The world’s largest brewer is ramping up its spending on marketing initiatives ahead of the FIFA World Cup this summer, as such promotions have already helped buoy demand in Colombia and Peru.
Anheuser-Busch InBev NV’s first-quarter earnings growth of 6.6 percent surpassed analyst estimates and CEO Carlos Brito said he is “confident” that growth will accelerate, especially in the second half of this year.
Budweiser’s campaign for the World Cup, the most-watched sporting event globally, began this week. The initiative comes as Anheuser-Busch InBev works to drive more revenue from athletic tournaments and social occasions after the past decade’s influx of smaller brands weaned drinkers off its mass-market brews.
To address that challenge, the Leuven, Belgium-based company is investing US$2 billion in promoting its brands and improving their supply chains in the US.
In Colombia, the Aguila brand increased sales more than 50 percent in the first quarter, helped by ads that fueled nostalgia for the last time the country played in the World Cup.
Cristal performed well in Peru, as the brand is supporting the national team.
This year’s World Cup is to be held in Russia, a market dominated by Carlsberg A/S.
The Danish brewer last week said the Russian market shrank by about 5 percent in the first quarter, hurt by restrictions on bottling and the threat of international sanctions on the country’s economy.
Anheuser-Busch InBev said it plans World Cup promotions for Budweiser in Argentina and in Nigeria, where it started selling the brand in March.
One of the first ads in the new campaign involves hundreds of drones flying beer bottles from St Louis, Missouri, Budweiser’s home, down the shores of Rio de Janeiro, through the jungles of Latin America and over snowy mountain ridges. They drop off the beverages in Shanghai’s city center, in British pubs and finally at a Moscow soccer stadium.
Anheuser-Busch InBev’s shares have lost about one-quarter of their value since the multinational acquired SABMiller PLC in 2016 in the beverage industry’s largest-ever deal.
The company said it had cost savings of US$160 million related to the SABMiller purchase in the first quarter.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts