Carlsberg curbs its growth ambitions

Carlsberg has ruled out acquiring other breweries and is looking at divesting its non-core assets, its chairman has told a Danish newspaper.

Carlsberg chairman Flemming Besenbacher (Photo: Carlsberg)

The brewer is reining in its growth ambitions to focus on its key importers and aim for stable, profitable expansion instead of breaching new markets.

Its chairman Flemming Besenbacher said that in the current economic climate, especially in Russia, his priority is to have a stronger brewer, not a bigger one.

“There was a time when Carlsberg had an ambition to be the fastest growing brewery… but with the development in Russia is no longer an ambition,” Besenbacher told Danish daily Berlinske.

Carlsberg closed down two of its breweries in Russia in January 2015. It announced in September that volume sales in eastern Europe and Russia declined by 16% organically in the third quarter of the current financial year.

The current strategic shift contributed to Besenbacher’s decision to replace CEO Jørgen Buhl for Cees’ t Hart in February last year. In the interview he hinted that some animosity had crept into the relationship between the chairman and his former top executive.

“Cees’ t Hart is a completely different type [of CEO] than Jørgen Buhl and it is also why he was employed,” he said. “It is also easier for a new CEO to clean up than it is for the old to clean up what he has put in the lake.”

“Cees’ t Hart calls a spade a spade. For him, the glass half empty, while in Carlsberg may have had a tendency to think that it was half full”, Besenbacher told the newspaper.