Two Brewing Giants Announce Plans to Merge

The Adolph Coors Company and Molson Inc. announced on Thursday (July 22, 2004) that they planned to merge the two companies. The purpose is to better compete with leading breweries such as Anheuser-Busch and Miller and the combination would rank them fifth in the world, as far as brewing volume. The new company would be called the Molson Coors Brewing Company and would have annual revenues of around $6 billion.

These two companies include brands such as Coors Original, Coors Light, Molson Canadian, Keystone, and Carling.

Both breweries have been family controlled for well over a century. Molson was founded in 1786, by John Molson and Coors was started in 1873, by Adolph Coors and Jacob Schueler. Descendants of these founders still control the voting stock, to this day.

The two companies believe that this merger could generate as much as $175 million per year in revenues and savings, by 2007. Still, the merged companies would trail far behind Anheuser-Busch, which is the nations leading beer company.

Coors is based in Golden, Colorado and has a second brewery in Memphis, Tennessee and a packaging plant in Virginia. Molson operates in Brazil and the United States, as well as Canada.

Leo Kiely, who is Coors chief executive, would become CEO and the chairman would be Eric Molson. Right now in the beer industry there is a big push to increase sales in foreign markets such as China and South America, since the U.S. market has been fairly flat.