Snow Ramps Up As Beer Battle Leaves The Regions

As the battle for Chinese beer supremacy goes national, the country's leading brewer by volume China Resources Snow Breweries (Snow) has acquired Shandong-based Amber Breweries for CNY285mn (US$41.7mn) in a bid to build a footprint in that high consumption province. Snow is ramping up investment in a bid to become a truly national player in China's still-fragmented beer industry, and to beat fierce rival Tsingtao to the spoils of a beer market that BMI analysts expects to grow by 55% in volume terms to 2013. Traditionally, individual brewers dominated beer sales in individual Chinese provinces, but amid rapid economic expansion the largest and most ambitious of these provincial players began to expand by picking off smaller rivals in neighbouring provinces. However, even throughout this process ─ which has hitherto been fairly slow compared to the rate of M&A activity witnessed in other equally-promising markets ─ consolidation had until very recently been centred on regional lines.

To read the full article, please choose one of the following options: