For the financial year 2010 Krones expects sales to grow between 10 percent and 15 percent, which translates into full-year sales of between EUR 2.1 billion and EUR 2.15 billion.

While the ruling means that AB-InBev cannot get a blanket trademark for the 27-nation European Union as a whole, the brewer can have trademarks in individual EU markets. It was already settled in the past that AB-InBev can keep the Budweiser or Bud name in 23 of the 27 European countries.

According to a corporate press release, Premium Wine Brands will be in charge of the development and global strategy of Pernod Ricard’s wine brands. The portfolio includes: Australian wines (Jacob’s Creek), New Zealand wines (Montana and Brancott), as well as Spanish and Argentinean wine brands with international potential (Campo Viejo and Graffigna). The new company’s objective is to accelerate the international development of these brands within the Pernod Ricard distribution network.

Brau-Union seems to be a great believer in shunting its beer around the country: having it produced in one place and bottled in another. The announced closure of the Kaltenhausen brewery represents just another affirmation of this strategy as in the course of the next year the production of the Edelweiß wheat beer will be transferred to Brau-Union’s Zipfer Brewery, where it is already being packaged, while production of the Kaiser brand will be relocated to the Wieselburger brewery.

Pernod Ricard said that its subsidiary Domecq Bodegas has sold the Spanish wine brands Marqués de Arienzo and Viña Eguίa, the bodega and 358 hectares of vineyards and lands to a consortium of buyers made up of Vinos de los Herederos del Marqués de Riscal and Gangutia for a cash consideration of EUR 28 million on a debt free / cash free basis.

In South Africa, where SABMiller has some 90 percent of the market, the company has said it sold an extra 130,000 hl beer during the World Cup. However, volumes in South Africa are below expectations and the country has become an area of concern for the company. After an 8 percent rise in volumes in the previous quarter, to post a flat volume performance in the latest quarter, despite the benefits of the soccer World Cup, is surprising, to say the least. Could it be that beer is losing out to spirits, or is SAB relinquishing market share to Diageo’s and Heineken’s joint venture?

Confident that the global beer market would continue to grow unabatedly, the brewing industry placed long-term forward contracts, which led to an increase in hop acreage around the world. From 2007 to 2008 planted acreage increased by more than 12 percent, particularly in Germany and the United States.

Harvest of spring barley in Europe will be lower than 2009. Except for all the reduced areas, but Denmark, yield and quality will be very heterogen from the vantage point of the present. The wet spring in some regions and the heat during the last weeks stressed the plants.

In the meantime, Diageo, the world’s number one drinks company, is biding its time hoping that eventually it will be able to take full control of drinks company Moet-Hennessy, which is still majority-owned by LVMH Chairman Bernard Arnault. Matrix thinks the 66 percent of Moet-Hennessy that Diageo doesn’t own is valued at around EUR 12.6 billion.

Mr Kronseder’s was the typical story of the self-made man, who rises to importance through sheer luck and hard work. Born into a family of craftsmen, he initially trained as an aircraft mechanic at the Messerschmitt company in Regensburg. Surviving both the war and a prisoner-of-war camp, he sought further education as an electrician before setting up his own workshop at the age of 27, producing bottle labelling machines. Why bottle labelling machines? Because this was Bavaria and beer enjoyed a comeback after years of post-war austerity. Success came quickly, first of all with Mr Kronseder’s new, semi-automatic labellers, and subsequently with his fully automatic models.