Following up on yesterday’s news about Heineken’s purchase of the Drinks Union brewery group, I did some back-of-the-beermat math to try to explain why it matters if local breweries aren’t locally owned. Here’s what I came up with:
128 million dollars.
That’s a quick estimate for the amount of money that is leaving the Czech Republic every year, simply due to foreign ownership of local breweries. That is to say that the Czech Republic — a transitional economy just 18 years removed from communism — is sending countries like Holland — one of the wealthiest nations in the world — an amount akin to $128 million every year.
Here’s how I came up with that figure.
