Actual finance blog

Bankrupt U.S. media group Tribune Co could emerge from bankruptcy in the autumn without a major overhaul of its present top management, the New York Times said, citing people briefed on the restructuring plans.

The status of Tribune’s chief executive Sam Zell is however not clear, the paper said.

People close to the talks told the paper that major creditors have not made it clear whether they want Zell to leave the company or work in another capacity. Zell’s plans are also unclear, the paper said.

A Tribune spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment by Reuters.

The publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times filed for bankruptcy in December 2008 after going private in a deal led by Zell that resulted in the company having $13 billion in debt.

Last week, Tribune bondholders asked a bankruptcy judge to investigate the 2007 buyout by Zell, saying it caused the company’s demise, court documents showed.

(Reporting by Ajay Kamalakaran in Bangalore; Editing by Lincoln Feast)

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When General Motors executives stopped in St. Louis last fall to meet with auto dealers, the economy was entering a free fall.

"We were right in the middle of the meltdown when we were out doing this. We just didn’t know it," said Mark LaNeve, GM vice president for sales. "I mean we thought it was a bad couple of weeks. And as it turned out, the vehicle market was collapsing, the stock market was collapsing, the banking sector (too)."

Last week, LaNeve, CEO Fritz Henderson and other GM executives met with Midwestern auto dealers in downtown St. Louis for the first time since emerging from bankruptcy last month. The automaker is going forward with fewer brands, fewer vehicle "nameplates" and, ultimately, fewer dealerships.

The launch of the nine-city dealer tour comes at a pivotal time for the American automaker. The deep recession has hurt auto sales, and consumers have been lukewarm to some of its vehicle brands.

Henderson called last week’s meeting a good opportunity to reconnect with GM dealers and get people "charged up about winning in the marketplace." To do so, the new, smaller GM has to win back the hearts and minds of U.S. consumers, he added.

"For those people who own our vehicles today, and are happy with them, we want to make sure we make them even happier," Henderson said after the meeting. "And for those that don’t want to consider us, we want to compete and get back on their consideration list."

Several area dealers were upbeat about what they heard and the prospects for the future. The fact that Henderson attended this year’s meeting was further evidence that "they mean business; that they’re serious," said attendee Greg Flotte, general manager of Don Brown Chevrolet in St. Louis.

Flotte said there already had been some signs that it wasn’t business as usual at the new GM. When the federal government was slow to reimburse dealers on Cash for Clunkers rebates, GM came up within 48 hours with a loan program to help dealers who had not been paid car loan interest rates.

"That would not have happened under the old General Motors," Flotte said. "To have that happen that quickly and take action that was effective was something that I was very, very impressed with."

General Motors plans to put more marketing muscle behind fewer vehicle models within its core brands — Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac and GMC, LaNeve said. "We’re going to very aggressively get our story told. That’ll kind of start in September."

Dealers said they welcomed that focused approach to advertising.

LaNeve said reducing the number of dealerships proved "an enormously emotional, painful process." The company plans to shed about 1,200 dealers nationwide under its reorganization, but GM officials would not disclose how many are in the St. Louis region or elsewhere.

It also plans to sell off Hummer, Saturn and Saab, and discontinue the Pontiac brand.

"So we’ll have a 24, 25 percent reduction in the overall number of dealers, which we did to strengthen the dealers," he said. "We’ve got to have dealers that can compete."

The weakened economy has hurt demand for GM’s full-size GMC Savana and Chevrolet Express vans built at the company’s Wentzville plant, where GM eliminated one of two production shifts. But Henderson said that the van remained an important product and that Wentzville was "the only place where we build that van."

One analyst said GM’s campaign for the hearts and minds of consumers, dealers and auto enthusiasts was not unlike a political campaign.

"A lot of it, at the end of the day, is to get votes," said Erich Merkle, president of Autoconomy in Grand Rapids, Mich. "GM wants to be elected. They want to be perceived as a cutting-edge, high-quality company."

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Even though financial stocks have rallied nearly 70 percent since the end of March, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued another grim quarterly report Thursday on the health of the nation’s banks.

The agency reported that the banking industry lost $3.7 billion in the second quarter amid a surge in bad loans made to home builders, commercial real estate developers and small and midsize businesses. Its deposit insurance fund dropped 20 percent, to $10.4 billion, its lowest level in nearly 16 years. And the number of "problem banks" increased to 416, from 305 in the first quarter, and is expected to remain high.

