Bud Light Parent Company Reports Plunge in US Revenue for 2nd Quarter, Uses China to Offset
The Bud Light boycott cost its parent company big time, but in the end, AB InBev came out with a global profit thanks in part to Chinese beer drinkers.
On Thursday, AB InBev said its second-quarter revenue in the U.S. fell 10.5 percent, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Millions of Americans boycotted Bud Light beginning in April after the company patterned with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
AB InBev announced that its second-quarter sales to U.S. wholesalers dropped 15 percent, while sales to retailers fell 14 percent.
North American revenue fell $395 million compared to the same period in 2022, according to CNN. CNN noted that that figure included Canada, where revenue rose, “suggesting the slump was isolated to the United States.”
Sales in China also rose, according to Reuters.
The company sold 11 percent more beer by volume there and achieved a more than 20 percent increase in sales of higher-priced beers.
As a result, AB InBev’s second-quarter profits rose 5 percent year-over-year, well outpacing expectations of a 0.4 percent increase.
RBC analyst James Edwardes Jones called the outcome “an impressive demonstration of AB InBev’s resilience and diversification,” according to the Journal.
However, analysts at Morgan Stanley warned that the “full hit” of the Bud Light boycott would not appear until the next quarterly report, The New York Times reported.
In the four-week period ending July 22, retail Bud Light sales dropped over 40 percent in some metro areas. Sales of Bud Light at bars and restaurants went down 34 percent in the second quarter.
Beer Business Daily publisher Harry Schuhmacher told Fox News that Bud Light’s wounds were self-inflicted.
“In my 30 years of doing this, I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen such a shift in market share this quickly, and I’ve never seen it so prolonged,” he said.
“I think it’s kind of a wake-up call for marketers … that wading into the culture wars can have pretty serious consequences and it’s probably best just to stay clear.”
Schuhmacher explained that in 2015, Anheuser-Busch moved its sales and marketing departments to New York from St. Louis, where it had been headquartered for 100 years.
“At the time, distributors warned them that that might give them a hole in their thinking. It might give them gaps in connecting with Middle America. And sure enough, that clearly happened,” Schuhmacher said.
“I think living in that kind of Chelsea-Manhattan bubble really does remove you from the bars and taverns, restaurants, convenience stores, grocery stores across America. And I think it definitely does have a cultural effect that you can’t really measure, but it’s definitely there,” he said.
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