The Good and The Bad of the InBev Anheuser-Bush Deal

By now you may have already heard that InBev will be buying Anheuser-Bush for $52 billion to create the largest brewing company in the world. Whether this is good or bad largely depends on your point of view. As much as I don't like drinking A/B beverages (or SABMiller or Molson-Coors), I am disappointed to see the sale. I think this leaves Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams), Yuengling, and Sierra Nevada as the largest American-owned breweries.

Good:
-For the A/B shareholders: They'll be making a tidy profit by the sale. Hopefully one of the index mutual funds I own will too.
-For microbreweries: Many people that traditionally drank A/B beer because it was an American owned/operated/located company. Hopefully, those people may now say to themselves "Why should I drink a beer that supports a foreign company when I could drink a beer made by a locally owned & operated microbrewery?" (There's some false logic in there, which I'll get to later.)
-For A/B beer: Just maybe they might tinker with the existing formulas for the better, or more broadly market some of the “micro-brewed” beer that they already produce.

Bad:
For Americans in general:
-Another homegrown business sold to a foreign company. The breweries will stay, but the profits go to Europe.
-Jobs will probably be cut to some degree, although A/B had proposed a list of cost-cutting measures before being sold.
-The export market: Lots of folks overseas drink A/B beer as it is an import to them, just as we in the States drink beer from other countries. Some InBev whiz bean counter will say “ Why should we import Bud to Europe when we can just make it here and save on the shipping costs?” The “import” will then just be another domestic and sales might decline.