Brewer Carlsberg left analysts in a tizzy after they cancelled their medium-term profitability goal. The February 2010 target to boost operating profit to 20 percent of sales in three-to-five years has “proved difficult to use”, Carlsberg said on 18 February 2013, adding that “several events, both within and beyond our control, have and will continue to impact margins.”

On the face of it, AB-InBev’s executive suite does not seem to be all that concerned that they will have to relinquish a brewery and give up Modelo’s U.S. business entirely to receive regulatory approval for their USD 20 billion deal to buy the rest of Mexico’s Grupo Modelo that they don’t own yet.

Whoever put out the estimate how much Heineken’s Finnish subsidiary Hartwall could fetch if sold seems highly optimistic. In early February 2013 the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper reported that Dutch brewer Heineken was seeking to sell Hartwall, the Finnish arm of the former Scottish & Newcastle brewing group it bought in 2008, for about GBP 500 million pounds (EUR 590 million).

In a brief news item, the UK's Sunday Times reported on 3 February 2013 that Heineken is rumoured to be looking to sell its Finnish subsidiary Hartwall for EUR 590 million (USD 790 million). Heineken acquired Hartwall as part of the Scottish & Newcastle transaction in 2008, which it conducted jointly with Carlsberg.

It's kind of funny that a beverage that is basically a simple beer mix and was already invented over 90 years ago by a Munich publican, is finally becoming an international phenomenon. Radlers or shandies have proven very popular in several central European markets like Hungary, Austria, Croatia and Slovakia, where they have captured between 3 and 6 percent of the beer market. In the Czech Republic Radlers have instilled some vigour into the languishing beer market category. Same in Poland, where Radlers were introduced last summer to offset a sluggish market.

Why the recent interest in small brewers? Is it because the big multinational brewers have realised that their brands are often more vibrant than their own mega-brands? Or because they have found out to their distress that they depend on the smaller guys to keep consumer interest in the beer category alive?

First the U.S., then Australia and now Sweden. As BRAUWELT International will argue in an upcoming report on “Craft Brewing in Europe”, micro brewers currently find themselves embroiled in a hot debate over what constitutes an authentic craft beer. With craft beer becoming more popular in several markets, we see more and more crafty-looking me-too launches by the big operators. However, all too often the multinational brewers feel compelled to disguise the origins of their craft beers, probably knowing all too well that ownership is a sore issue in the definition of craft beers.

Getting your timing right is everything in politics. So why did the issue of obesity dominate the UK’s media during the last week in January? Was it because the Public Health Minister, Anna Soubry, had persuaded eight new companies to sign up to the UK government’s Calorie Reduction Pledge, with leading soft drinks brands Lucozade and Ribena joining the likes of Britvic, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo in reducing the amount of sugar and calories in some of their products?

The days of seemingly endless growth in the central and eastern European beer markets are definitely over. Russia, Poland, the Ukraine are all in decline, albeit for different reasons. In Russia government interventions threw a spanner into brewers’ spokes, while in the Ukraine the sorry state of the economy helped dampen consumer spending. Poland, on the other hand, did not witness any of the above. It is the only country in the EU to have avoided a recession. Its economy is still growing, albeit at a slower rate – 2.1 percent in 2012 – than in previous years. But there is no doubt about it: Poland has become a highly mature beer market with per capita consumption standing at 94 litres in 2011.

It’s probably small consolation to Efes executive suite that its Ukrainian unit in 2012 managed to grow its beer sales volume by 14 percent over 2011, although beer production in this eastern European country as a whole declined 1.6 percent over 2011 to 30 million hl.