E-Malt.com News article: Australia: Coopers defies flat beer market and raises market share in its past financial year

South Australian brewery Coopers has defied the flat beer market to report an 8.3 per cent sales lift for the past financial year, boosted by new brand licensing deals, The Australian reported on August, 7.

The privately owned company reported record sales of 69.7 million litres, lifting its share of the Australian beer market to 4.5 per cent from about 3.5 per cent in 2010. Sales were boosted by the addition of licensed international brands Sapporo and Carlsberg, which the company began brewing last year.

Carlsberg's Danish parent shifted its Australian licence to Coopers from previous licensee Foster's, under "change of control" provisions in its contract triggered by Foster's A$12.3 billion takeover by Britain-based brewer SABMiller in 2011.

In May SABMiller reported a 13 per cent decline in sales from Foster's for the 12 months to the end of March, or 5 per cent when the impact of losing third-party brewing contracts such as Carlsberg was stripped out.

Meanwhile the latest figures for Lion, Australia's biggest brewer and owner of brands including XXXX and Toohey's, showed a 3.2 per cent decline in sales by volume for the six months to the end of March. But when new brands poached from Foster's were included, volumes rose by 12.1 per cent.

Managing director Tim Cooper said he expected Coopers would continue to increase its share of the beer market.

The expansion includes doubling the size of the existing lager cellar and installing a second bottling line and two additional fermenters, a move that will increase annual production capacity from 71 million to 134 million litres, including 14 million litres of keg beer.

Dr Cooper said the company, which is owned by about 100 private investors, many of them descendants of company founder Thomas Cooper, had recorded average growth of 9.8 per cent across the past 20 years.

"In the recession of 1992-93, Coopers' total sales fell to 10.8 million litres, our lowest level since 1985," he said.

"However, by the late 1990s, we were in danger of outgrowing our Leabrook brewery, resulting in us developing the new brewery at Regency Park . . . which has since provided us with the efficiencies and capacity to fuel our continued expansion."

In a sign of the ongoing pricing pressures facing brewers as retailers push for ever-larger discounts, Dr Cooper said the company had absorbed the most recent excise increase for packaged beer, which came into effect on August 1.


07 August, 2013