Could brewers diversify and buy, say, a soft drinks company?
We are soft drink bottlers around the world, mainly with the Coca-Cola system, but we do have some minor soft drink brands in other parts of the world that are not aligned with that. So we do exploit synergies with soft drink operations, and there are some fairly considerable synergies to be had. I don’t personally think that we will go into non-alcoholic beverages across the globe in any major or systematic way; we are brewers. So is a tieup between SABMiller and CocaCola unfeasible? I don’t know that it’s completely unfeasible, but I don’t think it’s on the cards right now either. You have operations in Zimbabwe. Are you questioning your presence due to political uncertainty? We’ve been in Zimbabwe for a very long time and, in fact, the Rhodesian Breweries, as it was many years ago, was one of the foundations of our business. Now we still own a substantial minority holding there and we have no plans to divest of it. Zimbabwe is in extremely troubled times and our business doesn’t app
