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The “King of Beers” is growing more popular in China, the world’s #1 beer market, even as it’s once unassailable dominance in the states continues to decline…
Here’s the deal…
Beverage Daily is reporting that Budweiser is now more popular in China than it is in the United States, with sales in China surpassing those in the US for the first time this year.
It’s true!
According to Rabobank, a multinational banking and investment firm, Budweiser’s domestic beer used to make up 87.7% of total consumption in the US, but it declined to 67.6% in 2017, falling to imports like Corona and Dos Equis and American craft beers.
At the same time Bud is making serious inroads into China’s huge beer market, where it’s seen as an exotic import and attracting many upscale Chinese beer drinkers tired of homegrown brands like Snow.
“Whether it is nostalgia for a beer drank back home or on holiday, or a longing for a product with authenticity, consumers see foreign beer as a premium product,”
Francois Sonneville, senior beverages analyst at Rabobank explained Budweiser’s growing Chinese popularity to Beverage Daily this way…
“Whether it is nostalgia for a beer drank back home or on holiday, or a longing for a product with authenticity, consumers see foreign beer as a premium product.”
Global brewing giant, AB InBev, home to a Budweiser, and other Big Beer majors like Heineken are investing heavily in China.
And it appears, at least in Budweiser’s case that investment is paying off.
Snow, an uber-cheap lager brewed by state-backed China Resources Beer Holdings, is currently the best-selling beer in China with a 24% share of the market. And Heineken recently signed a strategic partnership with domestic beer manufacturer China Resource Beer (CR Beer) to boost its presence on that continent.
According to Euromonitor China, the world’s largest beer market consumed a mid-blowing 45 billion liters of beer in 2017 (almost twice as much as the US did during that same period) and increasingly those Chinese consumers are drinking Bud.
