Some smart finance folks went out and analyzed the beer market....discovering that there are roughly nine brands of beer in serious trouble from declining sales.
At the very bottom? Michelob. Even Old Milwaukee fell into the bottom five (in serious trouble).
The issue is that folks got around in the last decade...to drinking small brewery products, and finding a better taste. They lost interest in lousy beer.
What's Michelob to do? It's hard to say. You can't just hustle up and change your product overnight. And if you did change it....who is to say that you might upset the several hundred thousand folks who still consume it on occasion? You might lose more than gain on the deal.
The other curious thing that could be affecting sales is that import beers are catching on. A guy will sit at some pub, and accidentally try some Dutch beer, and suddenly find himself enjoying a better taste. Course, he's paying fifty percent more for the beer than he'd usually spend.
If I were going to take an educated guess on business operations here...I'd say that Michelob is likely to be bought out by someone in the next three years....at a low-end price. They will shut down operations for a month, and do up a new formula for the brew, and try to stage a come-back. A Chinese company? Yeah, I'd start betting on someone with cash and taking a risk like that.