Indeed, federal officials warned that while the economy and financial markets were showing signs of improvement, the banking sector was unlikely to rebound soon.

"These credit problems will at least outlast the recession by a couple of quarters," said Sheila Bair, the FDIC chairwoman. "Cleaning up balance sheets is a painful process that does take time, but it is absolutely necessary to the industry’s sustained profitability."

The dismal report shows how the industry’s problems have spread. A handful of the biggest banks were among the first to suffer big losses nearly two years ago from complex mortgage assets and other securities, but have posted strong profits from trading over the last two quarters.

Still most of the nation’s 8,195 banks primarily make their money from lending to consumers and businesses. They are now facing increased pressure from soaring loan losses and higher deposit insurance costs as the FDIC seeks to shore up the industry fund. Analysts say a recovery will not be in sight until the job market and broader economy stabilize.

So far, 81 banks have failed this year, including 45 in the second quarter. That, in turn, has put enormous stress on the government’s deposit insurance fund, which is supported by fees charged to the banks regulated by the FDIC. Its second-quarter reserve of $10.4 billion compares with $45.2 billion a year earlier.

The bulk of the decline comes from additional money that the agency has set aside to cover the cost of bank failures, and Bair said the fund had ample resources to make sure insured depositors would not lose money. But the levels are so low that FDIC officials said Thursday that they would consider imposing a special assessment on the banks, on top of elevated insurance fees, toward the end of the third quarter.

Through similar actions, it added about $9.1 billion to the fund in the second quarter.

Bair said she did not anticipate having to immediately tap an emergency credit line run by the Treasury Department, although she did not rule it out. "I never say never," she said. The FDIC quarterly report came after a similar release by the Office of Thrift Supervision on Wednesday that showed savings and loan associations eked out a $4 million profit, the first time the sector posted positive results since the fall of 2007. Still, the number of "problem thrifts" rose to 40, up from 17 a year earlier.

The savings and loan industry "is not out of the woods yet," said John Bowman, the acting director of the Office of Thrift Supervision. "Despite some encouraging signs, the industry’s performance remained uneven."

Federal banking regulators are bracing for hundreds of small and medium-size banks to collapse in the coming months even though the economy has shown early signs of a recovery. Banks are burdened with billions of dollars of bad loans made over the last few years and are continuing to set aside more money to cover losses. In fact, credit loss rates reached a record high in the second quarter.

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An empty 400,000-square-foot warehouse built two years ago near Lambert-St. Louis International Airport is scheduled to go into foreclosure Thursday.

Loan documents filed with St. Louis County in December 2007 show that two units of ING bank loaned $16.85 million to Hazelwood Bulk Building LLC, controlled by McEagle Properties.

But negotiations are under way with the project’s lender to rework the $16.85 million loan and cancel the foreclosure, Chris McKee, president of McEagle, said Tuesday. "There’s a reasonably good chance it won’t go to foreclosure," he said.

The building, marketed as the Hazelwood Logistics Center, is within a 151-acre development site. Only the warehouse building is involved in the foreclosure action. Commercial broker CB Richard Ellis is handling the leasing for the entire site, which is bounded by Lindbergh Boulevard, Phantom Drive and Missouri Bottom Road.

The area is within the region’s Foreign Trade Zone, which the Commerce Department expanded this year by more than 825 acres. County officials said the expansion boosts plans to develop a Chinese air cargo hub around Lambert.

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Japan’s exports slipped in July as annual drops in exports to the United States and China accelerated, in a sign that the impact of stimulus measures in major economies worldwide may be starting to wane.

Exports to the United States have lagged improvements in shipments to Asia as the world’s largest economy struggles to pick up steam, while the yen’s rise against the dollar also played a part.

But exports to the fast-growing Chinese economy also fell at a faster annual pace as a surge in state spending and loan growth failed to mask tepid domestic demand there.

The annual fall was largely in line with market expectations, but in another sign of slowing momentum, Japan’s exports fell from the previous month for the first time in two months.

Some overseas stimulus programs have already expired, and economists warn that as such fiscal support runs its course, exports could slow while weak labor markets in the United States and Europe mean consumers won’t be able to pick up the slack.

