“It is hard to provide some percentages for the decline of the market, because we don’t know how long this pandemic will last and what the final impact on the hospitality sector will be. What we can say is that 2020 will be a year of decline in consumption,” Julia Leferman general manager of Brewers of Romania Association says.
The association has the most important brewers in Romania as its members – Bergenbier, Heineken Romania, United Romanian Breweries Bereprod, Ursus Breweries and Martens, along microbrewery Clinica de Bere. The six supply 85% of the beer drunk in Romania. The association also includes raw material producers – Soufflet Malt Romania and Romania’s association of hops producers.
Beer consumption reached 85 liters per capita in 2018, according to the latest data available and 2019 came with a rise in sales, too. There are about 100 brewers on the market, according to ZF estimates based on Trade Register data, but most of them are microbreweries. The companies in the beer sector see more than RON4.5 billion (some EUR1 billion) revenue a year.
As many Romanians started staying home in March, sales of foods and bottled water rose. There are no data about the beer consumption trend in March yet. Cristian Cornea, general manager of Can-Pack Romania, the only facility in the country that makes beer and soda cans, says orders for such cans in March were according to plan, and even went up slightly.
“On short-term, I could say consumption of beer and soft drinks will see a certain rise, driven by off-premise consumption, since hundreds of thousands of people are stuck in their homes,” the Can-Pack official says.
Consumption of beer sold in cans accounts for some 20% of the volumes in Romania, with PET-bottled beer accounting for 47%.
“We have no March sales data yet. What we can see as a trend is that on-premise consumption will shrink, and we hope we’ll see slight rises of off-premise consumption. It is highly unlikely such rises could offset the on-premise segment decline,” Julia Leferman said.
Hospitality industry accounts for about 15% of the beer sales in Romania, according to the Brewers of Europe 2018 report.
Sports competitions boost sales in certain years, especially when they happen to take place during summer. The World Cup and European Football Championships are usually the competitions brewers most eagerly await, because they drive sales up by at least 10% to 20% compared with a regular summer month.
Julia Leferman expects the beer industry to be affected as a result of the closing of all on-premise locations and cancelation of a number of sports events, concerts and festivals.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)