Sapporo Holdings Ltd is planning to set up a brewery in the US by the end of 2024, as the top-selling Japanese beer in the US market seeks to expand its market share and cut costs.
“I would like to have a production base on the west coast,” Hiroyuki Nose, Sapporo Breweries’ vice president of marketing, said in an interview. “We make and import most of it from Canada and there are logistical costs. This is a challenge for us.”
The Tokyo-based beverage maker has not been able to scale up beer brewing in North America — its largest overseas market, said Nose, who is set to become president of Sapporo Breweries at the end of this month.
Sapporo might also look at acquiring a brewery or expanding its contract manufacturing in the US as part of the efforts, he said, declining to share more details, such as investment or the brewing capacity being planned.
A presence on US soil would not only save transportation costs for Sapporo, but also allow it to better penetrate what the Brewers Association, a craft-beer trade group, says is a US$116 billion US beer market.
The company predicts sales volume of its Sapporo Premium beer to increase 20 percent this year in North America, as demand recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although it lags rivals in its home market — it is the fourth-largest beer maker in Japan — Sapporo had an early start in the US, to which it began exporting in 1964, and has become a popular offering at restaurants.
Sapporo also owns California-based craft beer maker Anchor Brewing, which it purchased in 2017. A small amount of its Sapporo Premium beer sold in the US is currently brewed through contract manufacturing, and the rest is imported from Canada and Vietnam.
The North American market contributed about one-fifth of the company’s alcoholic beverage sales of ¥285.4 billion (US$2.63 billion) last year. About 70 percent of its overseas beer brand, Sapporo Premium, was sold in the US and Canada.
Beer makers worldwide have been hit hard by the pandemic, as the virus upended how consumers dine out and drink. That meant beer and alcohol sales to restaurants dropped off, while canned drinks sold through retail channels did well.
While Sapporo’s alcohol sales fell 13.6 percent last year, the North America unit’s sales decrease of 5.3 percent was much smaller by comparison and the segment’s profit also grew.
The fall was stemmed partially by a larger contribution from store sales, as more drinkers shopped for home consumption.
Sales actually grew in Canada, where about 90 percent of its beer sales are through retail channels, Nose said.
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
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
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],”
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