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| A consumer picks up a Cass bottle at a large discount store in Seoul in this 2022 file photo. Yonhap |
By Kim Jae-heun
Oriental Brewery (OB) is facing growing calls to diversify its product portfolio as it generates more than half of its sales from the Cass brand of lager, according to industry officials Sunday.
Annual sales of Cass lager are estimated to be over 1 trillion won ($750.7 million), which accounts for at least 64 percent of the firm's 1.56 trillion won in sales last year.
Against this backdrop, OB has been trying to launch a series of new brands over the past few years, but to no avail.
In 2019, it launched the very first sparkling liquor, FiLGood, but the product lost in its competition against Hitejinro's FiLite, which sold over 1.6 billion cans last year.
Two years later, OB introduced an ambitious rice beer known as Hanmac, but it also failed to make a strong enough presence in the local beer market due to the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, which saw many bars and restaurants closed during that time.
In 2022, OB launched the wheat beer, Cass White, but it failed to grab consumers' attention too.
In the meantime, its original lager beer, Cass, has been selling well and its sales and operating profit jumped 16 percent and 38 percent, year-on-year, to declare 1.56 trillion won and 361.7 billion won, respectively, last year. Its operating profit was at an all-time high, since the last time back in 2019.
OB said it is on the right path.
"We know our reliance on Cass is high, but if you look at it from another perspective, having a best-selling beer brand in the country is a blessing. And we keep trying to improve it and launch new beers under its brand," a Cass official said. "If we only have Cass and don't launch any more new products that would be a problem. But we introduced Cass White, Cass 0.0 and renewed Cass."
This year, OB is boosting its Hanmac beer product as the pandemic has entered the endemic stage.
It recently introduced its renewed Hanmac, improving its taste with stickier foam. The rice beer's can and bottle design have also changed, adopting a Korean-style pattern design logo on the front.
"We want to focus on growing Hanmac while continuing to sell Cass. As people are back out and drinking at restaurants and bars, we expect them to find Hanmac more this year," the official added.
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