AB InBev Is Selling Less Beer Every Year. So Why Is It Making More Money?

The world's largest brewer is selling less beer every year, and the people running it could not be happier about the money. In FY2024, AB InBev's beer volumes fell 1.9%. The year before, its own beer volumes were down 2.3%; the year after, down 2.6%.¹³⁷ Three straight years of fewer bottles leaving the brewery. And yet, across those same years, organic revenue climbed and margins fattened. The trick is not a trick. It is a deliberate bet that the company can make the average glass of beer worth more, faster than the world drinks fewer glasses of it.

The official story is simple: premiumization is offsetting falling volumes, full stop. It is the line every brewer wants you to believe, and it is mostly true - except where it isn't, and where it isn't is exactly the part that matters.

Fewer liters, more money per liter

Here is the mechanism, stripped to the bone. A brewer's revenue is volume times price per unit - in AB InBev's language, hectoliters times revenue per hectoliter. When volume shrinks, you have one lever left: make each hectoliter worth more. In FY2024 the company pulled that lever hard. Total volumes fell 1.4% and beer volumes fell 1.9%, but revenue per hectoliter rose 4.3%, and organic revenue grew 2.7% to a record.¹ The math worked because price beat volume. People bought fewer beers, but the ones they bought skewed toward Stella, Corona, Michelob Ultra - the above-core portfolio that carries a fatter price tag and a fatter margin.

That is the thesis, and it is genuinely powerful: AB InBev is no longer a volume business pretending to be one. It is a margin business that happens to sell beer. The proof is in the trajectory - FY2025 saw normalized EBITDA rise 4.9% to $21.2 billion, with margin expanding 101 basis points to 35.8%, even as beer volumes fell 2.6%.⁷ Selling less, earning more, three years running.

Where the pricing lever snaps

Now the part the headline strategy skips. Premiumization is an offset, not a force field. It compensates for the slow drip of mature markets drinking a little less each year. It does not compensate for a market falling out from under you - and AB InBev has now hit that wall twice in three years.

China was supposed to be the showcase. The story went that even as overall Chinese beer demand softened, premium brands would carry the day. They didn't carry enough. In Q2 2025, AB InBev's China volumes fell 7.4% year-on-year, and the company openly acknowledged it was underperforming the industry there.⁶ A 7.4% volume collapse is a different animal from a 2% drift. No realistic per-hectoliter gain closes a hole that deep. When the liters fall fast enough, pricing simply cannot run fast enough to catch them - the lever you were pulling so confidently snaps in your hand.

The other wall was self-inflicted. After the April 2023 Bud Light controversy, Modelo Especial dethroned Bud Light as America's best-selling beer, and the damage was not a blip.⁵ AB InBev's own filing put North American organic revenue down roughly $1.4 billion in FY2023, driven by the Bud Light decline.³ A full year later, in Q1 2024, US sales-to-retailers were still down 13.7%, again driven by Bud Light, and US EBITDA dropped 19.7%.⁴ The premium portfolio did not ride to the rescue. When a flagship loses loyalty at that scale, no amount of mix-shift refills the gap.

The two-thirds that's really one-third

There's a number that gets repeated until it feels like fact: that premium and super-premium beer is roughly two-thirds of AB InBev's business. It isn't - not globally. That two-thirds figure is a regional statistic - AB InBev's own FY2024 press release uses it specifically in the context of China, not the global portfolio.⁹ At the level of the whole company, AB InBev's own FY2024 results state plainly that the above-core beer portfolio represented 35% of revenue, and grew revenue only by low single digits.² By FY2025, above-core was still 35%.⁷ So the premium engine, the one carrying the whole narrative, is about a third of the business and barely growing its share. It is doing real work. It is not doing two-thirds of the work.

Which brings us to the margin story, the proudest number of all. Margin expansion is treated as proof that premiumization is working. Some of it is. But the EBITDA figure everyone quotes is a company-defined measure, not a standardized one, and the expansion was helped along by cost discipline that has nothing to do with selling fancier beer. Net capex fell from $4.5 billion in FY2023 to $3.7 billion in FY2024, feeding $2.5 billion of free-cash-flow growth.⁸ A richer mix lifts margin; so does spending less. The headline blends the two and credits the more flattering one.

But isn't a margin machine exactly what you want?

The fair objection is that this critique misses the point. Who cares if you ship fewer liters, the steelman goes, if each one is more profitable and free cash flow is climbing? A business that converts a shrinking, low-growth category into rising profit is doing precisely what a mature consumer giant should do. And there's truth in that. In Q2 2025, even with volumes missing badly, operating profit still jumped 6.5%.⁶ That is a real and enviable resilience - the kind of pricing power most companies would trade their growth for.

But resilience is not the same as durability, and the gap is widening, not closing. The volume decline accelerated - from 1.9% in FY2024 to 2.6% in beer for FY2025¹⁷ - which means the price lever has to pull harder every year just to hold the line. Meanwhile net debt to EBITDA sat at 2.87x.⁷ A margin business resting on a shrinking volume base is fine until the base shrinks faster than pricing can compensate. China showed what that looks like. The strategy isn't failing. It is running out of slack.

AB InBev has built something genuinely impressive: a way to make a shrinking thing more valuable, year after year, by selling fewer and better beers at a higher price per liter. It works. It just doesn't work everywhere, and the places it fails are the places that move the needle most. The pricing lever is real - but it is a lever, not a law. It carries the slow declines and snaps under the fast ones. The question for the world's biggest brewer was never whether it could make beer worth more. It's whether it can keep doing that faster than the world keeps drinking less - and the gap between those two numbers is the whole company.