As we move into 2013 one can’t help but wonder what the future holds for the UK market – in general, of course, but if I can be specific, then what it holds for the Category C sector… what I still insist on calling AWPs.
We have 130,000 of them in the UK, made up of about 55,000 in pubs, around 30,000 in AGCs and another 45,000 in an assortment of other locations.
And at the BACTA Convention we heard that the total sales into the UK market this year has been 12,000.
Either everyone has stopped re-investing in their businesses and therefore the industry in the UK is in crisis, or something else is happening.
To me, the Category C market was always one which sold 60,000 units in a good year, 40,000 in a bad year and I can remember writing in a year of 35,000 sales that we were in a mess. Now it’s 12,000? And if 50,000 of the existing estate is in pubs, then the retailers are probably using an injection rate of around two per cent! What happened to the golden rule that incomes were maintained only by regular game-changes?
So why are the Austrians and Germans buying up the UK market? To answer my own question with the response of a German friend: “The UK business might be mature, but it is stable – nowhere else is…”. And with both of the major AWP (sorry, Category C) manufacturers in the same hands, do we at least have one delicious vision: The brewery machine controllers (sorry, retailers) will now be told what they can have and what they will pay for it, instead of the other way around.
Oh, how the worm has turned.
