scandalo“ is due to the fact that Peroni has been owned by a global brewer – first by SABMiller and now briefly by AB-InBev – since 2003. Too long to make anybody remember that it was Italian-owned once.

Also when SABMiller took over Peroni, it did not axe jobs. This rendered the takeover almost benign – in the eyes of the concerned public at least. In those days joblessness was around 8 percent (today it’s over 12 percent).

Besides, and this is a major point , it was thanks to foreign brewers taking a foothold in the Italian beer market that in moral terms (!) the general situation improved massively. Before Heineken at al came to Italy, beer quality was so so. Many brewers engaged in illicit sales (bypassing the tax man) and fiddled with their excise payments (except for the northern Italian brewer Forst). In other words, foreign brewers have literally cleaned up the Italian brewing industry and made it more law-abiding. Today, Italy’s major brewers Heineken and SABMiller control 50 percent of domestic beer sales and Carlsberg 6 percent, according to estimates. AB-InBev, through imports, has a 7 percent market share. All other imports combined represent around 20 percent of sales.

Despite brewers’ best efforts it’s perhaps for these historical reasons that beer is not exactly relevant to Italian consumers. Per capita beer consumption is only around 29 litres. As to preferred brands, Italians seems to be very little patriotic: only one in five Italians declared to prefer an Italian brand to an import, according to a report by UK Trade and Investments.

Ultimately, the polite disregard shown towards the Peroni sale may be attributed to Italians having much more on their plates to upset them. No day goes by without a scandal involving politicians hitting the news. No day without groups of people finding out that they are not entitled to a pension. No day without the discovery of illegal rubbish dumps; no day without media sighting ruined artefacts due to neglect. As one observer puts it, it’s because of all these really big problems that no one in Italy can spare a thought for the fate of Peroni.