The Japanese to brew Hungarian beer

According to mno.hu, the five biggest Hungarian beer producer companies fall under the interest of three European, one North American and a Far Eastern enterprise. They produce 6.54 hectolitre beer all together annually. The Japanese Asahi Group Holdings has confirmed recently that they were to buy the Belgian-Brazilian Anheuser-Busch InBev’s (AB InBev) five East European beer brands, including the Hungarian Dreher.

The enterprise also announced that they were to pay 900 billion yens, that is, more than 2300 billion forints for Dreher, the Czech Kozel and Pilsner Urquell, and the Polish Lech and Tyskie, all together. Asahi – which means “rising sun” in Japanese – had to make its plan public due to their shares decreasing by 4.6% on the Japanese stock market after the news of cornering, published in Nikkei business magazine.

According to Reuters’ information from early November, Mol Nyrt. also proposed an offer to buy the beer brands as part of the consortium. The partly state owned oil and gas industrial enterprise didn’t comment on why it would’ve acquired beer market interest arm-in-arm with the Polish Maspex Wadowice Group soda producer company and PZU insurance company.

The topic of selling arose after the global market leader AB InBev incorporated its biggest rival, the British-South African SABMiller disposing of Dreher’s marketing, for 96.2 billion dollars and then announced that it would get its Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Slovakian and Polish interests off its hand. For that matter, the beer industrial mega-fusion meant the formation of a huge enterprise supervising 30.5% of the international beer market. Heineken (9.1%), the Danish Carlsberg (6.1%), the Hong Kong China Resources Enterprise (6%), the Chinese Tsingtao (4.7%) and the American-Canadian Molson Coors (3.2%) all lag behind.

“It would be too early to comment on the agreement of AB InBev and Asahi, because it has to be approved by the European Commission. Until then, everything stays the same in the Dreher brewery” said Dreher. According to mno.hu’s resources with an insight into the inner operation of the company, the arrival of Japanese investors shouldn’t cause dramatic changes in the life of the Kőbánya centred factory. It seems like they can carry on focusing on their own tasks.

Market changes and rearrangements are typical in other industrial sectors as well. Hungarian beer-producers – as the members of big producer companies – don’t play an initiative role in how ownerships change. These types of decisions are made in company centres, on which Hungarian operation doesn’t have a direct influence. Since the buyer Asahi and the seller AB InBev are both stock market companies, even negotiations can be very delicate issues, not to mention the long process of the unification of local markets.