Bill Gates has placed his bets on Bud Light’s comeback after the tech mogul bought 1.7 million shares of the brand’s disgraced parent company.
The 67-year-old Microsoft founder acquired shares of Bud Light through his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust in the second quarter of this year.
The shares have a market value of approximately $95 million, the company reports TipRanks.
His investment comes as Anheuser-Busch Companies are still reeling from the fallout from their partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney on April 1. The videos and images she posted prompted nationwide boycotts of the beer.
This isn’t the first time Gates has invested in the global beer industry, having made a much larger purchase months ago.
The 67-year-old founder of Microsoft acquired the shares through his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust in the second quarter of this year. The shares have a market value of approximately $95 million
It all started when Mulvaney, 26, shared a video with her 10.8 million Instagram followers of her opening a can of Bud Light on April 1.
Gates invested $939.87 million in Heineken stock at the start of the Bud Light controversy after their disastrous partnership with Mulvaney.
According to the declaration of the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets, he acquired 10.8 million shares on February 17.
And before that, in 2007, Gates bought a $392 million stake in FEMSA, whose brewery was sold to Heineken in 2010.
Bud Light has seen its sales drop even further amid continued criticism over its disastrous partnership with transgender influencer Mulvaney.
The beer giant lost its place as America’s No. 1 beer brand to Modelo Especial due to the controversy, a position it held for more than 22 years.
As of August 19, Bud Light sales at remote locations such as supermarkets and gas stations were down 15.9 percent on a dollar basis and 20.1 percent on a volume basis over the past year.
By contrast, sales of the rival brand Modelo Especial rose enormously: the beer increased by 10.3 percent in sales and 9.6 percent in volume.
Bump Williams, head of data firm Bump Williams Consulting, which tracked the recent data with NielsenIQ, said Modelo beat Bud Light as the top-selling beer thanks to convenience store sales.
Overall, organic volume declined 1.4 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2023, with North America declining 14 percent.
But at the same time, there was growth in the Asia-Pacific region.
Morgan Stanley analyst Sarah Simon told TipRanks, “Following a successful execution through Covid, ABI has experienced significant market share loss in the US in 2023, primarily due to consumer boycotts of the Bud Light brand.
While this creates very negative headlines, ABI’s exposure to emerging markets limits the impact of the US stock loss.
“Following the one-time charges in 2023, we see profitability returning to growth in 2024, with strong cash flow growth driving leverage towards the 2.0x target, enabling both a payout ratio increase and share buybacks to resume from 2026 .
“The current valuation does not reflect this upside in our view.”
Bud Light was accused of alienating its traditional customer base by partnering with Mulvaney, prompting many conservatives — including Kid Rock — to boycott the brand.
Rock had decided to stack cases of Bud Light beer on a table and use them for target practice in a video that went viral.
Rock’s comment to “f*** Bud Light” as the cans spewed into the air was the opposite of what the marketing team had in mind when they decided to partner with Mulvaney.
Other celebrities joined Kid Rock in condemning the collaboration, with country singers John Rich and Travis Tritt publicly denouncing the brand. Beer aficionados in Tritt’s hometown of Marietta, Georgia quickly followed suit and began drinking Coors Light instead of Bud Light after the controversy.
And the nightmare for Bud Light executives didn’t end there.
Millions of customers abandoned the American brand within days of Mulvaney’s social media posts, which filmed scores of themselves pouring the beer down the sink and tossing the cans into trash cans.
And as the polarization spread to bars across America, where patrons exchanged insults and recriminations about each other’s beer choices, some bar owners said they would stop selling Bud Light simply to avoid arguments.