Andrea Felsted, Columnist

No One Wants to Pay Budweiser’s $10 Billion Bar Tab

Without an Asian IPO, it's hard to get very excited about AB InBev. Its debt-cutting will be slow and its prospects for M&A are diminished.

July 15, 2019 at 10:30 AM UTC

By Andrea Felsted

Andrea Felsted is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering consumer goods and the retail industry. Previously, she was a reporter for the Financial Times.

No can do.
Photographer: Douglas Graham/CQ-Roll Call Group

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For a company that built its beer-brewing empire on the back of swashbuckling deals, the future for Anheuser-Busch InBev SA looks pretty unexciting.

Friday’s decision by the Belgian giant to pull an initial public offering of its Asian unit, which might have raised as much as $10 billion, means it has given up the chance to pay down its $100 billion of debt faster. Perhaps more important, the brewer has lost a valuable source of funding for acquisitions in Asia.