Grupo Modelo, S.A.B. de C.V., Mexico’s largest beer producer, announced on February, 19 its fourth quarter and full year 2009 financial results.

During the fourth quarter, Modelo’s total domestic volume was stable compared with the same period of the prior year, reaching 9.4 million hectoliters, in spite of the price increase implemented at the end of the quarter and a difficult comparison base, particularly in the month of December.

The imported brand portfolio decreased 25.6%, as a consequence of the price increase carried out in the first semester to compensate for part of the exchange rate depreciation. Therefore, the total volume sold of domestic brands registered a 0.5% reduction to 9.6 million hectoliters.

Export volume totaled 3.4 million hectoliters, a 4.0% decrease with respect to the same period of 2008, as a result of the economic crisis which has affected consumption in the different export markets. It is important to highlight that in the last three quarters, the year over year change in volume has showed a slight sequential recovery. Europe and Oceania are among the regions which showed better performance, Modelo said.

Net sales grew a solid 7.9% reaching 20,358 million pesos. Domestic sales showed an increase of 7.0%, driven by a ...More Info

Sapporo Holdings, the parent company of Japan’s fourth-largest brewer, said its consolidated net income amounted to 4.54 bln yen in 2009, a decline of 40.6% on 2008.

Net sales and operating income dropped too – by 6.5% to 387.53 bln yen and 12.2% to 12.90 bln yen respectively.

Overall domestic beer demand contracted an estimated 2.1% from 2008, largely as a result of unseasonable summer weather. With consumers increasingly tightening their belts, demand for conventional beer and happoshu (low-malt beer) decreased while demand for new genre beer grew a hefty 21%, Sapporo said.

Sapporo’s conventional beer sales were down 9% in 2009 as a result of consumers’ growing preference for low-priced products and a slump in demand in the commercial market. Sales in the new genre category grew 27%, outpacing overall new genre demand growth. The brewer’s overall 2009 beer sales in Japan fell 5% as a result of growth in low-priced new genre products’ share of total sales.

Overall, Sapporo’s Japanese Alcoholic Beverages business earned operating income of ¥7.4 billion (down 3% or ¥200 million from 2008) on net sales of ¥282.9 billion (down 6% or ¥16.7 billion).

With consumers expected to remain in belt-tightening mode in 2010, demand in the beer market is ...More Info

In the past four years, nearly 17,000 Efes beer sales points have either shut down or stopped selling beer, Tuğrul Ağırbaş, managing director of Efes Turkey, was quoted as saying by Hurriyet Daily News on February, 18.

Efes aims to expand the beer market in Turkey, but the number of sales points has diminished to around 83,000 from nearly 100,000 four years ago.

“The per capita beer consumption in Turkey is around 12 to 13 litters,” he said. “The European average is 100 litres. What spurs consumption is restaurants, cafes and pubs. But in Turkey, each consumer pays a special consumption tax that is nine times more than the tax paid in Germany, for example.”

Beer sales points have problems in getting licenses or renewing them, Ağırbaş said. “Beer is a key source of revenue for corner stores and kiosks. Rakı, beer and cigarettes together constitute 70 percent of a grocer’s revenue. When you take out rakı and beer, the grocer starts having a hard time,” he said. “Those who wish to open sales points cannot find places to rent. Others face neighborhood pressure. Meanwhile, chain stores are destroying corner stores.”

“Neighborhood pressure” is a term used to describe the pressure to live a ...More Info

Danish brewer Royal Unibrew said on February, 12 all preconditions for closing the sale of its ownership in certain breweries in the Caribbean have now been met except for one.

In one of the islands, the Government has decided to grant a given licence to the purchaser. The decision has been confirmed by the Minister of Finance; however, the administration has not yet formally issued the document. Royal Unibrew said it expects the written confirmation from the local administration to be available during the coming weeks. The transaction is expected therefore to be closed in the coming weeks, too.

