Beer sales declined by 2.8 percent in 2009
As concerns beer sales, Bavarian brewers appear to have a greater reason for joy than their colleagues further up north. However, figures can be deceptive. Take Bavarian beer exports: they were 3.35 million hl in 2009 or 15 percent of sales, down 100,000 hl year-on-year. For comparison, German beer exports in 2009 were 13.9 percent.
That might mean that beers brewed by the 600 odd Bavarian brewers are much sought after in the rest of the world. Well, that’s true but only if your brands are called Erdinger (export: over 500,000 hl), Paulaner (export: over 500,000 hl) or Beck’s (owned by AB-InBev). What brewers prefer to ignore is that several hundreds of thousands of hl of Beck’s, which are brewed in Munich for export to Italy, are nevertheless included in the Bavarian brewers’ statistics.
Interestingly, Oettinger Brewery, which produces Germany’s leading discount brand, lost almost 2 percent in volume in 2009. Apparently, not even a retail price of less than EUR 6 per crate (10 litres) is a sure recipe for success. Oettinger’s beer output was 6.6 million hl – which still made Oettinger Germany’s major beer brand, followed by Krombacher, Bitburger, Warsteiner and Beck’s.
In 2009, the privately-owned Krombacher Brewery sold 5.6 million hl beer plus 748,000 hl soft drinks, maintaining the previous year’s turnover of EUR 642 million.
Krombacher says that its policy to branch out into soft drinks (it bought the rights to the Schweppes’ brand for Germany in 2006) has paid off. While the brewery’s total beer sales dropped 1.4 percent in 2009, soft drinks sales went up 3.9 percent. And as if to spite Bavarian brewers, sales of Krombacher’s wheat beer rose 5.9 percent to 161,000 hl. Krombacher Weizen was launched in 2008 only.
Most worrying are Warsteiner’s sales volumes. Despite a seemingly endless string of price promotions, sales still declined almost 5 percent in 2009 to 2.8 million hl. Market observers say that one out of two bottles of Warsteiner were sold under a special offer.
Looking forward, German brewers hope that the FIFA World Cup in South Africa will have a positive effect on beer sales. If the weather is fine, football fans are expected to mill to outdoor viewing venues in their tens of thousands. Whether these extraordinary seasonal sales will prove capable of stemming the long-term decline in beer consumption in Germany remains to be seen.
