Beer cartel (Switzerland)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The beer cartel was an agreement between almost all Swiss breweries . It existed between 1935 and 1991 and allowed extensive market regulation. The cartel was under the leadership of the Schweizerischer Bierbrauerverein, founded in 1877 (since 2005 the Swiss Brewery Association).

First steps towards the cartel

The first regulations of the market took place long before the cartel was founded. The background to this was the fierce competition, the large financial requirements for modernizing the factories and the brewery's death.

In 1903 an agreement in the canton of Zurich set minimum prices. However, deliveries from other cantons at lower prices could not be prevented, so that the agreement soon became void again. From 1907 to 1910 a “customer protection contract” was in force, which led to sharp protests by the host association against paternalism.

In 1919 the director of the Winterthurer Haldengut presented the brewery association with the idea of ​​a nationwide merger of all breweries and a comprehensive restructuring of the industry. The aim would have been to produce rationally uniform beers only with a reduced number of breweries. One would have wanted to fight outsiders with the good quality and the lower prices. Elements of this proposal were later incorporated into the 1935 Convention.

In 1921, in the economically difficult period after the First World War , the brewers agreed on a five-year restructuring contract with the Wirteverband, and at the same time import duties for foreign beer were increased significantly.

From 1927 onwards, beer production was taxed higher in several steps. In 1933, the breweries threatened to directly pass on the burden of the new taxes on the beer price in order to win the landlords over to the political fight against the levies. At the same time, negotiations began between the breweries with the aim of replacing the previous agreements with retailers and hosts with a comprehensive new convention.

The cartel

The comprehensive convention, which was drawn up under the direction of the Swiss Brewers' Association, came into force on March 1, 1935. Among other things, it regulated the allocation of territories, the standardization of the products (types of beer, ingredients, original wort , containers, labels, etc.), ancillary services to hosts, wholesale and retail prices, collective advertising and the restriction of individual advertising. The agreement set out the procedures for territorial and customer allocation, pricing, and dispute resolution. For the implementation of the regulations, Switzerland was divided into ten districts.

Although the host association never formally recognized the convention, it took note of it and obliged its members to implement the requirements.

Legal background

The Swiss Federal Constitution of 1874, with its liberal Article 31 on freedom of trade and commerce, made it possible to form cartels. From the 1880s onwards, numerous agreements were made in various industries. In general, cartels in Switzerland were not seen primarily as an obstacle to the free market, but as a sensible way of regulating the market. The antitrust-friendly mentality of the population, politics and business as well as the employee representatives subsequently led to laws and ordinances that basically allowed cartels and also protected them legally.

Impact in the brewing industry

The beer cartel and the legal framework ensured that the breweries could benefit from a high level of planning security with regard to their economic future. The focus was on preserving the vested rights and avoiding unnecessary costs through competition, not the development of new products or sales markets. There were no export activities worth mentioning. There were no mergers with foreign breweries. The domestic market was protected from foreign beers by restrictive import barriers.

An expression of the extensive standardization of beers was, for example, that the cartel breweries jointly placed advertisements for “Swiss beer” without naming brand names until the early 1980s. Beer had become an interchangeable mass product on the Swiss market. This was definitely desired on the part of the cartel members: Objections to the supplier allocation to the buyers could be refuted with the argument that the products of all brands were standardized anyway and thus hardly differed.

Attacks on the cartel

The legal situation made the attack on the beer cartel difficult, because cartel agreements were legally enforceable. First came an advance from the political side: In January 1958, a referendum , the so-called cartel prohibition initiative (officially "abuse of economic power") failed with 74.1% no votes in the referendum . In the voting campaign, the brewers argued that the beer cartel would lead to low costs and thus to a low beer price. In 1964, the Cartel Abuse Act came into force, which, contrary to initial fears of the brewers, had no direct impact on the beer cartel. Later federal investigations came to the conclusion that the beer cartel had no harmful effects. The brewers were again able to use the cost argument.

  • The Brasserie du Boxer SA, founded in Romanel-sur-Lausanne in 1960 and in Yverdon-les-Bains since 2012 , did not join the cartel and began selling beer throughout Switzerland in 1962 right from the start of production. It did this with a bottle size of 50 cl (0.5 liters), which deviated from the cartel norm (60 cl, later 58 cl), and the characteristics of the beers also did not meet the cartel requirements. The landlords were allowed to sell beer from an outsider, but the dealers were threatened with the termination of the customer relationship if they added to their range in this direction.
  • In 1974 a doctor bought the Fischerstube restaurant in Basel . He asked the Basel brewery Warteck for a delivery contract, but received the notification that his restaurant had to get Anker beer from Frenkendorf , as it had done before . He ignored the instruction to have to serve a beer that was not brewed in Basel and subsequently set up the first house brewery in Switzerland.
  • The Kronenbrauerei in Herisau (closed in 1979 after a fire) and the Lupo brewery (today Ramseier Suisse ) in Hochdorf were also not part of the cartel. Lupo started producing beer in 1963, and from 1967 mainly a private label for Denner .
  • Foreign cheap beers in one-way containers hit the cartel from the 1970s. For cost reasons, Swiss breweries have long resisted the trend towards disposable bottles and cans.

