re: Anheuser-Busch to lay off hundreds of US corporate workers after Bud Light boycott

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Look it up. A-B InBev is the owner and the largest beer company in the world. Unless you want to give up major beer brands and drink only microbrew products, you are drinking from the same owners. Have a Modelo! We will show them! 400 jobs cut from making Bud Light and 1000 picked up to make Modelo. This is silly. The Bud Light campaign was dumb, but the boycott is equally dumb if you expect to punish A-B, which has been owned by InBev since 2008

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Modelo and Bud Light are owned by different companies in the U.S. as the result of a settlement agreement to a federal antitrust lawsuit.

In 2012, Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev announced a deal to acquire the remainder of Grupo Modelo, which owns the Modelo beer brand, that it did not already own. AB InBev previously owned more than a 50% stake in Grupo Modelo before the deal was announced.

If the deal went through as planned, AB InBev would have had full ownership and control of Modelo.

But the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed an antitrust lawsuit in January 2013, before the sale was completed. The lawsuit alleged that the nearly $20 billion purchase would “substantially lessen competition” in the U.S. beer market.

In April 2013, the Department of Justice reached a settlement with AB InBev and Grupo Modelo. The settlement agreement allowed the sale to go through if AB InBev sold Modelo’s entire U.S. business to the company Constellation Brands.

“Before the merger, there were two competitors – Modelo and ABI – and ABI owned a substantial stake in Modelo,” Bill Baer, former assistant attorney general for DOJ Antitrust Division, said in a press release announcing the settlement. “The companies’ proposed merger would have reduced those two competitors to one – ABI.”

Constellation Brands announced in June 2013 that it had completed its acquisition of Grupo Modelo’s U.S. beer business from AB InBev for about $4.8 billion. This means beer brands that were owned by Grupo Modelo, including Modelo, Corona and Pacifico, are now sold by Constellation Brands in the U.S.

AB InBev still owns the Modelo brand elsewhere in the world, but not in the United States. That means sales of Modelo in the U.S. go to Constellation Brands, not AB InBev.

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