As previously announced, this transaction will reduce Royal Unibrew’s interest‐bearing debt by just below DKK200 million, and the net selling price of the shares is at the level of their carrying amount.

Royal Unibrew announced the conditional agreement with the Cerveceria Nacional Dominicana (CND) brewery in the Dominican Republic to sell its shares of the breweries in Dominica, St. Vincent and Antigua to CND in August 2009.

Kenya's East African Breweries will invest 1.7 billion shillings in a year, expanding capacity to raise exports and snatch sales from informal brewers, its finance director was quoted as saying by Reuters on February, 17.

Majority held by the world's biggest drinks group, Diageo, EABL is looking to boost growth in the second half after costs, weaker local currencies, higher spirits taxes and sluggish economies hit first-half pretax profit.

Brewers say there are rich expansion prospects in Africa, where per capita beer consumption ranges from single digit litres in some nations to nearly 60 litres in wealthier countries such as South Africa and Gabon.

"We are going to put in an additional keg line in this plant at about 700 million shillings. We are also going to put a new bottle line in Uganda which will also cost us just over a billion Kenya shillings," Finance Director Peter Ndegwa said.

"The keg line will be installed in the next six months whilst the line in Uganda will be installed in the next nine months," he said.

He was speaking after the firm commissioned a new 80,000 bottles-an-hour packaging line and a brew house. Both facilities were built in the past year for about 3.5 billion ...More Info

Over production across Europe last year, together with a fall in beer sales, means there is enough quality barley in the system to last until January 2011, Bob King, commercial director of the Crisp Malting Group, was quoted as saying on February, 19 by Farmers Weekly Interactive.

"It's a much more competitive market now than it has been in recent years," he told the HGCA malting barley workshop in Bury St Edmunds this week. "Quality will be absolutely critical when it comes to selling the 2010 crop. Any recreational planting this spring will do nothing but damage to the malting barley market."

Growers with storage should make good use of it, he advised. "There will be some very cheap barley around at harvest, as the maltsters won't be buying any more than they have to. Malting activity is closely linked to brewing demand."

Spring barley is preferred to winter, added Mr King. "There simply isn't any call for winter barley, except from regional brewers, and all the recent breeding progress has been with the spring crop. In England, there's a particular requirement for spring barley in the 1.6-1.7 nitrogen range, for lager production."

Despite the somewhat gloomy outlook for this harvest, Mr King was ...More Info

EU’s malting barley market abounds in offers as resellers and producers look to make some room in the silos, La Depeche posted on February, 19.

However, the market lacks activity as the demand for malting barley remains very limited. Market participants are waiting for the beginning of planting.

Takashi Nagamine, Takahiro Sekiwa, Emiko Yamaguchi, Mika Oozeki and Tsuneo Kato

J. Inst. Brew. 115(4), 292–295, 2009 ABSTRACT
To make an efficient and laborsaving quality selection in a malting barley breeding program, the relationship between malting quality parameters and the hardness index (HI) measured by Single Kernel Characterization System (SKCS) 4100 was studied with barley genetic resources and a group of descendant lines from “Yon Rkei 1363” that possess the high lysine allele lys1 and a very high diastatic power (DP). There was a highly significant correlation between the grain HI and the malt extract both in the genetic resources (r = –0.48**) and in the lys1 parent- derived lines (r = –0.50**). Malt HI showed a highly significant correlation with malt extract (r = –0.70** in genetic resources, r = –0.57** in the lys1 parent-derived lines) and malt total protein (r = 0.73**, 0.84**, respectively). For the selection of very high DP lines from the lys1 parent-derived group, high grain HI selection was effective as all the very high DP lines had much harder grain characteristics. Therefore SKCS was regarded as a useful tool for quality selection in malting barley breeding. Key words: Diastatic power, grain hardness, Hordeum vulgare, malt quality, SKCS.br> Load full article, 4 pages, 142kb , PDF file