Abstract

The European brewing industry has experienced considerable development related to the changes of beer production volume. These trends are generalised by Vernon’s concept of product life-cycle that is already anchored in the economic geography. The differences of its growth, maturity and decline stages are important to study transnational corporations’ (TNC) strategies within the combination of different stages of all European markets. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to verify how the TNCs’ behaviour in individual countries depends on the stages of their beer markets. In the beer life-cycle perspective, Europe can be divided into several regions with a similar stage of development. Expected behaviour of brewing TNCs in the dependence of the countries’ stage in the beer life-cycle have been proved in the large extent. Some interesting differences were, however, also found. The paper finally pointed on the rising beer life-cycle of microbreweries, which could replace the life-cycle of traditional breweries.

中文翻译：

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全球啤酒市场的赢家和输家：从产品生命周期的角度看欧洲竞争

摘要

欧洲啤酒工业在啤酒产量变化方面经历了可观的发展。这些趋势通过弗农的产品生命周期概念得到了概括，该概念已经在经济地理学中扎根。它的成长，成熟和衰退阶段的差异对于研究跨国公司在所有欧洲市场的不同阶段中的战略至关重要。因此，本文的目的是验证跨国公司在各个国家的行为如何取决于其啤酒市场的阶段。从啤酒生命周期的角度来看，欧洲可以分为几个发展阶段相似的地区。很大程度上证明了跨国公司在啤酒生命周期中对啤酒酿造跨国公司的期望行为。但是，还发现了一些有趣的差异。该论文最后指出，微型啤酒厂的啤酒生命周期不断增加，这可以取代传统啤酒厂的生命周期。