Scottish and Newcastle sold off all its 1400 pubs and restaurants for £2.5bn in October to Spirit Amber, a consortium of private equity firms and Spirit Group, formerly the managed pub division of Punch Taverns. S&N has secured a seven year agreement to supply beer and cider to the Spirit estate. The sell off is said to allow S&N to concentrate on its UK and international brewing. The acquisition should be complete in November. Spirit Amber will then be the largest managed pubs business in Britain; the company would not say if they would be making any redundancies or selling off any of its pub estate which will now total over 2400.
Punch Taverns has also agreed to buy pub chain Pubmaster for £1.2bn, giving it an estate of nearly 8000 pubs. Punch has identified 200 pubs it is prepared to sell if there are concerns about competition. Firms such as Enterprise Inns - the biggest player in the sector - Punch Taverns, and Pubmaster now own more than a third of Britain's 60,000 pubs.
S&N has returned Theakston's brewery to the Theakston family. The brewery was taken over by northwest brewery Matthew Brown in 1984. S&N held a large share in the latter and finally succeeded in taking it over in 1987, closing the Workington and Blackburn breweries down. S&N will retain a share in Theakston and a commitment to promote Masham beers.
Industry analysts have shown that claims that cask beerıs share of the drinks market is dwindling are in fact distorted by over reliance on data from the Big 4 breweries. For these companies cask beer is a small part of their overall brewing interests. Scottish Courage (S&N) now owns Kronenbourg; Interbrewıs main brand is Stella Artois; Coors owns Carling, while Carlsberg Tetley brews Carlsberg lager in Northampton. ScotCo also owns John Smith's; with Tetley Bitter these are the two biggest ale brands, but both companies put most of their promotion into smoothflow as well as their lager brands. The advertising budget for John Smith's is £8m, while that for Carling is £13m. The biggest regional breweries such as Greene King, Shepherd Neame (which each spend £1m on promoting their beers) and Adnams, meanwhile report increases of up to 20% in sales of their leading beers. The outlook for real ale may therefore be better than the big brewers would have us believe.