SA’s biggest beer maker, South African Breweries (SAB), has made an open appeal to the Treasury not to increase excise taxes in the forthcoming budget announcement, citing a need for the industry to recover from Covid-19, which resulted in three sales bans.
SAB was among a spate of companies that in 2020 either delayed or cancelled billions of rand in investment, citing uncertainty caused by the government’s ban on the sale of alcohol.
In adverts and posts on social media, SAB has called on finance minister Tito Mboweni not to increase excise taxes, which it says cost the industry R15.5bn in 2019.
“During a time when the entire economy has suffered, the beer industry has been particularly hard hit,” SAB said. “When you decide to keep excise flat, the beer value chain can start to grow again, business by business.”
SAB has also gone to court to challenge the constitutionality of the government’s alcohol ban, while it said in January the industry had lost an estimated R21.8bn in revenue during the first two alcohol bans in 2020 and 165,000 jobs.
The SA alcohol industry contributes R173bn, or 3.4%, to GDP, SAB said. It had cancelled a cumulative R5bn in investment, saying that SA “missed out on local brewer infrastructure development that could have given the economy a boost when it needed it most”.
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