Bud Light Boycott Cost Anheuser-Busch $1.4B in Lost Sales

Anheuser-Busch lost $1.4 billion in sales due to the Bud Light boycott, with its market share only very slowly inching back up, CNN reports.

The world’s largest brewer — and the purveyor of Bud Light, which had been America’s No. 1 beer for two decades — faced a customer firestorm over its partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The company’s tepid response to the backlash also angered the LGBTQ+ community.

Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD) reported record revenue Thursday but said its “full growth potential was constrained” by its U.S. business.

In North America, A-B InBev’s organic revenue plunged by $1.4 billion, since beer makes up most of the company’s revenue.

Mexican beer Modelo Especial dethroned Bud Light in May 2023, a month after the Mulvaney campaign debuted on April 1, 2023, as America’s best-selling beer. Sales data in August showed Modelo commanding a 8.4% share of total beer sales in the U.S., just slightly ahead of Bud Light’s 8.2%.

Between May and February, Bud Light recovered only 1.2 percentage points of its lost market share, CEO Michel Doukeris told investors on the earnings call Thursday. Bud Light’s market share recovery is only rising at a rate of 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points every three to four weeks, he said.

“It’s not at the fast pace we were expecting or that we’ve been working for,” Doukeris said. “But nevertheless, progress is in place.”

Some equity analysts, including Hargreaves Lansdown’s Aarin Chiekrie, were not impressed.

“In the U.S., (A-B InBev) performance remains very underwhelming with revenue down at double-digit rates as the group lost market share,” Chiekrie said Thursday.

A-B InBev’s market capitalization, which was $132.38 billion on March 28, 2023, right before the transgender fiasco, plummeted by $27.48 billion over the summer. At $132.38 billion now, it is still down, by $8.59 billion.