Royal Unibrew closes Aarhus brewery
Following the consolidation in the Danish brewing industry Royal Unibrew finds itself straddled with more breweries than are economically feasible.
Many have been expecting another round of brewery closures in Denmark but bad timing is bad timing. Right after the Christmas break, when everybody must have been nursing a booming hangover, Royal Unibrew, Denmark’s number two brewer - by a wide margin – gave its employees plenty of reason to worry when it announced that it would close its Ceres brewery in Aarhus, Denmark, in a move to strengthen the group’s future earnings. That announcement cannot have made many people happy – except perhaps for the shareholders who had had to stomach Royal Unibrew’s other announcement that sales in the third quarter had been lower than expected.
The group said that the closure would affect some 130 employees, and added it has initiated negotiations with workers at the brewery.
It is a shame that with the Ceres brewery 150 years of brewing history will also disappear from Aaarhus.
Once the brewery is discontinued, the site will be sold. The property is estimated to fetch just under DKK 1 billion (EUR 133 million).
Beer production from Aarhus will move to the group’s other breweries in Odense and Faxe.
It has already been pointed out that Royal Unibrew, even after the closure of the Aarhus site, will still have one brewery more than its much larger rival Carlsberg in Denmark. Carlsberg’s brewery in the city of Frederica will be shut in 2009. Royal Unibrew will invest DKK 240 million in its two remaining breweries in Odense and Faxe, but experts suggest that should profits fail to improve, further consolidation is likely. Read one more brewery will have to go. The question is, which? Odense or Faxe.
