You’d have to be living under a rock to not have seen the news that ABI was planning a takeover bid to acquire SABMiller, which might work unless SABMiller might be able to buy Heineken, thus making itself too big for ABI to get in a hostile takeover. These rumors have long been circulating so nobody who’s been paying attention to the beer industry was too surprised at these announcements.
But so far I haven’t seen too much discussion about what the beer world might look like if any of these come to pass. The online news site Quartz filled that gap by producing a chart showing that This is what the family tree of beer companies will look like if AB InBev acquires SABMiller.
You know how much I like infographics, but this one caught my attention nonetheless. The problem is that it doesn’t accurately reflect the scale of this deal, since it makes SABMiller look barely larger than MolsonCoors and much smaller than Carlsberg, when in fact it is much larger than either.