Denner in an exchange of blows with the cartel

The discounter Denner repeatedly fought with the beer cartel. Boycotts , lawsuits, counterclaims, numerous lawsuits through all instances and a rough tone in advertising were part of the exchange:

In the autumn of 1969, Denner announced in the press that he would in future be selling bottles of lager for 50 cents in discount stores. All Swiss breweries that belonged to the brewery association subsequently refused to fulfill orders for lager beer in bottles of 60 cl. Up until this point, Denner had bought a bottle of 60 cl lager beer from its suppliers, Hürlimann and Löwenbräu Zurich, for 46 cents net. The cartel set the minimum sales price at 70 cents. The boycott was followed by processes across several instances. On November 28, 1972, the federal court ruled that the boycott was lawful (BGE 98 II 365).

Among other things, it justified the judgment by stating that price maintenance is in the interests of both breweries and consumers, since a minimum price would protect those dealers who could not work with such a favorable cost structure as a discounter. A larger number of sales outlets represent customer service that would be lost if the retail trade were allowed too little margin. On the part of the brewers, there is no market exclusion, but a conditional delivery block, which would be removed if Denner adhered to the minimum sales price.

The ruling also stipulated that, according to the findings of the Swiss Cartel Commission in the report on the beer market (VKK 1966), there were only two outsiders in Switzerland besides the Lupo brewery in Hochdorf, Boxer SA in Romanel-sur-Lausanne and the Kronenbrauerei AG in Herisau. The market share of these outsider breweries amounts to 1%, that of the imported beers a little more than 1% of the total output of the members of the Swiss brewery association. The antitrust law was issued against "economically or socially harmful effects of cartels and similar organizations". It must therefore recognize cartels and similar organizations in principle and limit itself to combating abuses in the exercise of collective economic power.

From the fall of 1980, cartel members started delivering branded beer again after Denner had undertaken to adhere to the fixed minimum price of one franc at the time. With effect from November 1st, 1981, the brewery association increased the so-called intervention price to CHF 1.10. Denner refused to comply with this increase and continued to sell the 58 cl returnable bottle of lager for CHF 1.00, which was followed by another delivery block.

Denner demanded that the boycott be revoked as a precautionary measure. A constitutional complaint to the Federal Supreme Court was rejected on July 20, 1982 (BGE 108 II 228).

From November 1982, a series of lawsuits, counterclaims and lawsuits about the boycott as well as claims in advertising followed. On May 6, 1986 the Federal Supreme Court overturned a judgment of the Commercial Court of the Canton of Zurich of November 16, 1984 with reference to the main action and referred the matter back to the lower court for a new decision (BGE 112 II 268). The legal dispute only ended with Denner's victory in 1993, two years after the collapse of the beer cartel.

In 1985 Denner advertised his cartel-free Swiss “Denner-Lager-Bier” at 60 cents for 50 cl. The illustration with Wilhelm Tell and his son carried the headline “We want to be free like our fathers were ... and fight new Gessler bailiffs ... ". Denner claimed in the text that accepting the minimum price of the beer cartel of CHF 1.10 for 58 cl would mean saying hello to the Preis-Vogt, therefore “fighting the beer cartel”, because the Denner beer comes from a “small, cartel-free Swiss brewery” . Their name (Lupo) was not evident from the advertisement.

The end

The Sibra Holding (Cardinal), a member of the cartel, announced the convention in 1988 unilaterally, after it had already come in previous years to breaches of the agreements. Among other things, they concerned the introduction of a new container and the poaching of customers. After the Feldschlösschen and Hürlimann breweries withdrew, the convention expired at the end of 1991.

aftermath

The end of the cartel, but even before the opening of the market for foreign beers, caught the Swiss breweries partly unprepared. The industry was not used to fighting for its customers with marketing measures and developing new products. With the exception of non-alcoholic beers , only very insignificant quantities were exported. Even at the time of the cartel, breweries were allowed to a certain extent to sell foreign specialties in addition to their own beers. After decades of standardized products and communal advertising, Swiss beer had the image of the ordinary, so that consumers were receptive to new offers. Foreign suppliers with their international marketing campaigns, new products and other container sizes ensured that the market shares of imported beers in 1991 were already 13.7 percent; by 2012 they had increased to 24 percent. At the same time, beer consumption per capita declined during this period: from 71 liters in 1991 to 57 liters in 2012.

Further developments

The changed market conditions led to two opposing developments: to a boom in the establishment of small breweries, but also to a concentration in the established former cartel companies. The number of registered breweries rose from 34 in 1985 to 483 in December 2014 and 869 in December 2017.

The members of the collapsed cartel saw a number of mergers and closings, diversification in the direction of specialty beers, mineral and fresh water, and increased emphasis on the real estate business.

The Feldschlösschen Group in Rheinfelden is an example of the mergers and closures . From 1988 it integrated the breweries Hochdorf (closed), Warteck in Basel (closed), Valaisanne in Sion , Cardinal in Friborg (closed) and Hürlimann in Zurich (closed), until it was taken over in 2000 by the Danish Carlsberg .

