The Carlsberg Story by Ditlev Tamm

Author:Ditlev Tamm
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030526702
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.2 The Great Beer Wedding

The history of the merger of Carlsberg and DFB (or, in fact, with Tuborg), known as the great “beer wedding” by the press, has so far mostly been told in pieces and by those who were there at the time and had their share in the events. The two leading figures behind the merger were A. W. Nielsen and the chairman of the board of directors of DFB, Supreme Court advocate Bernt Hjejle, who wrote in 1982 a more detailed account of the merger seen from his point of view.2 Hjejle had a lifelong affiliation with Tuborg as an attorney, as a member of the board of directors, and from 1969 as chairman of the board. He became one of the protagonists in the negotiations and was, in reality, the person from DFB’s side who could overcome resistance to the merger on his own executive board, where the intransigence was mostly based on some nostalgic reluctance to join Carlsberg (as the minor partner) and—probably more—the actual CEO’s personal ambitions. Hjejle’s book bears the stamp of his understandable pride about his own role. Even if the author possesses the kind of character which is reluctant to be publicly critical of anyone, it is apparent that he had no illusions about Tuborg’s (at that time) economically and intellectually weaker position.

An important point is that Hjejle fundamentally respected A. W. Nielsen and the Carlsberg side more than his own and, presumably, would rather have been on what he must have considered the winning team than representing the losers. Kristof Glamann says straight out about Hjejle that he was “incredibly charmed by A. W. Nielsen”, who could, therefore, get him to do almost anything.3 He even seemed relieved to be able to turn over what (at that time) was a sickly Tuborg, led by a not auspiciously talented but avaricious director to Carlsberg’s or, rather, A. W. Nielsen’s professional hands.

The picture drawn in the existing source material does not deviate markedly from the protagonists’ own view. In his account of the merger, A. W. Nielsen mentions that “foresight and prescience were prominent characteristics in the men who shaped the 1903 agreement between Denmark’s two great brewery groups”. He was especially thinking here that they anticipated developments in the beer market, which “since the Second World War has been in rapid development, characterized by mergers and concentrations of capital”. He mentioned “the 1968 consolidation of the two great Dutch breweries Heineken and Amstel with a total annual turnover of around a couple of billion crowns and equity in the amount of a billion crowns and the huge capital concentrations within the British brewery industry, each representing annual sales up toward six billion crowns with equity exceeding five billion”. It is interesting that the experienced CEO emphasizes how “these large Dutch and British groups introduced a huge expansion in the 1950s through the establishment of breweries outside their traditional market areas”, which had led the major Danish breweries to “reconsider their previous line”.

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