A few years ago I wrote an article on the world’s beer market share. The top five global beer makers in 2010 were AB InBev NV (BUD), SABMiller PLC (SBMRY), Heineken N.V. (HINKY), Carlsberg (CABGY) and China-based China Resources Enterprise(CRHKY). 

The U.S. is the world’s largest beer market. However most of the American beer market is dominated by foreign-owned companies as shown in an article in the Journal back in July:

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Source: InBev Buys Brewery Where Budweiser Name Began, The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2014 and WSJ The Numbers

Two of the popular brands in the U.S. are Budweiser  and Bud Light owned by AB InBev NV (BUD). But they cannot compete quality-wise compared to imported beers or other craft brewers made by smaller brewers. For example, Canadian beer such as Labatt Blue is much stronger and taste better than Budweiser  and Bud Light. The buds are usually cheaper than other beers and hence taste accordingly…..

Disclosure: No Positions

Forbes Asia has published its annual list of Asia’s Feb 50 firms for this year. The companies in this list are selected from publicly-traded companies. Here is the selection criteria from the Forbes article:

The Fab 50 is chosen from a pool of 1,300 companies in the region that have at least $3 billion in market cap or annual revenue. Since only public companies are considered, hot privately held outfits such as Alibaba Group and Huawei Technologies are out. We screen for a long series of performance measures, analyze the outlook for each company and throw out any that carry a lot of debt or are more than 50% state-owned. Companies that are more than 50% owned by listed parents are also culled. The result is the region’s best of the best.

The Top 10 Firms by Market Capitalization are shown in the graph below:

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Source: 2014 Fab 50: Asia’s Tech Takes Over The World, Forbes Asia

The following table shows the complete list of Asia’s Feb 50 for 2014:

Some observations on this list:

• China dominates the list with 15 firms followed by India with 12.
• China’s Tencent Holdings (TCEHY) is the topper in terms of market capitalization with almost double the market cap of next topper Tata Consultancy Services of India.
• Overall this ranking is dominated by tech firms underscoring the growing power of Asian tech firms in the global marketplace.
• India’s second largest private-sector bank HDFC bank, (HDB) has appeared eight times in this list since Forbes started compiling it in 2005.

Disclosure: No Positions