Haldengut in Winterthur and Calanda in Chur merged in 1990 and went to the Dutch Heineken in 1993 , followed by Eichhof in Lucerne in 2008 . The old Haldengut location in Winterthur was closed.

Market leader

The two foreign giants Carlsberg and Heineken cover around 60 percent of domestic consumption with their production in Swiss breweries, and around 65 percent of the market together with their imported beers.

The two largest, by a foreign group independent Swiss breweries are to fenaco belonging Ramseier Suisse in Hochdorf (formerly Lupo) and Schützengarten in St. Gallen. As a producer of own brands, Ramseier Suisse has 45 million production units (approx. 210,000 hectoliters) (2012), Schützengarten in the brewing year 2011/12 an output of 170,700 hectoliters. The total market in the 2012 calendar year, including imports, was 4,622,509 hectoliters, while exports to 32 countries amounted to almost 80,000 hectoliters.

literature

  • Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and us , history of breweries and beer consumption in Switzerland. Publisher here + now, Baden 2011, ISBN 978-3-03919-193-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Website of the Swiss Brewery Association . Retrieved May 19, 2016
  2. ^ Daniel Gerny: Beer culture in Switzerland: A brewer and national councilor wants a Swiss pilsner In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of July 3, 2017
  3. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 99.
  4. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 108.
  5. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 138.
  6. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 128.
  7. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 132.
  8. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 133.
  9. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 134.
  10. ^ Federal Supreme Court , judgment of November 28, 1972 (BGE 98 II 365), Denner AG v. Bierbrauerverein, Recital 3, Paragraph bb), accessed on March 7, 2012
  11. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 166.
  12. ↑ Swiss Brewery Association: Historical posters for advertising beer , accessed on August 9, 2018.
  13. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 133.
  14. ↑ Federal Chancellery website : Text of the popular initiative Abuse of Economic Power , accessed on March 9, 2012
  15. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 155.
  16. ↑ Bière vaudoise: La singulière histoire de la brasserie Boxer au pays du chasselas . In: 24 heures online, March 4, 2012, ( French ). Retrieved March 5, 2012
  17. ^ History of the brewery , accessed on March 2, 2012
  18. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 160.
  19. ↑ Ueli Bier website of the Fischerstube brewery , history, ( Memento of the original from April 25, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved March 6, 2012  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.uelibier.ch
  20. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 162.
  21. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 176.
  22. ^ Federal Supreme Court , judgment of November 28, 1972 (BGE 98 II 365), Denner AG v. Bierbrauerverein, Facts A, Paragraph 2, accessed on March 7, 2012
  23. ^ Federal Supreme Court , judgment of November 28, 1972 (BGE 98 II 365), Denner AG v. Bierbrauerverein, accessed on March 7, 2012
  24. ^ Federal Supreme Court , judgment of July 20, 1982 (BGE 108 II 228), Denner AG v. Bierbrauerverein, accessed on March 7, 2012
  25. ^ Federal Supreme Court , judgment of May 6, 1986 (BGE 112 II 268), Denner AG v. Bierbrauerverein, accessed on March 7, 2012
  26. ^ Website Denner , Geschichte, accessed on March 10, 2012
  27. ↑ Newspaper views , ad Denner Lager Beer from February 22, 1985
  28. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 178.
  29. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 191.
  30. ^ Neue Zürcher Zeitung: Interview with Weko President Walter Stoffel from June 1, 2008, accessed on March 9, 2012
  31. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 160.
  32. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 174.
  33. ↑ Regular beer seller is looking for regular young drinkers. In: NZZ Folio . August 1994, accessed March 9, 2012.
  34. ↑ a b Swiss Brewery Association website , Beer Market Development Switzerland ( Memento of the original from May 19, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved May 19, 2016  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / bier.ch
  35. ^ Website of the Swiss Brewery Association , Market Division Switzerland ( Memento of the original from May 19, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved May 19, 2016  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / bier.ch
  36. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 211.
  37. ↑ Customs administration: The Swiss beer market in numbers. Retrieved August 12, 2018
  38. ↑ Feldschlösschen website , history. ( Memento of the original from January 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 1.8 MB) Retrieved March 6, 2012  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.feldschloesschen.com
  39. ↑ Heineken Switzerland website , history. Retrieved March 6, 2012
  40. ↑ Matthias Wiesmann: Beer and Us , History of Breweries and Beer Consumption in Switzerland. Page 211.
  41. ↑ Ramseier Suisse, portrait, beer production , accessed on September 22, 2013.
  42. ↑ Wirteverband Basel-Stadt: Diversity and Power in the Swiss Beer Market, July 21, 2012 , accessed on September 22, 2013.
  43. ^ Website of the Schützengarten brewery , brewing year 2011/12. Retrieved May 1, 2013
  44. ↑ Swiss Brewery Association website , key figures 2012 ( Memento of the original from May 19, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved May 19, 2016  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / bier.ch