A new report in Investor’s Business Daily estimates that the parent company of Bud Light, Anheuser-Busch InBev, has had its market value plunge by a staggering, painful $15.7 billion since the Dylan Mulvaney controversy began on April 1st of this year.
Investor’s Business Daily, to make that estimate, had to convert the data to US dollars using S&P Global Market Intelligence, beginning things with the April 1st video Mulvaney posted to advertise Bud Light during the March Madness playoffs. It found that while Bud Light has seen its market value decline by $15.7 billion, its competitors have seen their market value increase by $3.2 billion. Molson Coors has received the lion’s share of the advantage, adding about $2.2 billion in market value since the Dylan Mulvaney controversy began.
Further, the report goes on to quote Jared Dinges, beverage analyst at JPMorgan Chase, as saying that Bud Light sales are currently down 23% and will stay down significantly in the future. Writing about the “foreseeable future,” he said, “We believe there is a subset of American consumers who will not drink a Bud Light for the foreseeable future. We believe a 12% to 13% volume decline on an annualized basis would be a reasonable assumption.”
And Dinges added that AB InBev is doing far worse in the stock market than its peers, saying, “Shares (Of Anheuser-Busch) have underperformed EU Beer peers by 15% since the start of April. We believe this is due to U.S. uncertainty, as investor focus has shifted squarely to the potential impact from the Bud Light controversy.”
That is similar to what Anson Frericks, the former president of sales and distribution for Anheuser-Busch, told the Daily Wire. He said:
“I think that you’re going to see sales continue to be down because customers, it’s too easy for them to switch to other brands, and they’re seeing the impact of their results. If they want those customers back, they have an easy decision that they can make, which is saying, ‘We want Bud Light customers back, therefore Bud Light is not going to get involved with political issues moving forward.’ If not, they’re probably going to be in a worse position next year and their sales will continue to decline.”
He also told Fox News Digital that Bud Light is in for a world of hurt unless it apologizes to consumers furious about the Dylan Mulvaney partnership, saying:
“One thing that they haven’t done is say they made a mistake with this campaign and been clear about who they’re going to serve moving forward. Is it going to be their shareholders and their customers who want them just to create a Bud Light that’s apolitical, or are they going to be serving their stakeholders? These are the people that want BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, who are asking them to serve political organizations, activists.”
He also said that Bud Light made a major mistake by voluntarily leaving what was neutral cultural space, saying, “What does Bud Light stand for? Bud Light… was a brand that was never about politics. This is always about a brand that brought people together. It was about football, It was about sports. It was about music. It never got involved in political situations. That’s why it was enjoyed by both Republicans and Democrats equally, and that was what made the brand actually remarkable, is that it was remarkably unpolitical and this is just a political situation they should not have got themselves in.“
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