In a sign demand within Japan isn’t strong either, prices for business-to-business services marked a record annual fall for the third straight month in July, as deflation deepens.

“Falls in exports have been moderating in recent months on companies’ restocking efforts and government stimulus worldwide. But the July datas indicate that the recovery momentum is losing steam,” said Seiji Shiraishi, chief economist at HSBC Securities.

“It is questionable whether exports will continue to recover once the stimulus effect runs out because global final demand may not turn up fully.”

On a seasonally adjusted basis, exports fell 1.3 percent in July from June, trade data showed on Wednesday, the first drop in two months.

Compared with a year earlier, Japan’s exports fell 36.5 percent in July. That was slightly less than the median forecast for a 38.6 percent fall in July, but faster than the 35.7 percent annual decline in June.

Exports fell at a faster annual rate due to slower shipments of cars to the Middle East, Russia and the United States. Exports of steel and semiconductors to Asia also saw faster annual falls.

In July, the yen was 12.4 percent higher against the dollar than in the same month last year, which also weighed on Japan’s exports, the data showed.

Altogether, Japan logged a trade surplus of 380.2 billion yen ($4 billion) in July, just short of the median estimate for a 385.0 billion yen surplus.

Exports of steel to China were weak, said Junko Nishioka, chief Japan strategist at RBS Securities, raising worries about a China-driven recovery scenario. Shipments of steel to China declined 29 percent in July from a year earlier, faster than the 19.1 percent annual decline in the previous month.

“I think material exports to China will garner more attention in coming months,” she said. 

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They sell quirky beers with names such as "Buffalo Drool" and "Wheach," a peach-wheat combo. You won’t see their commercials on television, because they do their marketing through fish fries and Facebook, e-mails and street festivals. Their staffers might wear kilts from time to time.

They are Missouri’s craft brewers, independent makers of small-batch beers. In this recession, they are proving they have something more than quirkiness: Staying power.

Craft brewers across the St. Louis region say their business is proving surprisingly resilient as the economy slices into the hide of other industries. Times are difficult, but craft brewers are growing or holding steady.

Good beer, good food and strong connections to the local area are essential.

"I don’t think our crowd has pulled back," said Dushan Manjencich, owner of Buffalo Brewing in midtown St. Louis. The brewpub, which opened in March 2008 on St. Patrick’s Day, is apparently benefiting from the revitalization of the Olive Boulevard corridor. Sales are up this year by 10 to 15 percent, Manjencich said.

Craft brewers — including beer-

brewing restaurants called brewpubs, microbreweries and regional breweries that send beer across hundreds of miles — sold 4.2 million barrels of beer nationwide in the year’s first half, up from 4 million in the same period last year, according to the Colorado-based Brewers Association.

With the overall U.S. beer industry basically flat, craft brewers will take that pace of growth, even if it’s slower than before.

Dollar sales from craft brewers increased 9 percent in the first half of 2009, compared with 11 percent growth in the same period in 2008. Measured in liquid, sales rose 5 percent this year, compared with 6.5 percent growth last year.

"Real good, considering," said Paul Gatza, director of the Brewers Association. "A lot of companies are still growing and expanding distribution."

O’Fallon Brewery in O’Fallon, Mo., is certainly looking for new territories. The company, which saw its beer sales to Missouri wholesalers rise 4.7 percent through June, is expanding distribution into Kansas and is also eyeing other states as far away as Florida.

"It’s pretty much, putting the blinders on and working the plan and not really doing anything different during the recession," said co-founder Tony Caradonna. "People are still coming to the party."

In Missouri, retail sales of craft beers brewed in the state were up nearly 18 percent, according to Nielsen. That far outpaced overall beer sales.

"Consumers are looking to buy locally," said Nick Lake, vice president at Nielsen Co. Drinkers of craft beers "like variety, and they certainly like ‘local,’ and they like to support the underdog."

Craft brands are slowly gaining space on store shelves and restaurant menus, Gatza said.

One reason is that some drinkers are switching from wine and distilled spirits to cheaper beer when they’re at a restaurant, bar or nightclub. In a Nielsen survey released in May, nearly a quarter of wine consumers reported choosing less expensive drinks.

Perhaps most importantly for craft brewers, support from wholesalers and retailers is growing, thanks to the hefty profits that stores and distributors can earn from selling pricey craft beer.

