Breweries in race to spur output

Though Vietnam produces billions of liters of beer a year, such volume does not seem sufficient as breweries have shown little sign of keeping local beer production and importation unchanged, the Saigon Times Daily reported.
Though Vietnam produces billions of liters of beer a year, such volumedoes not seem sufficient as breweries have shown little sign of keepinglocal beer production and importation unchanged, the Saigon Times Dailyreported.

Vietnam’s beer market actually looks far fromsaturation since leading global beer brands are still entering the localmarket, making competition tougher.

Market shares of manydomestic beer companies are in decline though their production volumesare high, said Nguyen Mau Chi, General Director of Hue Brewery Ltd.,known for the brand Huda Hue.

According to Chi, the strongplayers on the market are Saigon Beer, Alcohol and Beverage Corporation(Sabeco), Vietnam Brewery Limited (VBL), Hanoi Beer, Alcohol andBeverage Corporation (Habeco), Huda and Japan’s Sapporo.

Statisticsof the Vietnam Beer, Alcohol and Beverage Association (VBA) showed thatSabeco, which has reported steady growth in recent years, saw itsvolume in the year’s first half falling by 0.5 percent. The market shareof Habeco dropped by a sharper 4.8 percentage points against lastyear’s same period.

Meanwhile, though Huda Hue achieved steady growth in the 2005-2012 period, its growth slowed down last year.

HudaHue sold nearly 60 million liters of beer in 2005 but saw its salesmove up to 291 million liters in 2012 before falling to only 200 millionliters last year.

Starting as a 100-percent State-owned company,Huda Hue then cooperated with Carlsberg Group and was wholly owned bythis Danish brewery in 2011.

Japanese brewery Sapporo enteredVietnam in 2010 and its factory in Long An province was put intooperation one year later with an annual capacity of 40 million liters.

Notrevealing the specific consumption volume, Hirofumi Kishi, GeneralDirector of Sapporo Vietnam, said that Sapporo’s sales doubled lastyear.

Hirofumi Kishi told the Daily that Sapporo would increasethe factory’s capacity to 100 million liters in the coming time and 150million liters in 2019.

To realise such a target, Sapporo hasdeveloped over 5,000 sales points, most of them in Ho Chi Minh City andsouthern provinces. Hanoi is a market the brewery is directing at andthe expansion to Hanoi is just a matter of time.

VBA has recordeda steady increase in the country’s total beer production over the pastyears, with over 2.6 billion liters produced domestically in 2011, over2.83 billion liters in 2012 and over three billion liters last year. Thebeer production volume in this year’s first half reached around 1.4billion and the year’s final figure is likely to be higher than that oflast year as beer normally goes well at year-end.

According tothe association, domestic breweries exported nearly 63 million liters ofbeer and imported over 442,000 liters last year.-VNA

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