Of bulls, bears and golden calves
It’s become a hotly debated issue. How do you read a balance sheet these days? From top to bottom or from the bottom to the top? Delegates at the 4th World Beer & Drinks Forum, which was held in Munich in September, were treated to a piece of new times thinking by John Brock, the CEO of InBev, who told them that “(beer) volumes were broadly irrelevant” today. Instead it was EBITDA, EBITDA, EBITDA – and a bottom to top reading of InBev’s balance sheet. Wolfgang Salewski, the chief of Germany’s Brau Holding International (the JV between Heineken and Germany’s real estate and hotels entrepreneur Stefan Schörghuber in which Heineken has a 49.9 percent stake) was visibly outraged by this and retorted that if you do a proper job, the bottom line would somehow fall into place. ....
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