E-Malt.com News article: United States: If the right opportunity to buy comes up, we will take advantage – Molson Coors chief executive

Peter Swinburn, the new chief executive officer of Molson Coors Brewing Co., said the company has now improved its shareholder value in the last three years by 90%, ReportonBusiness.com published on September, 29.

According to Mr Swinburn, the company is now in a very good position with cash, so if the the right opportunities come up, Molson Coors would like to take advantage.

As to the question where the company was looking to buy, the CEO answered: “We will not be myopic. We will look to where the advantages are. We want depth rather than breadth, so we will look to a position where we would be No. 1 or No. 2 in a market if that came up. We're not interested in just planting the flag for the sake of it.”

Peter Swinburn said a full merger with SABMiller might create truly global scale. “It would be a deal that would create value,” he said, “but the issue is we're not in that market. We are in the market of making sure we grow our company just as Miller wants to grow its company and so we will be competitors outside the U.S.”

“The deal in the U.S. made sense for both parents; a deal outside doesn't make sense for both parents,” he added.

Concerning the competition with Anheuser-Busch in the light of its impending takeover by InBev, the CEO said that “nothing really much has changed except the sign on the door. We got ourselves in position beforehand by doing the Miller-Coors deal. That is going to make us significantly more competitive than we were. If you think about the U.S. market, Miller had 18-20 per cent and we had 10 per cent and now we have 30 per cent. That gives you a lot more clout.”

“Beer is actually still a local market. The biggest brand in the world [Budweiser] has only 3.5 to 4 per cent of the global market, although the top 10 are growing and will continue to grow. If you look at total volume, 85 per cent of the market is local.

The growth of global brands will be a function of consolidation. As people buy other companies around the world, they use those distribution platforms to put their well-known international brands across. That is bound to increase,” the CEO said.


01 October, 2008