MAJORITY - What is the largest selling beer brand in the world?

Heineken? Carlsberg? Budweiser? You are not. The foam served most in this world is the Snow Beer, a beer ... Chinese, of course.

The British newspaper The Telegraph reports that Chinese Snow Beer, a joint venture between SABMiller and China Resources Enterprise, is beer that has been selling over the last three years. No less than 16.5 billion quarts have been purchased last year, twice as Budweiser, which was however the king of beers trade until 2008. And the trend should not be reversed any time soon: Snow Beer sales increased by 10% per year!

An amazing performance considering that this beer is aimed exclusively at the local market yet. So that local does not find it in Hong Kong.

"Many foreigners are surprised when they stop in my office," said the Telegraph Ari Mervis, director of SABMiller Asia. They ask me: 'But what's that beer? We have never seen anywhere. "I tell them it's the largest selling beer brand in China, ahead of its rivals which are nevertheless present here for nearly 110 years, while ours is only 15 years. But this beer is for a very Chinese segment of the market, not where are the foreigners. "

For most foreigners, both in and outside China, the Chinese beer Tsingtao is the best known, first brewed by the Germans in the north-east, and now owned by Japanese conglomerate Asahi , a Chinese entrepreneur and the Chinese government itself. Tsingtao but has sold only 11 billion pints a year ago. Proof if ever there was in China a niche product can be more successful than its competitors the most famous and most commercially aggressive.

Source lemonde.fr