Conferences & Events

Ho ho – a German beer cartel? At first sight, it cannot have been a very effective cartel, if brewers in Germany fail again and again to drive the price of a crate of beer above EUR 10 (for 10 litres of beer). But then, perhaps it’s a novel kind of cartel, aimed at dropping the average retail price of beer even further?

That’s a job many will covet: being a spy for Diageo, visiting bars to suss out all the latest trends in taste and culture. Diageo’s R&D people are like the CIA – although they will object to the comparison – who run a string of informers everywhere to detect changes in consumer preferences when it comes to drinks.

For such a small market as Georgia's, a country in the Caucasus, four brewers are actually quite a crowd. This may be one of the reasons why Castel-Sakartvelo, the smallest one, was put up for sale.

2012 was the first year since 1998 that alcohol consumption has dropped below eight litres per head, per year (7.99 litres). Consumption per head is now 16 percent lower than it was in 2004 when the current trend began, says the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA), which has compiled the new data based on HMRC alcohol tax returns.

Looks like AB-InBev desperately need this Modelo deal to go ahead as they seem to have reaped most of the benefits from their last transaction with Anheuser-Busch in 2008. Organic growth does not seem easy to come by any longer when you look at AB-InBev’s past financials. In actual fact, AB-InBev’s revenues have not really risen much since 2008. True, AB-InBev have driven up EBITDA to USD 15.5 billion from USD 12.1 billion in 2008, but for the past two years EBITDA growth has kind of stalled.

They need to be bullish, don’t they? Although their USD 20 billion transaction with Mexico’s brewer Modelo is far from cut and dried, AB-InBev said on 27 February 2013 “we remain excited about the potential to grow the domestic Mexican business and the Modelo brands outside of Mexico and the United States”.

Stakeholder pressure on multinational companies is rising. Last July AB-InBev got rapped by the Berlin-based corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) for not disclosing enough about what it does to fight corruption. Six months later, in February this year the UK charity Oxfam released a report, “Behind the Brands”, which, though wider in scope than TI’s, came to a similar conclusion: multinational food and beverage companies, such as Nestlé, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, are failing on CSR goals.

Is there no end to brewers’ woes in western Europe? Heineken reported on 13 February 2013 that it was thanks to Africa, Asia and the Americas driving volume and revenue growth, that the brewer managed to offset weak European markets in its 2012 financial year.

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.”