Report details how Carlsberg, SABMiller and UB fixed beer prices in India

India | Top executives of Carlsberg, SABMiller and India’s United Breweries (UB) exchanged commercially sensitive information and colluded to fix beer prices in India over eleven years, according to a government antitrust investigation released in December 2020.

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Asahi sells online retailer BoozeBud back to founders

Australia | Japan’s Asahi, which bought the country’s leading brewer Carlton & United Breweries (CUB) from AB-InBev in 2020, has sold its leading online alcohol retailer BoozeBud back to the business’ founders.

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China’s wine tariffs will hurt Australia’s vintners

Australia | For several months now, China has been using punitive tariffs in retaliation for criticism from Australia. Now Beijing has targeted Australian wine. Since the end of November, Chinese importers have to pay surcharges of between 107 percent and 212 percent. China’s demand for Australian wine is expected to almost completely collapse.

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Buy Aussie wine!

Australia | More than 200 parliamentarians from 19 countries are calling on people to drink Australian wine in protest against the brutal tariffs slapped on the country by China. The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) describes itself as a “cross-party group of legislators working towards reform on how democratic countries approach China”.

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Australian breweries in 2020: keeping spirits high

Australia | As can be expected, the coronavirus crisis will have impacted brewers’ sales adversely, but insiders are hard pressed to come up with an estimate. Most likely, beer sales will be down in the mid-single digits in 2020, but the decline will probably hit the Big Brewers harder than the independents.

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Australia’s indie brewers benefit from shift in people’s drinking habits

Australia | 2020 may turn into craft brewing’s “lost year”, but Australian craft brewers remain upbeat. They think they are in a “largely strong” position, heading into the antipodean summer, while building on the trends that have emerged since the pandemic broke out.

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Australia’s Coopers breweries sees sales rise during lockdown

Australia | Adelaide-based Coopers brewery is crediting a consumer trend towards local beer brands, and its shrewd move to more canned products, for a 3.9 percent rise in volume sales in its 2019-20 financial year, ended 30 June.

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Bega Cheese buys Kirin’s Australian dairy arm

Australia | After having offered its underperforming dairy unit to nearly everyone for two years, Japanese brewer Kirin finally found a buyer: On 26 November 2020 media reported that Kirin will sell its Australian beverage and dairy subsidiary to the local dairy company, Bega Cheese, for USD 412 million. 

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Kirin halts payments to its Myanmar partner linked to military

Japan | Japanese beverage group Kirin Holdings said it is halting dividend payments from its beer joint ventures in Myanmar to local partner Myanmar Economic Holdings Public Company (MEHL).

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India is a worry for Carlsberg

India | Carlsberg’s CEO Cees ‘t Hart called India’s market environment “highly uncertain” and “volatile” after posting a 30 percent volume decline in the country, which it blamed on the market struggling socially and economically.

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Beer in Asia: a mixed picture

Asia | For the first nine months of 2020 the world’s leading brewers all reported beer sales to have declined in their Asian markets, albeit to varying degrees. AB-InBev saw the steepest drop: -14.1 percent to 77.6 million hl. Heineken reported a 9.7 percent drop to 20 million hl, whereas Carlsberg saw an 8.5 percent decrease to 28 million hl.

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Coca-Cola European Partners acquires Coca-Cola Amatil

Australia | One day Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) was in the news over rumours it will buy Asahi’s sell-off brands, the next day it was the target of a takeover offer itself.

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Heineken to buy Asahi sell-off brands

Australia | When Asahi proposed to acquire market leader Carlton & United Breweries (CUB) from AB-InBev in 2019 for USD 11 billion, the regulator would only approve of the deal, if Asahi divests two of its beer brands and three of its cider brands.

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Lion to close Adelaide’s historic West End brewery

Australia | Lion announced plans to close Adelaide’s 160-year-old West End Brewery in June 2021, with the loss of up to 100 production jobs. The Kirin-owned brewer described the closure as a “sad day for the West End team, Lion and South Australia”.

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Sabeco proves a drag on ThaiBev’s results

Vietnam | It wasn’t covid-19 that has hit Sabeco, the country’s major brewer, hard, but tough drunken-driving penalties, which were introduced in January 2020. Beer consumption dropped 23 percent in the first half of 2020, and is only recovering slowly. It stood at 46 million hl in 2019, up 7 percent from 2018.

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Japan’s brewers hope revised beer tax will boost pandemic-hit sales

Japan | Brewers reeling from the drop in on-premise sales will get some relief from the long-awaited revisions to the liquor tax system that were implemented in October 2020.

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AB-InBev and Indian Hotels Company open first brewpub

India | Despite a six-month delay due to the covid-19 induced lockdown, the Indian Hotels Company Limited (IHCL) and AB-InBev are on course to open the planned 15 such microbreweries in the next five years. Their first brewpub, 7Rivers, threw open its doors at the hotel Taj-MG Road in Bengaluru (formerly known as Bangalore) – a year after the two announced their joint venture.

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China launches anti-dumping probe into Australian wine imports

Australia | The trade dispute between China and Australia is heating up. China has begun an anti-dumping probe into imports of Australian wine, it said on 18 August 2020.

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Asahi to restructure businesses

Japan | For the six months through June 2020, Asahi’s operating profit fell 49 percent to JPY 45 billion (USD 421 million) as beer drinkers around the world avoided going out to bars, Asahi reported in August.

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