Eli Gershkovitch Case Study

Originally located in Cranston, Rhode Island, the Narragansett Brewing Company was founded in 1888 by six business men of German origin. Two years later, the brewery was built, and George Wilhelm of Berlin Germany was appointed Brew master. During the next 20 years, Narragansett Brewery blossomed into the largest Brewery in New England. In 1914, they expanded their business further to include the largest and most hygienic bottling system in New England. They were granted a license by the U.S. Government that would allow them to continue to sell beer through Prohibition for “medicinal purposes” only. (Anderson, 1988)

     In this paper I will be talking about the U.S. beer industry and in short an overview of the brewing industry worldwide. I will talk about the barriers to entry, economies of scale, government intervention, pricing, current market trends, product differentiation, and imports. The focus being mainly on the U.S. brewing industry oligopoly. The U.S. brewing industry has three major players: Anheuser-Busch, SAB Miller, and Coors/Molson. Anheuser-Busch is currently the largest brewer in the world, producing over 100 million barrels a year. Anheuser-Busch currently owns over 50% of the market in the United States, with Miller trailing behind at 20% and Coors at about 11% with the rest of the market occupied by imports and craft breweries. When analyzing any industry, how easy it is for newcomers to enter the market is a great importance. If there are high barriers to entry

In a world where large, corporate breweries rule the market, craft beer is created to please an audience that applauds the styles, techniques and flavors. Though craft beer can be purchased through several different outlets, the best place to thoroughly enjoy the entire experience of the specially made beer is in the brewery where it was made. The article titled, “In Lean Times, a Stout Dream” in The Wall Street Journal1 states that, despite the hard economic times and consequent consumer cutbacks, sales of craft beer, the industry 's fastest-growing segment, rose

Strives to be the leader in micro brewing while maintaining the core values it started with and had employee buy in even before it went” 100 % employee owned in2013” (Gorski, 2013).

Many people seek to find passion in their life, something they feel gives them drive or purpose. Many only find one, if any at all. Eli Gershkovitch, however, has found three, all while making a booming business in the process. Eli Gershkovitch's interests run the gamut from brewing to aviation to Law and all seem to inextricably intertwine themselves. His interest in craft brewing tied itself greatly to his legal knowledge, experience and landmarks in life. Following his graduation from the University of Toronto's law school in 1987 Eli Gershkovitch began a European tour kicked off a series of events that would bud into a brewing empire.

The following report is to introduce the brewery's profile and production process, which include brewing

While in England Molson bought brewery equipment. Molson induced he growth of barely in and around Quebec, by selling the farmers the seeds and agreeing to purchase the barley after it had ben harvested. Molson dedicated 20 yeas of his life to his business. Molson was smart, he stayed away from the import export business, it took much to long to get a return on your investment for Molsons liking, if you received a return at all because of the high risk business. In addition to seeing the danger in the import export business, Molson could tell that the money in the fur fade was coming to an end. Therefore staying away from it. As Molson predicted the fur trade ended, and in the early 19th century it switched to the lumber business. With time comes new technology, and this was a field that Molson was highly interested in and would later invest large amounts of money into. After receiving 10,000£ and his old family home, Snake Hall, Molson sold the home as it was back in England. All the money Molson had received went back into enlarging his facilities and reinvesting in his brewing establishment. With an influx of loyalist immigration from both England and the soon to be United States of America, the demand for beer increased, even the French, who had never taken a liking to Molsons product were showing an increased interest in it. Molsons money was always on the for front of technology. With steam being the new energy source of the time, Molson was very interested. Molson invested money in the testing of new

The next project was bottling Gordon Biersch signature beer and retailing it. This had three biggest challenges: this project was entirely Gordon’s baby and demanded time and attention; secondly the freshness of the bottled beer versus the freshly brewed was an issue for which they decided the beer would have a shelf life no longer than three months. Thirdly and the most exciting challenge was the head-to-head competition with other microbreweries and premium beers. Despite the tough competitive environment, Gordon Biersch aimed to achieve 11% of the market in three years (by 1996). This retail venture required huge investment, thus they decided to start small to prove to the investors that they could pull it off.

The brewing industry can be characterized by Porter’s Five Forces framework. New entries to brewing have a relative ease in creating home micro-breweries, which is aided by

The Company must revisit objectives and goals and look into available resources (partnerships). At an external level, facing competition from other types of craft brew products. The Company needs to assess competitor’s strength and weaknesses, gathering data which in turn may provide a “loophole” for New Belgium to target the competitor’s market share. The Company will gather information of potential new customers. Figuring out why do customers select competitor’s product over theirs or what customers want, as tastes and trends are always changing. There will always be regulatory laws and social propaganda of “drink responsibility.”

Beer has a long history. In 2000 B.C.E., Sumerians had prepared eight different beer types, ranging from “strong,” “red brown,” and “good dark” (Mauk, 2013). Breweries have created their own recipes, brewed their own beers—some with alcohol, some without. Over the past few years, craft beer gained steady market share away from the national and international breweries (Murray & O 'Neill, 2012). Separating one beer from the next is the product itself, and what the product has to offer. Competition is ferocious due to more informed, sophisticated consumers, as well as globalization and the spread of technology (Murray & O 'Neill, 2012).

Hirotaro Higuchi (the protagonist), and CEO of Asahi Breweries, Ltd. must decide if he should increase its production and packaging capacity to meet the supply demands of their distributors, due to the company’s recent developments in the beer industry. Asahi Breweries has launched and seized a huge section of the dry beer market, ensuing from sales growth of 71.9% in comparison to the industry’s growth of 7.6%. A proposal has been made for, increasing their production capacity to 2,100,000 kiloliters to accommodate the recent shortages to their distributors. He has suggested an investment proposal plan of 230 billion yen within two years (1989 to 1990), to increase their brewing and packaging capacity by 30%. Hirotaro Higuchi must decide if he will welcome or dismiss this proposal. “Guiding change may be the ultimate test of a leader- no business survives over the long term if it can’t reinvent itself” (Kotter, 2007).

The following letter addresses your query regarding actions for annulment in the General Court (GC) as regards to the decision of the Commission to restrict the import of beer to only 10,000 litres per month. Immediately, it is important that the locus standi of a non – privileged applicant, the company has restricted access to courts. However, under Article 263 (4) in the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) there are three situations in which you are able to bring your action before a judicial review.

The brewing industry is interesting to examine due to its relatively unique structure. Up until November 2015, the market was dominated by four main players, known informally as the “Big Four”. AB InBev was the largest, followed by SABMiller, Heineken and Carlsberg. In November 2015, however, ABInBev and SABMiller agreed a formal $107 billion takeover deal, combining the brewers into a company which industry experts claim would control around half of the industry’s profits (Mickle, 2015). As a result of the sheer size and complexity of the merger, it is anticipated that the deal will not be finalised until the second half of 2016 as ABInBev must negotiate with anti-trust regulators around the world with respect to their potential monopolistic position. As the deal is yet to be completed, this report will analyse ABInBev independent of SABMiller.

|What do you see as the key success factors for firms in the global beer industry? |