Africa: Malt demand forecast to keep growing with needs covered mostly by Western Europe maltsters

From a global perspective, Africa reporesents 7.74% of the brewing total, and within that overall volume the toop 10 countries represent 68.9% of the regions beer production, RMI Analytics said in their early September report.

It is the top 10 countries that lead the region’s optimistic forecast for future beer volume growth, the analysts said. For the period 2020-2027, including the Covid pandemic and subsequent recovery, the African region leads the world in total beer volume growth, wih a very slight advantage over South America.

The African continent is underweighted in terms of malting capacity at 2% as compared to beer production at nearly 8% globally. This leaves the region heavily dependent upon malt imports, which predominantly originate from Western Europe malting facilities, where the largest global presence of malting capacity exists. There is a surplus of malting capacity in Western Europe but much of it is not in prime export cities.

As Africa’s malt demand grows, it is expected Europe’s malt footprint will need to expand accordingly, the RMI analysts believe.

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