Craft beers represent 3.2 percent of the U.S. beer industry’s case sales and 5.2 percent of dollar sales, according to Nielsen.

Several craft brewers and beer-focused restaurateurs say they have not had to cut prices to attract drinkers. Prices for craft beers have risen more than 4 percent this year — an increase of $1.44 per case in supermarkets — according to Information Resources Inc.

In this economy, that’s "remarkable," said Dan Wandel, senior vice president at IRI. "The craft beer segment has a lot of momentum."

At St. Louis Brewery, the makers of Schlafly beer are watching sales rise in Missouri and across the Mississippi River in Illinois. The company’s beer sales to wholesalers in Missouri and Illinois were up more than 30 percent in the year’s first half.

For St. Louis Brewery — which operates the Tap Room in downtown St. Louis and the Bottleworks in Maplewood — the spike in beer sales in stores across the metro area has helped compensate for flat restaurant sales. The company is in the middle of a renovation at Bottleworks that will allow it to brew thousands of additional barrels of beer per year.

"We’re now a brewery with a restaurant, instead of a restaurant with a brewery," said Dan Kopman, chief operating officer.

That might be a good thing, because bars and restaurants are weathering tough times.

At Morgan Street Brewery on Laclede’s Landing, co-founder Steve Owings said overall business was flat. The brewpub opened in 1995 and focuses on attracting visitors to downtown hotels and conventions as well as sporting events.

Banquets, which represent about a third of Morgan Street’s overall business, are fewer and farther in between these days. Morgan Street’s beer production is on pace to be flat compared with last year, or perhaps short by a couple of batches. With one month remaining in its fiscal year, the company had made 600 barrels of beer. That compared with about 690 barrels in fiscal year 2008.

Square One Brewery near Lafayette Park and its sister brewpub, Augusta Brewing, are boosting production to keep up with bigger sales. Augusta’s production of beer is up about 27 percent compared with last year, and Square One is up 5 percent, said Steve Neukomm, owner of the establishments. Augusta might brew 550 barrels or more this year, he said.

"This year, we’ve actually been running very well," said Neukomm, who opened Square One in 2006. "I’ve been very, very happy. I almost don’t want to say something and jinx it."

Still, people have noticeably cut back on visits to bars and restaurants. That has been a challenge for Kansas City-based Boulevard Brewing, which draws 55 to 60 percent of its business from draft beer sold at such establishments.

Boulevard, one of the biggest craft brewers in the U.S., expects to make about 150,000 barrels of beer this year and is planning an expansion that will add another 60,000 barrels of capacity. But its sales in Missouri are basically flat this year.

The recession has taken a psychological and emotional toll even on folks who didn’t lose their jobs, benefits or even much investment holdings, said Bob Sullivan, Boulevard’s vice president of marketing. "They’ve kind of been holed up in their houses," said Sullivan.

But the new dynamic of eating and cooking at home also creates opportunity for Boulevard, which is paying more attention to grocery chains and other key retailers. Boulevard is putting on beer and food pairings at Schnucks stores. There are also radio commercials — featuring a voice-over by actor Matthew McConaughey — that encourage visitors at Price Shopper stores to grab a package of Boulevard Wheat along with prime cuts of beef.

"Certainly in tough economic times, drinking a good beer is an affordable luxury," said Nielsen’s Lake. Craft beer has "a lot of legs and a lot of room to grow."

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When the financial system was teetering, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke flooded it with trillions of dollars to save the banks and free up credit for consumers and businesses.

Looming in the future is a high-risk challenge for the economy’s rescuer-in-chief: He will have to mop up that money without disrupting a nascent recovery.

And timing is vital. Act too fast, and Bernanke risks choking off lending to businesses and everyday Americans. Wait too long, and he risks setting off crippling inflation.

Assuming he manages to help usher in a sustained recovery, Bernanke, like his predecessors, will eventually face still another challenge: He will be under enormous political pressure to keep interest rates low, even though that could speed inflation.

But the Fed chief will face no task with quite the peril of withdrawing the trillions the Fed has pumped into the financial system in ways that had never been envisioned.

That money helped prop up shaky banks. It also was intended to unlock lending to people and companies, a key component of any recovery but one that so far has had only spotty success.

