Outside the UK
The second largest cider-consuming market is South Africa, home of the Distell-owned Savanna brand, with an 8.9% share.
The company is the third-largest cider producer in the world and, although the brand has invested recently in the UK market – which it sees as “still having growth potential” – the policy is rather more intrepid than its UK-centric peers.
“Distell’s policy is to trade across a broad geographic front to reduce the dependence on any one specific market,” says Debra Clausen, Distell’s global category manager for cider and RTDs. “We are active across Africa and in several European countries where there is scope for premium RTDs. We are not confining ourselves to English-speaking markets.”
Spreading sales to mitigate the risk of single-market dependency is always a good strategy – who knows what the UK market will be like in 10 years.
For groups such as Distell there are also some hopeful signs outside of the UK and South Africa. Albeit from low bases of less than 8% of the category collectively, North America (up 15.5%) and Australasia (up 28%) both saw rosy growth during 2011 and are ripe for further exploration.
Cider in Europe, though, is on the wane. France, which makes up 4.7% of the global market, declined 2.5% last year; Spain (3.9%) reduced by 3.6%; Ireland (3.7%) shrunk by 2%; and Finland (2.7%) fell by 3.2% (Euromonitor International). To make matters worse all four are expected to decline in the coming five years and probably beyond (Euromonitor International).
Perhaps it’s a generalisation to say the category only holds real appeal in the English-speaking world, but for the moment at least, cider doesn’t translate into too many other languages.
