What's Brewing

Recapping The Business of Beer in 2016.

- Christopher Shepard

JUST OVER A YEAR after announcing it, Anheuser-Busch InBev (A-B InBev) closed its deal to acquire SABMiller on Oct. 10, 2016. The more than $100 billion deal captured a great deal of the world’s attention on beer during that time as a top-10 (by some counts, top-5) global merger and acquisition transaction of all time. The world’s largest brewer bought the second-largest. The numerous moving pieces involved received a commensurate degree of scrutiny.

By the time it closed, A-B InBev agreed tosell off about 20 percent of SABMiller’s business. In many places, it made those deals to pass muster with various antitrust agencies. It kept the asset with perhaps the biggest upside: SABMiller’s significant stake in the emerging African beer market. Yet in the U.S., A-B InBev never attempted to buy SAB’s 58 percent stake in MillerCoors: It announced a separate deal to sell that stake for $12 billion to Molson Coors, which already owned the other 42 percent. That deal also closed on Oct. 10, giving Molson Coors complete control of MillerCoors. So, perhaps oddly, a comparison of U.S. market shares on Oct. 9 and Oct. 11 would turn up absolutely no change as a result of the deal.