Japan: Asahi Breweries. Ltd., which makes Japan's best-selling Super Dry Beer, expects record profit in the current year and may raise its dividend from 2005, Shigeo Fukuchi, company chairman, said, according to Bloomberg. “We will surely exceed our full-year profit target,'' Fukuchi said during an interview for Bloomberg Television on September 16.

The company's profit is nearly six times higher than in 1999, and its August forecast for the year ending Dec. 31 was for 28 billion yen profit, up 7.7 percent from an earlier forecast of 26 billion yen, on sales of 1.44 trillion yen. “The company, especially the beverage segment, is becoming more profitable,'' Fukuchi said. The company's profit margin, which divides profit by sales to measure profitability, grew almost six times to 1.7 in the past five years.

Asahi Breweries said in August that it may generate 200 billion yen ($1.8 billion) in cash flow over the next three years from this year, and Fukuchi said the money will be used on expansion and higher dividend payments for the year ending December 2005 and again in 2006. The current dividend is 15 yen a share.

“My company said earlier we will spend 60 billion yen on dividend payments over three years starting this year, and that plan has not changed much since then,'' Fukuchi said. Taizo Demura at Morgan Stanley Japan Ltd. is among analysts who said Asahi Breweries is likely to spend 20 billion yen a year from 2004 to pay. “We predicted that the company will pay 15 yen full-year dividend for the three years starting this year, but now we estimate that it will pay 17 yen next year and 20 yen in the year ending December 2006,'' Demura said in a report on Asahi Breweries.

Demura raised his rating of the company to overweight from equal-weight earlier.

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