Basle’s publicans annoy Heineken with parallel imports
The beer wars between the Association of Basle Publicans and the country’s major brewers Carlsberg and Heineken have entered a new stage. In May 2012, the Basle publicans began self-importing Carlsberg beer. As of September 2012, they will also self-import Heineken to protest against the brewers’ wholesale prices for draught beer.
"We want to teach the cost drivers Carlsberg and Heineken a lesson that we are not willing to tolerate their price policies any longer," said Maurus Ebneter, the spokesman of the Association of Basle Publicans. Through parallel imports the association hopes to encourage other publicans to circumvent the brewers’ official sales channels.
What has led to the new round of boycotts is Heineken’s recent price increase. Heineken Switzerland, which brews the domestic beer brands Eichhof and Calanda, had announced in July 2012 that it would raise prices by an average of 3.9 percent as of October.
Heineken only followed its competitor Carlsberg, whose local unit, Feldschlösschen, had announced a few months previously a price increase of 4.4 percent. Outraged, the Association of Basle Publicans lodged an official complaint with the country’s competition authority, Weko, in February this year.
Price increases in lockstep have been an all too familiar game in Switzerland. Between 2007 and 2012 Carlsberg and Heineken have raised their wholesale prices by more than 20 percent respectively.
Franziska Troesch-Schnyder, President of the Consumer Forum, told newspapers that the price hikes smacked of an informal arrangement, made possible by the two brewers’ strong market positions.
Carlsberg and Heineken are estimated to have a combined market share of around 65 percent (Carlsberg 40% – Heineken 25%), excluding their own import volumes.
It’s not just the price increases that annoy the publicans. What they find maddening is the brewers’ discriminate pricing of beer for the on- and off-premise. According to the Association of Basle Publicans, between 1995 and 2010 Carlsberg and Heineken increased the wholesale prices for bottled beers by half as much as for draught beer.
Obviously, the two brewers reject all allegations of price fixing and push the buck to the brewers. Olivier Burger, the spokesman for Heineken Switzerland, was quoted as saying that both, publicans and brewers, are responsible for the price of a beer in the on-premise. "Since 2007, we have raised our draught beer prices by CHF 0.59 (EUR 0.49) per litre. In the same period the price of a litre beer in the on-premise has gone up by CHF 2.23 (EUR 1.85)," he added.
Experts at the Swiss Federal Agency for Statistics beg to differ. According to their figures, the average price of a glass of beer (0.3 litres) over the past five years has risen 16 percent to CHF 4.80 (EUR 4), while brewers have hiked their wholesale prices by 22 percent.
It is not just the wholesale price of beer that drives Swiss publicans up the wall. Coke in Switzerland is another offender. Basle publicans complain that they have to pay Coke twice as much for a bottle of pop than their colleagues a few kilometres down the road in Germany. The city of Basle borders with Germany.
Therefore, the Association of Basle Publicans began self-importing Coke and Schweppes products from Germany in November 2011. Already 200 pubs rely on these imports which come at a price point 30 percent below Switzerland’s.
With the latest round of self-imports, the association hopes to bring Carlsberg and Heineken to their knees so that they will eventually lower their wholesale prices to “international levels” (read the lower German levels).
What the association does not say – and has never admitted to – is that the two brewers, in sync with raising prices, have provided publicans with increasingly generous loans for kitting out their bars.
As always, reality is not black and white but comes in several shades in between.
