LONDON – After weeks of public grandstanding and private haggling, the biggest consumer-products takeover in history was ultimately decided by a handful of men in a tiny brick house on a one-lane street in London.
At meetings on Monday in the diminutive St. James’s home of boutique advisory firm Robey Warshaw, Anheuser-Busch InBev and SABMiller reached a deal to create a colossus that’s poised to dominate global brewing.
For AB InBev – maker of the American Budweiser, Belgium’s Stella Artois and Mexico’s Corona – hard-driving chief executive officer Carlos Brito and his chairman, Olivier Goudet, took the lead. Across the table sat SABMiller chairman Jan Du Plessis and his deputy Guy Elliott. Just outside the firm’s sole meeting room, the principals – Simon Robey and Simon Warshaw – stood by to offer counsel to SAB, the brewer of brands such as Peroni, Grolsch, Pilsner Urquell, and Foster’s.
The players met at least three times on Monday at Robey Warshaw’s three-story townhouse. In the morning, InBev presented a revised offer of 43.50 pounds per share, equivalent to $66.55. By mid-afternoon, Du Plessis had delivered his board’s response: Not good enough. Just after sunset, Brito said he’d raise the offer to 44 pounds per share, about $67.32, valuing SAB at about $106 billion. The deal was done.
The combined company will 1 in 3 beers sold worldwide, and claim about half of the industry’s profit – scale that will attract intense scrutiny from antitrust regulators in dozens of countries.
The purchase will crown a three-decade, $90 billion dealmaking spree by Brito and his billionaire backers, who built a middling Latin American brewer into a globe-spanning empire with the scale to withstand sluggish emerging-market growth and the shift toward craft brews in developed countries.
