Combined revenues of its three global brands; Budweiser, Stella Artois and Corona grew by 9.0% for FY18 and 13.1% for the same period outside of their respective home markets.
Management comments in the report released by the company, said: “Our focus this year was to continue to drive the organic growth of our business while deleveraging towards our optimal capital structure.
"Today we are a stronger, more diversified company applying our learnings across our global business. While there is more work to be done, we are confident in our strategy and plans to grow our business by creating value from seed to sip and delivering sustainable top and bottom line growth in 2019 and beyond.”
Despite the overall growth, AB InBev struggled with certain markets including Brazil, South Africa and Argentina.
The report stated: “Top and bottom line performances were below our expectations in Argentina, Brazil and South Africa, largely as a result of a weak macroeconomic environment putting pressure on the consumer in all three markets. Additionally, in South Africa we were adversely affected by out of stocks, unexpected tax increases and segment mix shift.
“Unfavorable currency volatility in emerging markets impacted our cash flows and slowed our anticipated deleveraging path. As a result, we proactively rebased our dividend payout by 50% in October to accelerate deleveraging in line with our capital allocation priorities.”
On top of its global brands, AB InBev also owns Brahma, Castle Lager, Goose Island, Becks, Hoegaarden, Leffe among others.
