San Miguel Food and Beverage (SMFB), the largest food and beverage company in the Philippines, has confirmed plans on Wednesday to put up a new brewery in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, the country’s most populous city amid growing demand for beer. In a disclosure to the stock exchange SMFB said San Miguel Brewery (SMB), in which Kirin Holdings Company from Japan holds a 48.304% share, was “conducting a study” to put up a brewery in Vietnam.
Ramon Ang, vice-chairman, president and COO of San Miguel Corporation (SMC), the parent company of SMFB confirmed on Wednesday that SMB was eyeing to spend about USD 70 million for the planned new two million hectoliters brewery. Currently SMB runs only a brewery with 200,000 hl in Vietnam far from major cities like Ho Chi Minh or Saigon.If there’s an opportunity to buy an existing plant, the group would also be open to this, SMB president Roberto Huang said
Besides Philippines and Vietnam, SMB also operates breweries in Hong Kong, mainland China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand through its unit San Miguel Brewing International Ltd., which can collectively produce up to eight million hectoliters of beer yearly. The company also exports beer to over 50 markets.
In August 2018, SMFB revealed plans to sell between 20% to 30% of San Miguel Food and Beverage in the fourth quarter. The company said at that time to hope to raise as much as $3.6 billion in what could be the country’s biggest share sale on record. (inside.beer, 15.8.2019)
Amid bearish market conditions the company finally sold 400.94 million of its shares at P85 a share which represented less than half of the maximum offering of 1.02 billion secondary common shares, including oversubscription option, that SMFB was authorized to sell to the public. The free-flow therefore was brought near to 12 percent, with 88.76 percent of the shares still in hands of SMC.
The proceeds from the sale were meant to be used to fund a major expansion program. The company said it was planning to build 10 new breweries with an annual capacity of 1-2 million hectoliters each in the next two years.
These days SMB also layed the groundwork for the long-planned construction of a brewery on the West coast of the United States (inside.beer, 1.6.2017) to target the 4 million Filipino Americans, which are estimated to live in the US. (inside.beer, 18.7.2018).
