Japan: Asahi, Kirin to transport beer across Japan jointly next year

Asahi Breweries and Kirin Brewery will join forces next year in transporting beer across Japan by rail, a mode that is less expensive than trucks and more environmentally friendly, Nikkei Asian Review reported on July 27.

Under an arrangement to be announced on July 28, the rivals will work with Japan Freight Railway and Nippon Express to deliver beer to the Hokuriku region along the Sea of Japan coast.

Output from Asahi's Suita brewery near Osaka and Kirin's Kobe brewery will go by Nippon Express trucks to a JR Freight depot, and then by train to depots in Hokuriku. Nippon Express trucks will take over from there to deliver the products to wholesalers and other customers.

Rail shipments from the Osaka-Kobe area to Ishikawa Prefecture will begin in early 2017, with shipments to Toyama Prefecture to start as soon as that autumn.

The Asahi Group Holdings and Kirin Holdings units have no breweries in Hokuriku. Shipping beer by truck has become expensive owing to the long distances covered and driver shortages.

Rail transportation is expected to cut the cost of Hokuriku-bound shipments by a few percent. Asahi and Kirin will consider expanding the arrangement to other regions where they lack production facilities.

Many Japanese businesses in different industries are cooperating on logistics to contend with labor shortages. But this marks the first collaboration between two beer companies on inter-regional transport.

With younger Japanese less partial to beer and the overall population shrinking, beer shipments in Japan fell for an 11th straight year in 2015. As the market stagnates, reducing costs is becoming an urgent challenge for the industry. Asahi, Kirin and Sapporo Holdings unit Sapporo Breweries last year started sharing logistics sites in Tokyo.

For road vehicle drivers, the ratio of job offers to seekers has remained above 2 since July of last year. Twenty-five percent of truck drivers were 50 or older in 2001, but this had risen to 42% in 2015, according to the Railway Freight Association. With drivers increasingly old and expensive to hire, many companies are switching to rail even for medium-haul shipments.

27 July, 2016