BREWING INDUSTRY CHALLENGES
CHRIS GILMOUR: AB InBev head has Africa in his sights — but this continent is not for sissies
Ricardo Tadeu, a career AB InBev man from Brazil, has his work cut out for him
I love beer. Michael Farr, the former head of media relations at SAB, once told me it was nutritionally enhanced water. And that’s a good enough excuse to responsibly enjoy a drink and analyse a brewing company. I’ve been following SABMiller for quite a few decades and at Merrill Lynch was known as their Flamboyant Liquor Analyst. So it’s with great fascination that I look at what AB InBev is doing since acquiring SABMiller in one of the largest corporate takeovers in history. Besides being extremely tight-fisted on costs, AB InBev has largely grown by acquisition over the past 25 years. And therein lies its problem. Since the merger with SABMiller, which resulted in what is arguably the world’s largest consumer-goods group, AB InBev needs to reflect carefully on how it will grow. Strip out the effect of its enormous acquisitions made since the early 1990s and it is not immediately apparent that this company knows how to grow organically. Anyone can cut costs but eventually that str...
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