When to pull back the money is an issue sure to surface as Bernanke, his counterparts in other countries, academics and economists meet over the next couple of days at an annual Fed conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Some analysts think it could take four or five years for the Fed to withdraw the money entirely and shrink a balance sheet that is now about $2 trillion, more than double what it was when the financial crisis struck free credit report without a credit card.

Already, the Fed has taken baby steps.

It has said it will allow one program intended to support money market mutual funds — one that hasn’t even been used — to expire Oct. 30. It’s also reduced the maximum it will lend to banks under two other programs.

But this week the Fed extended a separate program designed to increase lending and help the commercial real estate market. So far, about $40 billion in loans has been extended to investors — a small fraction of the $200 billion made available in the program’s first phase. And Americans still have trouble getting loans.

Congress, the White House and statehouses across America will probably exert intense pressure on the Fed to keep the money flowing and the emergency aid programs operating.

Keeping the easy money in place too long could feed high inflation by encouraging overborrowing and overspending. Surging inflation could then derail a recovery if the Fed aggressively boosts interest rates.

But pulling the plug too soon on the Fed’s emergency aid could set back a recovery even faster. If, for instance, the Fed dumped its mortgage securities and interest rates shot up, homeowners and the housing industry would take a further pounding.

To prevent inflation from surging, many economists also think the Fed will have to start raising its key bank lending rate next summer.

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The heads of General Motors GM.UL, Canadian auto parts group Magna and its Russian partner Sberbank are due to meet on Thursday ahead of GM’s board meeting on Friday, a German newspaper said.

German tabloid Bild reported in its Thursday edition, citing sources close to the negotiations, that Sberbank’s Chief Executive German Gref will join GM CEO Fritz Henderson and Magna’s co-CEO Siegfried Wolf for the first time at a meeting in Detroit later in the day.

Magna and Sberbank have teamed up to bid for GM’s European Opel business, rivaling an offer by RHJ International, and sources close to the deal have told Reuters that GM’s board of directors will convene on Friday to address among other things the sale of Opel car insurance.

The purpose of Thursday’s meeting in Detroit is for all parties to get to know each other better and not to hold fresh negotiations, Bild said.

Sources close to the talks have said the GM board aimed to recommend one of the suitors at Friday’s meeting.

Trustees who oversee a majority stake in Opel — which was ring fenced and propped up with German aid in May to avoid being swept into GM’s brief bankruptcy — must approve any decision.

(Reporting by Eva Kuehnen; Editing by Hans Peters)

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Consumers, the cornerstone of U.S. economic activity, are still in disarray, data and central bank measures signaled on Monday, as households struggle amid the worst recession since the Great Depression.

The Federal Reserve announced the extension of programs to boost consumer lending, while credit-card issuers showed that people are increasingly having trouble paying their bills.

Manufacturing appears to be finding a floor, but without a pronounced recovery of consumer spending, any economic recovery is likely to be feeble, since consumers fuel about 70 percent of U.S. economic activity.

The Fed’s measures suggest that while the central bank’s emergency stopgaps for many parts of credit markets seem to be working, there is still much work to be done in revitalizing lending to consumers for everything from houses to cars, analysts said.

“It is rather like triage,” said Jay Mueller, senior portfolio manager with Wells Capital Management in Milwaukee. “Several of the markets that were in trouble are functioning much better. The Fed is putting resources where they are most needed,” he said.

In a joint announcement with the U.S. Treasury, the Fed said it would extend its Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to June 30, 2010 for newly issued commercial mortgage-backed securities.

The Fed and the Treasury also extended TALF through March 31 for newly issued asset-backed securities and already-issued, or “legacy,” commercial mortgage-backed securities. Both parts of the program were due to expire December 31.

In deciding to extend the TALF’s life, the Fed is trying to address the decline of commercial property markets, widely regarded as the next shoe to drop for many already debilitated smaller and medium-sized U payday loan.S. banks. “Everybody is concerned about commercial mortgage-backed securities,” said Mueller. Fed policy-makers “are still trying to get that market functioning,” he said.

After three years of sliding prices, housing activity, although stabilizing somewhat, remains depressed.

U.S. homebuilder sentiment in August rose to its highest level in over a year, a private survey showed on Monday. It added to mounting evidence that the housing market– and in turn, the economic recession — were leveling off.

The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index edged up to 18 from 17 in July, in line with market expectations.

