Oct
13
2015
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Comments Off on SABMiller yields to improved AB InBev offer
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http://fortune.com/…/sabmiller-yields-ab-inbev-merger-take…/
I want to know more about Altrias involvement in all of this. As the largest (one of the largest?) shareholders of SABMiller they are naturally for the sale as they increase their value significantly without any actual work.
There are a lot of anti-trust concerns in this. Who buys the SAB portion of MillerCoors? When I was in grad school I theorized that this merger was coming and that Heineken would pick up Miller in the contiguous, but they just spent a LOT of cash on the Lagunitas deal. Duvel was another plausibility, but they just purchased Firestone.
I’m interested to see who steps up to pick up the Miller brand (amongst others). The value in this deal is truly the distribution. The products are synonymous.
Brito is a genius for waiting on Heineken and Duvel to expend their cash reserves before making his move on SABMiller. I am intrigued to see what happens here. I have a lot of respect for his business acumen of acquisition. But I don’t like the end result of his actions.
He also seems incapable of growing a brand outside the use of acquisitions which will be the downfall of InBev, they will become too large to sustain and then splinter apart. The costs of entry are too small in this industry for him to hold the stranglehold for too long.