The room for Vietnamese producers in the home market has become smaller and smaller.

Neo Gim Siong Bennett, general director of Sabeco, said at an event for ThaiBev some days ago that Sabeco, under the ‘ThaiBev reign’, will be the strategic card which helps the group reach 50 percent of revenue from overseas by 2020.

ThaiBev believes that the brewer from Vietnam is strong enough to exploit the Indochina market, including Myanmar.

The acquisition of 53.39 percent of Sabeco shares was enough to raise ThaiBev’s market share in ASEAN from 23 percent to 26 percent, according to the Bangkok Post.

Sabeco is holding 42 percent of market share in Vietnam, which means that the Thai owner owns 22 percent of interest in the market, which has the highest consumption level in the region and third in Asia.

For Heineken, with its four major brands Heineken, Tiger, Larue and Amstel, the brewer holds 22 percent of the Vietnamese market share. It controls the high-end market segment with 67 percent of market share, of which 40 percent belongs to Tiger and 27 percent to Heineken.

The number 1 position in the high-end market segment brings Heineken huge profits of trillions of dong a year, though Heineken is not the largest brewer in Vietnam. It now owns five production facilities, including three in the south and two in the central region, the two key markets for it.

In the case of Carlsberg, after taking over Hue brewery, the brewer from Denmark now ranks fourth in the market with 9.7 percent of market share. Each customer bought 34.5 liters of beer a year in Vietnam alone.

Habeco holds the third largest market share with 22 percent. If counting the benefits from Habeco, Carlsberg, as a big shareholder, owns another 4 percent of interest in the Vietnamese beer market.

The Danish brewery has, more than once, expressed its willingness to raise its ownership ratio in Habeco to 51 percent. The company is working with MOIT on the deal.

If Carlsberg becomes the shareholder with controlling stake in Habeco, the Vietnamese beer market will become a playing field for foreign players, with little room for Vietnamese.

Vietnamese beer brands have been sold to foreign investors. Sapporo, for example, which was once a Vietnamese owned brand, has become a foreign company, and is 100 percent owned by Japanese Sapporo International Inc.

Huda is a similar story. It was owned by the joint venture of Hue Brewery and Carlsberg, and then became 100 percent Carlsberg owned.

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