Heineken

Product – Heineken

Based on the presentation by team Chimmac on October 27th 2015, I would like to deliver my opinion and further analysis through this report. The reason why I picked this topic is because we can see that beer market is one of the biggest market in Korea nowadays.

Heineken is one of the world’s most well known beer brewery company, first founded in Amsterdam (1864) and today they have numerous brewing plants globally. Their POP, just like any other beer brands, is to sell beer and make people enjoy their time with friends. While the POD, as it was mentioned in the presentation, is about their premium and classy image but still aiming for the young generation. However, not only that, if we look further in their website, we can see that they also emphasize on the sustainability. For example, for the sake of reducing water consumption, by 2020, Heineken aimed to reduce water consumption in the breweries by 30%. Moreover, they also try to reduce their C02 emissions by 40% and 50% emissions of their fridges. Overall, Heineken’s goal is to constantly improve their profitability while growing the business in a sustainable and consistent manner.

Thinking more on the Korean market, we can see that Heineken is not the market leader in the present since it is pushed by the local brands, such as Hite, Cass, and O.B.  The most popular import label was Asahi, then followed by Heineken. I think price is one of the factors why this situation occurred. Not only in Korea, but also in the U.S market, Heineken is sold in higher price by around $3 compare to domestic brand. In Korea, with the discounts, imported brands are sold in the range of 2000 to 3000 won per can, while Cass and Hite cost nearly 2000 won.  One of the statistic results shows that sales of imported beer from July through November 2014 surpassed the sales of Soju for the first time.  Even though Heineken was not mentioned in the graph beside, in my opinion we can see that in the long term Heineken may have a good prospect in Korean market since their position now is right behind Asahi in the imported beer category. [pic 1]