Okay, since I’m guessing that the readers of this blog likely aren’t generally of the type most interested in the goings on of the big breweries, I promise this will be my last mention of brewery consolidation for a while. Unless something really big happens. Like what a pair of Credit Suisse investment analysts suggested last week in a conference call.
Thanks to Beer Business Daily, we know at least some of what analysts Carlos Laboy and Tony Bucalo told investors during their call about the future of Mexico’s FEMSA, one of the Big Two in the Mexican beer market, and while most of it was relatively unsurprising, if illuminating, one possibility raised towards the end of the BBD story certainly raised my eyebrows.
Picture this scenario, mooted by Bucalo: SABMiller buys FEMSA, thus forming an international number two brewery that is as far beyond the rest as Anheuser-Busch InBev is now. That creates a second Superbrewery and leaves FEMSA loser Heineken way, way behind. So what does the Dutch brewer do? One possibility, as suggested by Bucalo, is that Heineken negotiates a merger with none other than the world’s leading drinks company, Diageo! Thus making a trio of breweries so large that no other could conceivably touch them for a long, long time to come.
Bud and Stella vs. Miller and Castle vs. Heineken and Guinness. The mind reels.
Heineken buy Diageo? That would be great news for Ireland – Heineken would own all three major Irish Stout brands.
Aye, Ron, which would almost certainly lead to the demise of one of them, or at least its ghettoization. On the other hand, assuming they could find anyone to brew large quantities for them, or enough capital for a dramatic expansion of their Carlow operations, it could be a boon to O’Hara’s.