A former executive with Bud Light responded to billionaire Bill Gates’ foundation purchasing nearly $100 million shares in its parent company amid a months-long boycott.
“Bill Gates is definitely making a mistake,” former Anheuser-Busch executive Anson Frericks told Fox Business this week. “Earlier this year, he already made a $900 million mistake when he invested into one of Anheuser-Busch’s largest rivals, Heineken. He did that earlier this year. And since that investment, Heineken’s down about 10 percent, whereas the broader markets are up 10 percent.”
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which Mr. Gates helped co-found, purchased about 1.7 million shares of Anheuser-Busch InBev, which owns Bud Light, for about $95 million in the last quarter, according to a recent regulatory filing. He has not issued a public comment about the purchase.
“So if I was looking for advice on investing to software companies, tech companies, I might go to Bill Gates. But if you’re looking at the beer industry, he doesn’t have a great track record of investing in winners at this point,” Mr. Frericks, who has been critical of Bud Light, said on Wednesday.
Anheuser-Busch’s American division reported about a 10 percent decline in profits in the second quarter due to a boycott that was initiated in April after Bud Light made a promotional package for a transgender activist. Conservatives, after learning of the news, were swift to call for action against Bud Light, which also lost its top spot to Modelo Especial earlier this year.
Sales of Bud Light have dropped year-over-year in many consecutive weeks. As of Aug. 19, sales volumes of Bud Light at off-premise locations like grocery stores fell by 20.1 percent so far this year, as compared to the same period last year, according to Nielsen IQ sales data via Bump Williams Consulting.
“For the company’s sake, they’d probably be better off [with] maybe somebody who is more of, kind of the everyman type of person, maybe like a Rob Gronkowski or somebody like that was investing into Anheuser-Busch, not necessarily somebody like Bill Gates. That doesn’t really resonate with sort of that common man that everyday Bud Light beer drinker,” Mr. Frericks said.
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