Heineken’s profit warning: all about EM | beyondbrics

Heineken’s profit warning: all about EM | beyondbrics:

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Is Russia the world’s toughest beer market? It’s beginning to look that way, after Heineken said on Tuesday it would see a 10 per cent decline in volumes sales there this year. That’s even worse than a recent gloomy assessment by Carlsberg, that volume had slumped by 7 per cent in the first half.

“Russia is a very, very difficult market,” René Hooft Graafland, Heineken’s chief financial officer, said on a conference call, warning that profits were likely to fall this year “in the low single digits”, sending the brewer’s shares down 5 per cent by mid morning in Amsterdam.

As the FT’s Tony Barber wrote this month, brewers face especially hard conditions in Russia because of government measures including a new beer tax, advertising restrictions and the forced closure of Russia’s dingy beer kiosks. Graafland said the weather had played its part too in September, when “autumn came a month early”."

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