The Nature of Consolidation

Consolidation is happening much faster in the brewer/importer tier and the retailer tier than the wholesaler tier today, and it makes one wonder if we are to see more distributor consolidation again as we did in the late 1990s. Consultant Joe Thompson believes so, as he points out that the compelling economics of scale of mega-wholesalers points to more big deals. But in the meantime, with Molson Coors, HUSA/FEMSA, A-B/Modelo, InBev/Labatt/Becks/Bass, and all the others, we have a distributor network