AB InBev’s Carlos Brito stays focused on things he can control
When asked earlier this year about the worsening economic slowdown in Brazil, one of AB InBev’s core markets, Carlos Brito, chief executive, was characteristically unflappable.
The group would not be distracted by macroeconomic trends, he told a local newspaper, instead it would concentrate on the things it could control and understand: “beer, soft drinks and energy drinks”.
Now he has something else to concentrate on: closing a deal with rival brewer SABMiller.
With the proposed takeover, the Brazilian born Mr Brito is pursuing the growth strategy he and the three billionaires who control AB InBev know best
Mr Brito began working with Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira in 1989, when they took over Brahma, a Brazilian local brewer. As they built the empire that eventually became AB InBev, Mr Brito’s role was to deliver and execute ever more impressive takeovers.
A no-nonsense executive who works in an open-plan office, he personally propagates AB InBev’s hard-driving culture of frugal, performance-orientated management.
He told the Financial Times earlier this year that the only interest outside of “the company” that he allowed himself was his family — and half an hour on a treadmill a day.
His management philosophy includes “zero-based marketing” in which budgets are reset to zero each year and every cost has to be justified afresh.
The group regularly sheds the “bottom 10 per cent” of underperformers in its workforce — he says they “always unhappy anyway and complaining”.
Before joining the beer group, Mr Brito worked for Shell Oil and Daimler Benz. He then persuaded Mr Lemann, a former Brazilian tennis champion who has also made his name in recent years for his takeovers of Burger King, Heinz and Kraft, to pay for an MBA at Stanford University.
Mr Brito worked his way up, becoming chief executive officer at InBev in 2005 and then leading the company through the dramatic $52bn takeover of US brewer Anheuser-Busch three years later.
The constant churn of dealmaking has left Mr Brito open to questions about whether the company can grow sales organically, particularly in the US. But the challenge of integrating SABMiller would put such concerns on the backburner.
As for what the integration process might bring, a summary of employee reviews on the employer rating site Glassdoor, could be revealing.
It shows that while 64 per cent of AB InBev employees approve of Mr Brito, only 48 per cent would recommend the company to a friend.
By contrast, at SABMiller, 88 per cent of employees approve of chief executive officer Alan Clark and 85 per cent would recommend the company to friends.
With millions of dollars in “synergies” looming from the proposed tie-up between the rival brewing groups, many of those employees recommending SABMiller to their friends today could be the ones looking for a new job tomorrow.