Belgium: John Brock, the world’s biggest beer boss in an interview

Expert globaliser John Brock has made of Inbev the world’s largest brewer. And he says in the interview given to The Sunday Time on October 16 that more megadeals could be in the pipeline

The world’s biggest beer boss is not what you expect. Pallid, bald and slight in frame, John Brock is a modest American engineer who has spent two-thirds of his career at Cadbury Schweppes. So what’s he doing at Inbev the Belgian-Brazilian beer giant? “Well,” he says slowly in his southern drawl, “the things you need to have for success are all the same. It’s about focusing on brands and consumers and having the right people.”

He blinks nervelessly behind steel-rimmed glasses. Brock, sitting at a meeting table in his office opposite the giant Stella Artois brewery in Leuven, Belgium, is not going to sell himself hard. His passion outside work is scuba diving, and at times it feels as if he is just swimming through our conversation, waiting to see what he will harpoon first.

But at Cadbury Schweppes, where he rose to become chief operating officer, he had a reputation as an expert globaliser and inexhaustible traveller. Now at Inbev, the monster beer group he put together by merging Belgium’s Interbrew with Brazil’s Ambev in 2004, he is two years into his first chief executive job, with the chance to show that his thought-out approach can really work.

So far, so good. Inbev announced sparkling interim figures for the first half of 2005, and is currently rolling out the Brazilian beer Brahma through its key markets, where it can join the group’s other global superstars Beck’s and Stella. And the potentially tricky relations between two groups of controlling family shareholders, Belgian and Brazilian, appear to be holding firm.

But don’t expect Brock to get over-excited about running the world’s biggest beer producer — Inbev takes about 14% of the global market compared with SAB Miller’s 13% and Anheuser-Busch’s 12%. Being the biggest, he says coolly, is only a partial advantage.

“As I often say, it’s not totally irrelevant but it’s broadly irrelevant. What’s important is the position we have in any given market, and what we are targeting is the No1 or No2 position in every big market round the world.”

On that criterion, he is not doing too badly either. Inbev’s premium trio — Stella, Beck’s and Brahma — and a host of regional brands have pushed the company into top-two slots in 21 markets round the world. Next Inbev wants to outstrip its rivals for profitability — the American giant Anheuser-Busch holds that crown. Brock is promising a 30% profit margin by 2007. The figures show he is on course. “You will have to ask Anheuser how it is doing,” he smiles, “but the American market is not a great place to be at the moment, unless you are at the premium end.”

Polite but rarely effusive, Brock, 57, exudes rational logic. When Andrew Davidson, the newspaper reporter asks what he found when he joined Interbrew in 2003, before the merger, he makes a small noise of appreciation — as if to say, “Good point” — and launches forth.

“It was fascinating, good brands, great people but it had fallen true to its previous description, ‘the world’s local brewer’ — we don’t use that tagline any more. It was appropriate at the time because it had grown from No17 to No3 in the world through a series of acquisitions. But it was not really focusing on global strategies, resource allocation, the co-ordination of marketing programmes, and global ways of making decisions. It was left up to local businesses to do their own thing.”

That was why Brock, with 20 years at Cadbury Schweppes and 13 before that at Procter & Gamble, was hired. He came with a wealth of experience as a global organiser — though not, interestingly, as a marketer. He has always left that to others.

Former colleagues say he made a good switch. “John is goal-orientated, he likes huge challenges and he knows how to make complex messages simple,” says Bob Stack, Cadbury Schweppes’s head of human resources. “He also has real knowledge of the international beverage industry from Cadbury’s soft-drinks side.” His timing was good too. Interbrew was crying out for his kind of globalising expertise — easy improvements could be made from re-organising its growing collection of local outfits. And the top slot at Cadbury Schweppes, taken by fellow American Todd Stitzer, was not going to be his.

Brock says Interbrew’s subsequent leap in size — turnover in 2004 topped €8.5 billion (£5.8 billion), only fractionally behind Cadbury Schweppes — was not on the cards when he first joined.

“I was presented with the concept of merger by our principal shareholder. He said we could be part of a transaction with the Brazilians and asked if we could put a deal together.”

Did he have a choice? He nods. “The deal almost fell apart three times. It had to create value for everyone if it was to work. In the end it did work.” Now, he says, the integration period is almost at an end. He has a top team of 13 reporting to him, of which four are South American. Pessimists who say mergers often destroy shareholder value will be proved wrong, he says.

“Our share price is one reasonable indication that the merger is working. Our volume is continuing to grow at two to three times the industry average, and we have two-thirds of our business in developing markets, which right now is a good place to be as they are growing all the time.”

