Chinese imported beer market grows

Chinese brand Snow beer [Photo: baidu.com]

China drinks one-quarter of the world's beer and their domestic market is expanding with imported beers, while Western beer markets are falling.

And the country’s domestic beer brands’ profits have been squeezed by imported beers; from 2011 to 2015, China’s imported beer volume has spiked from 64,100 tonnes to 538,300 tonnes, according to a report by Chinese newspaper, Economic Daily.

The Japanese company Asahi has agreed to buy SABMiller Plc brands in eastern and central Europe in December last year for €7.3 billion (£6.2 billion). It also offered to buy Peroni and other beer brands under Anheuser-Busch InBev NV in April.

Tsingtao is the second biggest domestic beer brand in China, with 15% of China’s beer market share, following behind Snow 

Revenues at China Resources Snow Breweries, the world’s biggest beer group by sales volume, fell 2 percent to 15 billion yuan in the first half of last year. China Resources Beer acquired SABMiller’s 49 per cent stake in Snow for $1.6bn last year.

"No one outside China knows what Snow is, but it is the biggest brand in the world," said industry analyst Spiros Malandrakis of Euromonitor.

SABMiller has a partnership with Snow beer, a state owned venture, and together they sold more than one out of every 20 glasses drunk worldwide. That could dramatically expand InBev's Chinese footprint, which already includes Budweiser, Beck's and Stella Artois.

Despite that, global brewers are buying or launching mass-market brands. Some hope to attract Chinese drinkers who might trade up to more expensive versions as incomes rise.

In China since 1984, InBev's Anheuser-Busch unit, the brewer of Budweiser, has 39 beverage plants and 26,000 employees.

Today, SABMiller has 98 breweries and says it accounts for more than one in every five cans or bottles of beer sold in China.

Other competitors include Heineken and Carlsberg, Japan's Kirin and Asahi and Chinese brands Tsingtao and Yanjing.