Well, Thursday brought a bit of a hit to Brazil’s beverage behemoth, Ambev. It seems their Q2 net profit took a tumble, down by a whopping 15.2%, and what’s more, it fell shy of the market guesstimates. Now isn’t that something?
You see, this brewing titan, a proud offspring of Belgium’s Anheuser-Busch InBev, managed to chalk up a profit of 2.60 billion reais, which is around $540.34 million, give or take. But here’s the catch, it didn’t quite reach the average 2.68 billion reais estimate. The analysts at Refinitiv were certainly scratching their heads, weren’t they?
But it wasn’t all gloomy, as their revenue actually climbed by 20% compared to the same quarter last year, hitting 18.9 billion reais. Though, it seemed the bar was set higher, as it didn’t match the 19.80 billion reais consensus. Talk about tough luck!
Things did look up slightly with EBITDA, the financial lingo for Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation, and Amortization. It actually showed some growth across all business sections, even with a 2.2% dip in sales volume. CEO Jean Jereissati optimistically commented, “Despite the roller-coaster ride, our top-line performance has shown resilience and cost pressures are on a downward trend, which is definitely contributing to our bottom-line growth.”
As they say, every cloud has a silver lining, right? Despite beer volume dropping by 2.5% in Brazil, thanks to a decrease in industry-wide beer and soft drink sales, Ambev continues to take the lead in commercial momentum.
It seems there are some ups and downs in Central America and the Caribbean as well. There’s been an overall “improvement” sequence, even though volumes have slipped by 2.8%. Panama seems to be the main culprit here, and the Dominican Republic isn’t far behind.
Keeping its chin up, Ambev remains committed to “steady and ongoing improvement” in the areas of growth and profitability. There’s a bit of unpredictability in many of their markets, but hey, who isn’t dealing with that these days?
Just for the record, Ambev is the fourth-largest company in Brazil, ranking behind Petrobras, Vale, and Itau. Quite an achievement, don’t you think?
(By the way, just to help you with your conversion, $1 equals 4.8118 reais. A little trivia never hurt anyone, right?)