But home improvement retailer Lowe’s Cos posted a 19 percent drop in quarterly profit on Monday and forecast current-quarter earnings below Wall Street estimates as consumers put off big home projects. It shares fell more than 8 percent.

ASSET FLOW WORRIES

Bond analysts also are concerned that over the long term, should foreign investors dump U.S. Treasuries, that could cause economy-wide borrowing costs, including mortgage rates, to soar, snuffing out any economic recovery.

The release of June U.S. asset flows data added to those anxieties. China, the biggest foreign holder of Treasuries, trimmed its overall holdings of U.S. government securities by $25 billion in the month, although analysts noted that one month’s decline was not enough to raise alarms, yet. 

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Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s biggest brewer, managed to squeeze more profits from smaller beer sales in its second quarter.

Thanks to cost savings in North America, the company blew through analysts’ profit predictions. Its beer sales — measured by liquid sold — fell 1.1 percent worldwide. But revenue rose 1.4 percent to $9.5 billion, and profit margins widened as the company posted $1.07 billion in quarterly earnings.

"Profits were higher than expected with the excellent cost management — again — from their side," said Wim Hoste, analyst at KBC Securities in Belgium. "This was a good set of results."

In the first half of the year, North America chipped in nearly half of the company’s global earnings. The company now reports its financial results in dollars and New York serves as a shadow headquarters. (Officially, it is still based in the university town of Leuven, Belgium.)

"When it comes down to basics, these guys basically care about three markets: Brazil, China and the U.S.," said Rob Mann, consumer goods analyst at Liberum Capital in London. "This is now an American business with a very powerful Latin American franchise."

The company said the $52 billion takeover of Anheuser-Busch continues to yield cost savings, with integration running ahead of schedule. The combined company delivered $315 million in synergies in the second quarter and $610 million in the first half of the year by cutting costs —

including jobs — implementing InBev’s famously strict budgeting procedures and using its size to get better terms from suppliers. The company said it is on pace to deliver $1 billion in cost cuts from the Anheuser-Busch takeover this year — a goal Hoste said is starting to look "conservative," given the company’s track record.

In the first six months of the year, Anheuser-Busch InBev sold $3.56 billion of assets, including brewing assets in China and South Korea, as well as packaging plants in the U.S. The company said it remained focused on reducing its debt and selling off assets in a "disciplined" manner.

The company is reducing its ratio of debt to earnings and is in the enviable position of not needing to sell assets in a fire sale, said Hoste. "They are not a forced seller," he said. "They can choose their deals or just let them go if the price is not right or the structure is not right payday advance lenders."

But Anheuser-Busch InBev issued a cautious outlook, warning that demand was weaker and the overall environment "challenging." Executives said the beer industry is resilient in most key regions but is susceptible to economic pressures and won’t improve quickly.

Shares of Anheuser-Busch InBev fell more than 5 percent on Thursday — the most since April — after the company said it didn’t expect to keep boosting profits at the same rate.

Competitors are weathering the same stagnant beer market: London-based SABMiller’s recent sales volumes were flat, and Danish brewer Carlsberg reported that volumes dropped 6 percent in the latest quarter.

"All the brewers are getting hurt from the global economic downturn," said Hoste. "A-B InBev is no exception."

The company gained market share in the U.S., its largest single market, but only because its sales fell less dramatically than its competitors’. Sales of Anheuser-Busch InBev beer from wholesalers to retailers fell 0.8 percent — "sluggish" results, according to Beer Marketer’s Insights.

Still, the company credited its "diverse portfolio" with helping it weather the difficult environment.

Anheuser-Busch InBev said its "focus brands" did better than its overall stable of 300 brands. Sales volumes of the focus brands rose 1.5 percent in the quarter. That group included Brahma and Skol from Brazil, China’s Harbin and the Bud Light family from the U.S. The brewer vowed to keep investing "significant sales and marketing resources" in its biggest brands.

The company gained market share in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, South Korea, Ukraine, the U.K. and the U.S.

For Anheuser-Busch InBev, the past three months represent a marked improvement over the past few years, said Mann. InBev suffered some troubling missteps before and shortly after taking over Anheuser-Busch. Russia was a disaster for InBev for some time, and Stella Artois stumbled badly in the U.K., for example.

"It was difficult to find any bright spots," said Mann. "But then they did a very large deal (with Anheuser-Busch), and bought themselves some stability. Those (profit) margins are pretty stunning."

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