Brewing the Global Shift: Variegated Capitalism, Firm Strategies, and the Restructuring of the Southeast Asian Beer Industry

Abstract

Asia has become the world’s largest beer-consuming region, and Southeast Asia sees the strongest growth in demand. While the Asian beer industry attracts investments from global and regional capital and is undergoing significant restructuring, there has been little academic attention to these transformations. In this article, the focus is on Vietnam, Myanmar, and Thailand to analyse how global and regional lead firms adapt to changing competition and increasing demand in Southeast Asia. A combination of theorisations of variegated capitalism with embeddedness and symbolic value is used to explain firm strategies on accessing markets, managing risk and building stronger brands. This analysis demonstrates how regional and global production networks co-exist and interact, and how regional lead firms struggle to challenge global lead firms in accessing the Southeast Asian beer market. The findings show how regional and global capital to a limited extent dissociate from established networks when representing a reputational risk and illustrate how firms co-create the demand for beer. The analysis gives a strong account of the role of embeddedness for expanding market access, and how lead firms seek to strengthen their position through buying up local competition to profit from their established reputation, and territorial and societal embeddedness.