the black China hand

The world’s second biggest brewer, it operates in the Chinese marketplace through its 49% stake in China Resources Snow Breweries (CR Snow). SABMiller said CR Snow’s share of the Chinese beer market had risen to 14.9% in the first six months of 2006.This puts it ahead of the previous Chinese beer leader, Tsingtao, which has a market share of 13.9%.

I’m interested in learning how SABMiller calculated its marketshare because a simple shelf space analysis of who has the largest market suggests that SABMiller is far from the leader. While Snow Beer, in addition to it’s “home base” of Liaoning Province, seems to be gaining shelf space in the bigger markets of Shanghai and Beijing…beer sales (other then the national brand Tsingtao which is partnered with Budweiser) still seem to be dominated by local breweries. Indeed it seems that in some areas such as Beijing, local breweries (read: Yanjing Beer) seem to do everything they can to keep non-local brews (both foreigh and domestic) out of consumer’s eyesight which all but guarantees consumption of local brands over others. For anyone that has had bad luck to drink Yanjing that is not optimal situation.

SABMiller ‘top China beer seller’

So there really was no need for Martin Scorsese to make “The Departed” — to remake, to Americanize, Mak and Lau’s 2002 Hong Kong gangster drama “Infernal Affairs,” a tersely structured and beautifully acted picture that few Americans got to see. “Infernal Affairs” was a smash in Hong Kong, spawning two sequels. Here, it was just another Asian-made picture picked up by Miramax and poorly distributed: People had heard about it, but seeing it in theaters was another story. Whatever life it had in the States, it found on DVD.

You heard it here first. (See below).

The Departed