Molson, Canada's largest brewery, is to buy the Bavaria beer brand and 5 bottling plants from Brazil's Companhia de Bebidas das Americas (Ambev) for as much as US$211m, the two companies said yesterday, the Financial Times reported. The Brazilian beer market has annual sales of about 88m hectolitres, 4.5 times the size of the Canadian beer market. With annual growth rates of 4.5 per cent, Brazil is set to outgrow Germany to become the world's third-largest market. Brazil's anti-trust agency (Cade) had ordered the sale of Bavaria as a condition for its approval in March of the merger between Brahma and Antartica, the two largest brewers, to form Ambev. Molson is one of Canada's leading brewers with annual sales of more than $2bn.
