Interbrew
Interbrew was a large Belgium-based brewing company which owned many internationally known beers, as well as some smaller local beers.
1366 Interbrew's roots can be traced back to Den Horen in Leuven when the Artois brewery was founded.
1987 Artois, and the Walloon-based brewer Piedboeuf, came together to form Interbrew.
The move onto the international scene happened when Interbrew acquired the Canadian beer brand Labatt. The transaction also included Labatt's sports-related assets, namely the Toronto Blue Jays baseball club, the Toronto Argonauts football club, and The Sports Network. At the time, Labatt was not much smaller than Interbrew; since then, the company has been considered a multinational with both Canadian and Belgian roots.
1999 AmBev was a Brazilian beer company formed by a merger between the Brahma and Antarctica breweries. It had a dominant position in South America and the Caribbean.
2001 In December Interbrew, Danone (former owner of Kronenbourg, and two other smaller brewers) were fined €91m for operating a cartel in Belgium while four Luxembourg companies were fined €448,000 the same month.
Some important Interbrew brands are Tennents, Stella Artois, Boddingtons, Beck's, Staropramen, Bass, Leffe, Labatt and Hoegaarden.
Interbrew was the third largest brewing company in the world by volume, Anheuser-Busch was the largest, followed by SABMiller in second place. Heineken International was in fourth place and AmBev was the world's fifth largest brewer.
In 2004 Interbrew merged with Brazilian brewer AmBev to form InBev, which is the now largest brewer in the world by volume, with a 13% global market share (as of 2004).
See Also
Sources of Information
- [1] Wikipedia