Those who have worked with him say the sheer scale of integration won’t frighten him. “John is a great collaborator. He always finds a way of getting people to work together,” says Andrew Coslett, chief executive of InterContinental Hotels, and an old Cadbury Schweppes colleague. “Just look at how Cadbury Schweppes integrated the Texas-based soft drink Dr Pepper. John never runs out of steam.”

That sense of energetic resolve and no surprises has stuck with Brock throughout a career that started on the technical side of Procter & Gamble. Born in Mississippi to a family without wealth — his father worked in maintenance, his mother was a school-teacher and church organist — Brock was a boy scientist who loved making rockets, but wanted to make money more.

He learnt piano from his mother, met his future wife in church (she was 11, he was 12), and treats much of business as an extension of homely common sense. The biggest surprise, perhaps, is that he didn’t go into the oil or chemical industries, like many engineers from the Deep South. “I have just always loved the consumer interaction side of things,” he says.

He will need more than good people skills, though, if Inbev is going to prosper in the highly competitive European market. In Britain, Inbev lacks a lower-strength mass-market brand to position alongside Stella, which rivals say is increasingly being sold at discount prices by supermarkets. That undermines years of careful brand positioning. Brock shrugs when the Times reporter points this out. “It’s not our choice that Stella is sold cheaply. It’s such an important brand in the off-trade that retailers decide on their own to discount it, and if they choose to do that, we can’t stop them.”

Isn’t he short of a mass-market brand here? “Yeah, we tried to buy Carling years ago but the UK authorities said no. We have to be very careful before we try again.”

Instead, across Europe, he wants more innovation, lower costs, better economies of scale. Could there be more consolidation among global brewers? “Sure, it could happen. Whether it will, I don’t know. But the global beer market is still fairly unconsolidated — the top five brewers take about 50%. Compare that with soft drinks. Coke and Pepsi and Cadbury Schweppes have 80%.”

That big picture is more likely to preoccupy Brock than the detail of individual markets. It is how he operates: always optimistic, showing little emotion, an oasis of calm among bustling managers. And when not working? “I do a couple of dive trips a year — all three of my kids dive — and I enjoy running and exercising in my gym. Otherwise I play the piano.”

Classical or boogie-woogie? He smiles. “Ah play it all.” Really? Brock seems too buttoned-up to be rolling the night away with Fats Domino but old colleagues say he can, and it is always a wow with customers.

You would just never guess it on meeting him. Later, during the picture session in his vast brewery across the road, he meekly defers to his corporate-communications chief who constantly vetoes camera set-ups that he had seemed perfectly happy with. Who’s the boss? “That’s typical John,” says one friend when I recount the story. “He doesn’t waste his time on the small stuff. He will have his brain on the bigger ideas.”

Vital statistics

Born: May 6, 1948

Marital status: married, with three children
School: Moss Point High School, Mississippi
University: Georgia Institute of Technology
First job: project engineer, Procter & Gamble
Salary package: €2m (£1.4m)
Homes: Tervuren in Belgium, Connecticut and Maryland
Car: grey Mercedes 500
Favourite book: To Kill A Mockingbird
Song: Unchained Melody
Film: Gone With The Wind
Gadget: Trio
Interests: diving, running, piano


John Brock's working day: The Inbev chief executive wakes at his home in Tervuren outside Brussels at 6am. “That’s assuming I am at home,” says John Brock. “I am travelling two-thirds of the time. By definition I don’t have an average working day in Belgium.” He breakfasts on yogurt and fruit, works out in his gym at home, then drives to the office by 7.30am.

He goes through his e-mails and starts meetings after 8.30am. He finishes at 7pm. “I don’t programme time on my own for thinking. I let it happen when it can.” He will take lunch in a meeting, or chat to staff in the canteen. He will also attend business dinners.

He hasn’t picked up French or Flemish despite living in Belgium for three years. “I can order from a menu,” he says, “and everyone in the company speaks English.”

Working space: John Brock works from a rectangular corner office on the fourth floor of Inbev’s new headquarters on the outskirts of the university town of Leuven, Belgium. The building, red-brick with long vertical windows, overlooks the Stella Artois brewery — “the best view in the world,” says Brock. Every floor is predominantly open-plan and decorated in minimalist style using concrete and stone, and pale grey suede furniture. “The whole idea is to keep it simple.”

Brock’s room is no more than 20ft long and has a desk at one end, a long flat-screen television on the wall alongside, and a large meeting table that can be lowered electronically to become a coffee table. A poster of Inbev’s corporate values hangs on one wall. Shelves carry beer mementos and the odd bottle. “I drink at least one beer every day,” says Brock.

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