Anheuser-Busch Companies

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Anheuser-Busch

logo
legal form Limited Liability Company
founding 1852 (as Bavarian Brewery )
Seat St. Louis , United States
management Patrick Stokes (Chairman of the Board), August Busch IV (CEO)
Number of employees 30,849 (2007)
sales $ 16.7 billion (2007)
Branch brewery
Website Anheuser-Busch

Anheuser-Busch is an American brewery headquartered in St. Louis , Missouri . Since November 2008, it has been part of the Anheuser-Busch-InBev group based in Leuven, Belgium . The best known brand is Budweiser ( Bud ), which has been brewed since 1876 and sold in over 70 countries worldwide. In 2007 a brewing volume of 190 million hectoliters was achieved.

history

Eberhard Anheuser from Bad Kreuznach took over the Bavarian Brewery, founded in 1852, in 1860 and ten years later took on his son-in-law Adolphus Busch from Kastel as a partner. In 1879 the company was finally renamed the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association .

Adolphus Busch's vision was to develop a national beer brand for the United States of America. In 1876, Adolphus Busch and his partner Carl Conrad set about brewing a new beer. His father-in-law Eberhard Anheuser supported him in this. A Pilsner Brauart beer that Bohemian immigrants from the city of Budweis brought with them to their new homeland served as a model.

The American Budweiser was launched and registered as a trademark in 1878 . In 1891, Anheuser-Busch acquired all rights to the brand from Carl Conrad. The Budweiser brand was born . The Czech Budweiser brewery tried to defend itself against this plagiarism, so the Bud Battle ( Budweiser dispute ), the oldest trademark dispute in history, broke out.

Historic brewery

As with most large breweries at that time, there were two other factors that favored large-scale production and widespread use: The invention of the ice machine by Carl von Linde and the advancing railway infrastructure. In order to be able to serve the US market with Budweiser, Adolphus Busch was the first to set up a network of cold stores along the most important rail routes, which enabled his beer to be cooled on long transport routes and thus ensured quality. Consequently, the first trucks with cooling in this industry followed later. In doing so, the company laid the foundation for the success of Budweiser, which has been the world's top-selling beer since 1957.

Anheuser-Busch survived the difficult time of Prohibition (1920 to 1933) by switching the business area to the production of ice cream, non-alcoholic beverages, baker's yeast and the sale of other refrigerated goods.

In 2008, the Belgian InBev group made a takeover offer that the American public viewed as an attack on national identity. Numerous US politicians and union officials opposed the takeover. However, after the Belgians improved the offer and were ready to pay shareholders $ 70 per share, the board of directors approved the takeover. The total purchase price corresponds to a volume of around 52 billion dollars.

Holdings

Anheuser-Busch operates internationally and operates breweries under its own name but also through various subsidiaries, such as Budweiser Stag Brewing Company Ltd. in the UK , 50 percent from Grupo Modelo in Mexico , 29 percent from Harbin Brewery Group Ltd. and 9.9 percent from Tsingtao Brewery Company in the People's Republic of China . According to an agreement with Tsingtao, Anheuser-Busch's stake will increase to 27 percent over the next few years. Anheuser-Busch has 17 offices outside the United States . The 20 percent stake in CCU (Compañía de Cervecerías Unidas) in Chile was sold to a Chilean bank. The St. Louis Cardinals baseball team had been owned by Anheuser-Busch from the mid-1950s until it was sold to a group of private investors in March 1996. Busch Stadium , built at the brewery's expense in the early 1960s, still bears the company's name, although a new stadium was built and the earlier one was demolished in 2006. Anheuser-Busch has signed an agreement according to which the new stadium will also be named "Busch Stadium".

In addition to numerous breweries, the group also owned a number of amusement park chains, including SeaWorld and Busch Gardens , as well as production, sales and packaging companies that support the beer business. The stake in the theme parks was sold to the US financial investor Blackstone in October 2009 for US $ 2.7 billion.

Breweries

Anheuser-Busch operates twelve breweries in the USA: At its headquarters in St. Louis (Missouri) as well as in Baldwinsville (New York), Cartersville (Georgia), Columbus (Ohio), Fairfield (California), Fort Collins (Colorado), Houston ( Texas), Jacksonville, Florida, Los Angeles, California, Merrimack, New Hampshire, Newark, New Jersey, and Williamsburg, Virginia.

Sponsorship

Anheuser-Busch was one of the main sponsors

vehicle construction

Between 1917 and around 1925 the company manufactured a number of passenger cars that were called Anheuser-Busch .

Trivia

The brewery co-heiress Wilhelmina Busch (1884–1952) built Höhenried Castle in Bernried on Lake Starnberg from 1937 to 1939 .

See also

Web links

Commons : Anheuser-Busch  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ ABInBev Press release ( Memento from December 21, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). The link is dead, please fix it once
  2. ↑ Brewing volume on Focus.de
  3. ↑ n-tv: Blackstone grabs - brewery giant sells Parks , October 7, 2009
  4. ↑ Beverly Rae Kimes, Henry Austin Clark Jr .: Standard catalog of American Cars. 1805-1942. Digital edition . 3. Edition. Krause Publications, Iola 2013, ISBN 978-1-4402-3778-2 , pp. 53 (English).

Coordinates: 38 ° 35 ′ 51 ″  N , 90 ° 12 ′ 43 ″  W.