Difficult year for Swiss breweries
Switzerland | The covid-19 pandemic is also proving calamitous for breweries. Due to restaurants, bars and concert halls having been closed for months, and major events being cancelled, beer sales in the 2019/2020 brewing year (until 30 September) are likely to be significantly lower than in the previous year.
It is estimated that on-premise beer sales slumped by 40 percent in the first half of the year. The most dramatic decline was in April, when on-premise sales tanked by 80 percent during the lockdown.
What is particularly bitter is that in the period April to June, breweries usually do very good business. The losses accrued during this period can’t be compensated even under the best conditions in the remainder of this year.
Supermarkets to benefit
As elsewhere, the Swiss beer market saw a shift in sales from the on-premise to the off-premise in the first half of the year (+12 percent increase in sales). For this reason, the trade association SBV estimates that the decline in beer consumption for the brewing year just ended will only be in in the single-digit range.
The fact that total beer sales did not fall more dramatically is related to the association’s counting method. Sales of imported beer brands are also included in off-premise sales figures, where they tend to do far better than in the on-premise.
Both domestic and imported beers vie for shoppers’ francs
As a result, not only Swiss breweries have benefited from the increase in sales in the off-premise, but also foreign breweries. In 2019, the Swiss drank 4.7 million hl beer, or 55 litres per capita. Of these, about 1 million hl were imported beers.
In Switzerland, there were about 1,100 breweries in 2019, most of which were microbreweries. They mainly rely on direct sales or, if they manage to get hold of one of the hotly contested beer taps, on pubs and bars. For them, the closure of the on-premise must have been nearly devastating.
The Swiss newspaper Blick reported that the Zürich-based craft beer brewery Turbinenbräu (founded in 1997) experienced a 96 percent drop in sales during the lockdown. Its only source of income were curbside sales, which had previously only represented a small proportion of turnover. As many events and private parties are still being cancelled, Turbinenbräu expects turnover in 2020 to be 50 percent below the previous year’s.
