The Hindu Business Line : Millennium Alcobev reports 42 pc growth in volume this summer

THIS summer of the beer industry may have belonged to Ravi Jain if the sales figures claimed by Millennium Alcobev Ltd (MABL) for the first quarter is anything to go by. The company, a three-way joint venture between UB group, Scottish & Newcastle (S&N) and Mr Ravi Jain, has reported 42 per cent rise in sales volumes even as the industry as a whole came off a lukewarm quarter.

The five year-old company into which S&N infused funds last year saw its monthly volumes cross one million cases in the first three months of the current financial year, 2004-05. It sold about 3.5 million cases for the quarter and saw its share of the domestic beer market move up from 8 to 11 per cent. "We want to be leaders in incremental volume growth and we are doing it," Mr Ravi Kaza, Head (Sales & Marketing), MABL, said. "We have the fastest growing brands across mild and strong beer segments in Sandpiper and Zingaro," he added while explaining that the company may end the financial year with 12 million cases.

MABL closed last year, 2003-04, with sales volume of 7.5 million cases. The company's flagship strong beer, Zingaro, sold over a million cases in the first quarter putting it firmly on track to achieve the target of three million cases for the year, up from nearly two million cases in the previous year.

"We are in the top three list in the major 15 States except Maharashtra," Mr Kaza said. Stating that the company had outperformed the industry by a distance, he said that its market share in the South, which accounts for nearly 50 per cent of the national sales, jumped from 3.8 to 9 per cent during the quarter. This was made possible by the company's rapid strides in Tamil Nadu where its market share leaped from 7 to 23 per cent. Incidentally, the beer sales in Tamil Nadu declined 8 per cent in the quarter.

MABL's "summer of reckoning" means that the company may have taken the market share away from the regional players and also to an extent from the two largest brewers, UB Beer and Shaw Wallace Breweries Ltd (SWBL). MABL's 42 per cent volume growth even though on a smaller volume contrasts with the industry average of 2 to 2.5 per cent in a quarter when the all the brewers were impacted by soaring bottle price and freight costs. The company has supported its brands through high voltage television commercials, on-premise promotions and "After Dusk" parties.

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