Mayu Sakoda and Rocky Swift
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s Asahi Group Holdings is seeking acquisitions in the United States and elsewhere to quadruple overseas sales of its flagship Super Dry beer by 2030, its chief executive said.
The beverage giant took a step toward that goal last month when it said it was buying Wisconsin-based Octopi Brewing, allowing it to produce Super Dry beer in the U.S. rather than import beer from its European plants.
The company is currently looking at mergers and acquisitions in emerging markets in Africa, Asia and South America, Asahi President Atsushi Katsuki told Reuters, citing a lack of good targets in the United States.
Katsuki acknowledged that investors are concerned that Asahi does not have a large presence in the United States.
“The US will be our largest market in terms of beer and the only growing market among developed countries in terms of population,” he said.
But while the US market is huge in terms of potential growth, new acquisitions by Asahi are unlikely to happen before next year, he added.
North America accounts for just 6% of Super Dry’s foreign sales, which currently total about 200 million hectoliters (5.3 billion gallons).
Asahi is among a number of Japanese companies looking to grow in the United States.
Spurred by the need to seek growth outside their shrinking and aging home market, Japanese firms made a massive 8.1 trillion yen ($54 billion) in overseas purchases last year, the most since 2019, according to LSEG data.
“This is no longer an environment in which acquisitions are made simply for economic gain. Sometimes a company needs to take on too much to transform itself,” Katsuki said.
Nippon Steel, for example, plans to buy US Steel for $15 billion, but has faced opposition from US lawmakers and US presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Katsuki said protectionist resistance seemed to arise because U.S. Steel was a symbol of the Rust Belt and the merger would likely ultimately succeed. But the uncertainty that Trump’s re-election could bring meant it was probably better to lock in debt refinancing sooner rather than later.
Asahi has been prioritizing debt repayment since its last major overseas acquisitions – Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Australian unit in 2020 and SABMiller’s (LON:) Central and Eastern Europe businesses in 2017.
($1 = 150.5000 yen)