Carlsberg’s boss has said the Danish group will remain a brewer at its core even as the local beer brands that it historically relied on for most of its revenue have dropped to less than half of its total annual sales for the first time.
Jacob Aarup-Andersen, chief executive since September 2023, said “moderation” was a big trend among consumers and this had led to Carlsberg bulking up in soft drinks such as Pepsi. But beer would “continue to be a major driver of relevance for us for as long as I’m alive”, he said.
Core beer sales – made up of local, mainstream brands such as Falcon, Karhu and Angelo Poretti – accounted for just 49 per cent of total sales in 2025, while the share from soft drinks and non-alcoholic beer has climbed to a third.
The brewer, founded in 1847, also sells premium beer brands such as Carlsberg, Tuborg and Kronenbourg, which account for about a fifth of sales, as well as other alcoholic drinks including cider and hard seltzers.
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“We have a very, very strong heritage and very, very strong brewing DNA in this company, and I’m not going to let go of that. Carlsberg is a brewer at the core. We believe we’re building moats around our beer business by creating a diversified portfolio around it,” Aarup-Andersen said.
Carlsberg has been the most aggressive of the global brewers in pushing into beverages other than beer, with the 2025 acquisition of Britvic in the UK almost doubling its soft drink sales to just below 30 per cent of the total. The push to soft drinks has helped it achieve better volume growth and margin performance in the past five years than both its main rivals, AB InBev and Heineken.
Analysts at Bernstein said Carlsberg’s underlying volume growth from 2019 to 2024 was 1.8 per cent per year, compared with 0.5 per cent at AB InBev and a 0.8 per cent drop at Heineken. The Danish group was the only one of the trio to improve its underlying margin, increasing it by 0.7 percentage points in the past five years.
“You can’t deny those facts,” Aarup-Andersen said. He added that his goal was to create a “structurally higher growth” company that could boom when the current weakness in consumer sentiment, caused by higher inflation and geopolitical uncertainty, subsided.
“We’re doing it against a backdrop that is significantly harder than expected. Especially, global consumer confidence is a significant headwind,” he said.
Carlsberg’s core beer sales dropped from 59 per cent of the total in 2024 to 49 per cent last year, and Aarup-Andersen expects the shift to continue as a result of higher growth rates for soft drinks and non-alcoholic beer.
“For more than 100 years, they [beer sales] were 100 per cent,” said the 48-year-old, who has long been one of the rising stars of Danish business. In 2018, Denmark’s financial regulator blocked Danske Bank from appointing him as its chief executive, saying it wanted a candidate with greater banking experience to run a lender that was at the time reeling from a money-laundering scandal.
Aarup-Andersen instead became head of ISS, the Danish facility-management services company, before taking over at Carlsberg.
“Coming in as an outsider, I came with the benefit of not being burdened by previous decisions or dogmas around what the consumer needed and how categories would develop,” Aarup-Andersen said.
“We’ve taken a very open mind around where the consumer’s heading, not just next year, but over the next decade.”
Aarup-Andersen said this year should see “some kind of improvement” in consumer confidence, but that much would depend on the outcome of the war in Ukraine and on how US tariffs developed.
The group, which sells almost nothing in the US, once derived half of its sales and profits from Russia, but exited after the country’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
