Dive Brief:
- Peter Swinburn, chief executive officer and president of Molson Coors, will retire at end of the year.
- The brewer said 51-year old Mark Hunter will take over as CEO and president upon Swinburn's departure. Hunter has run Molson Coors' European operations since January 2013.
- Hunter is seen as an experienced beer executive, but not as a merger and acquisition expert like Swinburn.
Dive Insight:
Wall Street took to reading tea leaves (or perhaps beer foam) when Swinburn's retirement was announced. And it didn't like what it saw.
The reason is somewhat convoluted, but understandable. The beer industry and the investment community have long expected the biggest beer maker on earth, AB InBev, to merge with the second-biggest brewer on earth, SAB Miller. Winning regulatory approval of such a deal would require selling off some U.S. operations, particularly the MillerCoors LLC partnership.That would put Molson Coors in the position to extract quite a bit from AB InBev and SAB.
Wall Street has apparently decided that if AB InBev and SAB Miller were actually close to a merger deal, then Swinburn would not be retiring just yet. So shares fell 2% on the news that he was leaving.