---
title: "AB InBev → SABMiller"
url: "https://mahouse.world/ma-deals/ab-inbev-buy-sabmiller-2015"
type: "M&A deal"
year: "2015"
---

# AB InBev → SABMiller

The largest takeover in brewing: AB InBev paid about £70bn — $107bn when the deal closed in October 2016 — for SABMiller, uniting the world's two biggest brewers and roughly half the industry's profit, and borrowed so heavily to do it that selling assets and halving its dividend followed.

Clearance required selling the MillerCoors stake to Molson Coors and Peroni, Grolsch and Pilsner Urquell to Asahi.

- **Acquirer:** AB InBev (Belgium)
- **Target:** SABMiller (United Kingdom)
- **Value:** $107B
- **Announced:** November 2015
- **Completed:** October 2016
- **Sector:** Consumer
- **Deal type:** acquisition

## Why it mattered

AB InBev was strongest in the United States, Brazil and Western Europe, markets where beer volumes had stopped growing. SABMiller brought what AB InBev lacked: Africa, where it had begun as South African Breweries, and Latin America, where it owned the leading brewers of Colombia and Peru. SABMiller knew it was the obvious target — in 2014 it had tried to buy control of Heineken partly to make itself too large to take over — and rejected four offers, from £38 to £43.50 a share, before accepting £44 in October 2015.

A company with a third of the world's beer volume needed permission almost everywhere, and the price of permission was a string of disposals. In the United States SABMiller's stake in MillerCoors went to Molson Coors for $12bn, which made Molson Coors the world's third-largest brewer. In Europe Peroni, Grolsch and Meantime went to Asahi, followed by SABMiller's Central and Eastern European businesses — Pilsner Urquell, Tyskie, Lech — for $7.8bn. In China its 49% of Snow, the world's best-selling beer by volume, went to its partner China Resources. What remained was completed on 10 October 2016.

## What it left behind

The cost savings came; the constraint was the balance sheet. The deal was financed largely with debt, and with beer volumes flat in its biggest markets AB InBev spent the following years deleveraging rather than growing: it halved its dividend for 2018, listed its Asia-Pacific business in Hong Kong in 2019 and sold Carlton & United, the Australian brewer that came with SABMiller, to Asahi in 2020. At the end of 2019 it still carried $128bn of goodwill against $52bn of revenue. For deal-makers it is the reference case for buying the last big rival: the combination wins the category, and the leverage decides what the company can do with it for years afterwards.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABMiller