Winners and losers of the global beer market: European competition in the view of product life-cycle
用产品生命周期理论分析欧洲各国啤酒市场的发展阶段，研究跨国公司如何根据市场成熟度调整策略，并发现微型酿酒厂正在崛起。
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.