Europe's second-highest court dismissed October 19 a case taken by German brewer Bitburger Brauerei against U.S. rival Budweiser over the right to use the word "Bud" as a trademark, Reuters communicated October 19.

The German company, which brews Bitburger Beer, took the case to the Court of First Instance in a bid to overturn a decision in 2004 by Germany's Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market in which it found in favour of the U.S. brewer.

Bitburger Brauerei based its opposition on the existence of its own national trademark "BIT" and the earlier figurative trademarks "BIT" and "Bitte ein Bit", which it said were close to the word "Bud".

"The Court of First Instance concludes that, considered as a whole, the marks at issue are not similar and there is no likelihood of confusion," the court said in a statement.

Bitburger has two months to appeal the decision to the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice, Europe's highest court.

SABMiller PLC, the British brewer of beers such as Pilsner Urquell, said October 18 it offered to buy the shares it does not already own in three Ecuadorean businesses for a total of $88 million, Associated Press released October 18.

The company will pay $36.25 per share for the stock of all three businesses, SABMiller said in a statement.

SABMiller already owns 92.06 percent of Compania de Cervezas Nacionales C.A.; 72.34 percent of Cerveceria Andina S.A. and 92.19 percent of privately owned Agrilsa Agricola e Industrial S.A.

CCN is Ecuador's largest brewing business, and is located in Guayaquil. Andina is Ecuador's second largest brewing business and is located in Quito. Both companies produce SABMiller's full portfolio of Ecuadorean beers, including Pilsner, the country's leading lager.

SABMiller plans to merge the operations of CCN and Andina with operations in Guayaquil and Quito.

Baltika Breweries is planning to acquire a roughly 40% share of the Russian beer market, Grigory Kharenko, Baltika manager for work with investors, said at a conference, Interfax communicated October 18.

The company currently has a 36% share on the beer market and the company's strategic goal is to increase that figure to 40%, he said.

Baltika, which was founded in 1990 and is one of Russia's largest beer producers, has breweries in St. Petersburg, Tula, Rostov-on-Don, Samara and Khabarovsk. Baltic Beverages Holding owns more than 80% of shares in Baltika.

Russian barley exports totalled 38,400 tonnes in September 2006, down four times from August and 4.4 times from September 2005, AgriMarket.Info released October 18. The largest buyers of Russian barley were Israel (14,300 tonnes), Italy (9,400 tonnes) and Georgia (3,400 tonnes).

The average export price for barley totalled US$/t 107 in September. Barley export of three summer months was at the level of 291,500 t against 639,500 t at the beginning of 2005/06 MY. At the same time in September Russia imported 10,000 t of barley.

Referring to the seemingly provocative balance sheet of this year’s malting barley supply and demand in the EU which forecasts that the usage for beer will reach 5.32 million t, analysts stipulated October 02 that it is even possible that this demand picture is too conservative. This year malting barley production estimate was said to amount for 7.61 million t while total needs were quoted to reach 8.17 million t.

Beer sales in 2006 were extraordinarily good so far and may lead to a higher malt demand in domestic and export markets. And experts have calculated that the low extract of this year's malt will necessitate an additional 1 – 200,000 tons of malt for beer production in the EU.