Beer is at the beginning of an era of growth in India: Heineken CEO

livemint.com:

₹85.34 crore in profits, against a small loss in the same period last year. In an exclusive interview with Mint, Dolf van den Brink, chairman of the executive board and CEO of Heineken, UBL's Dutch parent, said India escaped a major impact from geopolitical issues like raw material cost inflation because of its local sourcing. Van den Brink said the company plans to expand the Heineken brand further nationally.

While some markets like Delhi and Kerala faced temporary setbacks, UBL's performance remained strong, with an overall volume growth of 8% and revenue growth of nearly 20% in Q3. Edited excerpts: Geopolitical tensions really disrupted the beer market for over two years, mainly because most of the world relied on barley from Ukraine. Has that issue gone away now? The worst of the effects is behind us.

For sure, that's not an impediment at this moment in time. The war in Ukraine triggered a huge increase in energy costs and food cost, and particularly in grains. Barley prices, our main ingredient, were an issue and were faced by a huge explosion in our cost structure.

We have worked our way through it now and the main impact of that was in 2022 and 2023. In 2024, we see a normalization in our cost structure and consequently, a normalization in the category with more healthy volumes and top line growth. However, India was less affected by some of the issues in Europe.

Do you mean you were less impacted in terms of the raw materials or consumption of beer? On the consumption side, we didn't see a slowdown in India like we saw in a couple of other places. Also, we are sourcing almost all our ingredients and inputs locally here in India. We are working together with the farmers in India and are procuring huge amounts of