It has been on everyone's lips for months, but the merger between the Budweiser maker Anheuser-Busch InBev and Miller maker SABMiller is finally complete.
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It was confirmed in regulatory filings on Wednesday that AB InBev is shelling out $108 billion for its biggest American beer rival after months of back-and-forth.
AB InBev was known for producing beers including Budweiser, Stella Artois, Labatt, and Goose Island; SABMiller was known for Miller, Foster's, Blue Moon, Peroni, and many others. The deal puts a huge portion of the world's beer market under the same umbrella: The AB InBev-SABMiller union now has an estimated global market share of close to 30% after divestitures, and it controls six of the 10 most popular beer brands in America.
(It would have been eight out of 10, but part of the deal stipulates that Molson Coors will take Miller off of SABMiller's hands.)
These are just some of the brands the new beer goliath owns:
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The Stella Artois maker Artois brewery and its fellow Belgian-beer maker Piedboeuf merged to form Interbrew in the late 1980s. When Interbrew merged with the Brazilian company AmBev in 2004, it became InBev. InBev and Anheuser-Busch became AB InBev in 2008.
SABMiller, on the other hand, started when South African Breweries (SAB) acquired Miller Brewing in 2002, the second-largest brewing company in the US at the time, to form SABMiller. SABMiller combined Miller with Coors maker Molson Coors, to create MillerCoors — a joint venture SABMiller is expected to sell back to Molson Coors as a part of the $108 billion deal.
In the past 12 months, there have been more than a dozen craft-beer mergers and acquisitions by larger breweries, including the US-based 10 Barrel, Blue Point, Elysian, and Goose Island by AB InBev; and the UK-based Meantime by SABMiller.
Starting Wednesday, they're all one big happy family.
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