Hello and welcome to Alts Cafe.
A curated pour of the week’s most important alt investing stories, customized and brewed to your liking.
Table of Contents
Highlights
- International Investing: The yen carry trade breaks down and Japan starts trading on its fiscal outlook
- Startups & VC: 195 startups crossed the billion-dollar line in six months, more than all of 2025
- Sports: The Lakers sell to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for a record $12.5 billion
- Prediction Markets: New York’s City Council opens an investigation into how Kalshi and Polymarket advertise
- Music & Film: Ari Emanuel buys Broadway and West End landlord ATG in a $6 billion deal
- Crypto: Thune files cloture on the CLARITY Act, setting up a September 15 vote
- Collectibles, Culture and Luxury: Monterey Car Week auctions are tracking toward a record $500 million
- Private Equity & Private Credit: Apollo agrees to take easyJet private for £5.7 billion
- Real Estate: BREIT finishes its self-storage exit and moves $3.3 billion into data centers
- Precious Metals and Gems: The Pentagon puts $400 million behind the world’s first scandium mine
- Artwork: Christie’s public auction sales jump 71% to $3.5 billion in the first half
- Farmland: Cotton’s short squeeze picks up a two-continent weather story
- Wine, Whiskey & Spirits: Guinness owner Diageo unveils an £890 million restructuring
International Investing
Around the world…
- Japan’s yen carry trade has broken down, and Apollo’s chief economist argues the currency now trades on Japan’s fiscal outlook rather than the US-Japan rate gap, as governance reform drives record shareholder activism and foreign ownership near a third of the market
- Shein begins gauging investor demand for a Hong Kong listing, the biggest test yet of whether global investors will buy a Chinese consumer champion in Hong Kong
- Arizona is pitching Taiwanese developers and family offices on warehouses, hotels and science parks around TSMC, after two-way trade jumped to $21.2 billion from $4.9 billion in a year
- Barings makes the case that Korea is shifting from a cyclical semiconductor trade to a structural re-rating, with 2026 earnings growth forecast near 240% against 8.3x forward earnings versus 18.2x globally
Why it matters: The yen stops being a rates trade
For two decades the yen was the cleanest macro expression in the world: borrow cheap in Tokyo, buy yield anywhere else, and watch the currency track the rate differential almost tick for tick.
Apollo’s chart book argues that link snapped after April 2025, when tariff volatility made carry indefensible, and that the yen now takes its cue from Japan’s fiscal outlook instead.
That is a different animal entirely, because fiscal stories do not mean-revert on a Fed pivot. Last week’s coordinated US-Japan intervention put a floor under the currency; this week’s data says the floor is holding up something structurally weaker than investors assumed.
Corporate governance reform has pushed foreign ownership to roughly a third of the Tokyo market and driven activism to record levels, which is why Japanese assets keep showing up as value plays: Integral at 10x normalized earnings, Seria buying back 17% of its shares, Mercari announcing its first repurchase since listing, Nintendo compounding at 151% quarterly profit growth.
The currency is no longer doing half the work, so the returns now have to come from the companies. Fortunately, that is exactly what Japanese companies have spent three years learning to deliver.
Music & Film
- Ari Emanuel’s events company Mari agrees to acquire ATG Entertainment for a reported $6 billion, picking up seven Broadway houses and ten in the West End that draw 18 million theatergoers a year, in what Emanuel calls a long-term bet on where live goes next
- Disney and TikTok strike a first-of-its-kind deal giving creators access to assets from hundreds of Disney films and series, with curated videos running inside Disney+
- YouTube doubles its monetization threshold to 8,000 watch hours or 20 million Shorts views, effective February 1, while expanding Premium Lite to every country
- Acast acquires Backyard Ventures for $20 million, adding 200 creators across audio, YouTube and newsletters at roughly 1.2x trailing revenue
- Spotify passes 300 million premium subscribers and posts $762 million in quarterly operating profit, with monthly actives up 12% to 777 million
- Universal sells roughly $467 million of Spotify stock, with more than $100 million of it flowing to artists non-recoupable under a policy Taylor Swift negotiated in 2018
- Spotify will label AI persona profiles and exclude them from recommendations, while asking artists to disclose whether tracks are AI-generated
- David Ellison says he will move Paramount out of California from October 1 unless state attorneys general negotiate an end to the suit blocking the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, with a $7 million per day ticking fee starting that date
Why it matters: Ari Emanuel bets on Broadway
Ari Emanuel spent a career monetizing talent. His new company just spent $6 billion on real estate that talent has to walk into.
ATG is seventeen theaters in London and New York with 18 million annual visitors, and the thesis is that in a world of infinite reproducible content the scarce thing is a room where something happens once.
That argument keeps showing up in different costumes this week:
- Whatnot at $20 billion for live commerce
- Peacock’s Love Island pulling 19 billion minutes
- Campari selling spritzes at stadiums.
It also has a financing dimension that is barely built out, because ticketing produces contractual forward receivables against named shows on named dates, which is the cleanest collateral in entertainment and still mostly gets funded with unsecured paper.
Meanwhile the platform layer is moving the other way, tightening rather than opening: YouTube just doubled the bar to monetize, X rewrote its payouts, and Disney is renting its IP to TikTok creators rather than paying them.
Backing Creators Through Debt & Equity, Live In LA
Creators are building real businesses, and a whole new private financing layer is emerging to fund them: advances, revenue-share deals, credit lines, and catalog loans.
On October 6 we’re bringing the people writing those checks (and the people taking them) together in Los Angeles for an intimate evening of straight talk on how creator lending actually works.
Fifteen to twenty seats, dinner included, free for paying Altea members and $50 for everyone else. RSVP now to hold a spot.
Startups & VC
- 195 startups reached unicorn status in the first half of 2026, more than in all of 2025, led by AI robotics, infrastructure and defense
- AI now accounts for nearly 62% of all unicorn value, with Anthropic and OpenAI alone worth $1.8 trillion of an $8.2 trillion universe, yet ranking 11th and 15th of 18 on PitchBook’s business quality framework because rented compute means thinner margins
- OpenAI buys back $7 billion of employee shares at an $852 billion valuation, skipping outside buyers entirely as IPO preparation ramps
- Live shopping platform Whatnot raises $545 million at a $20 billion valuation, nearly double its mark from a year ago, having already passed all of 2025’s volume
- Defense manufacturing startup Hadrian raises $1.37 billion at a $7.87 billion valuation, roughly five times where it stood in January
- The median IRR for 2025 vintage venture funds sits at -2% with the bottom decile at -20.3%, against 15.6% for the 2016 vintage, and billion-dollar funds now absorb 68.3% of every dollar raised
- Bending Spoons agrees to buy Airtable for $1.28 billion, a fraction of the $11.7 billion peak it carried in 2021, and well under the $4 billion secondaries were pricing this year
- River AI, founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, raises $1.1 billion led by General Catalyst to help enterprises train and own their own models
Why it matters: The fastest unicorn class ever, and the quality question underneath it
Six months produced more billion-dollar startups than the whole of last year, which sounds like a boom and is really a repricing.
AI is 62% of unicorn value while being only about 40% of unicorn count, so the average AI company is being marked at a premium to everything else in the private market.
For LPs the arithmetic is already visible in the returns data, where the 2025 vintage median IRR is negative two percent and the gap between top and bottom decile is the widest on record.
Watch who gets liquidity. OpenAI just gave its employees $7 billion of it without letting a single outside buyer set a new price.
Sports
- Mark Walter agrees to sell the Lakers to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger at a record $12.5 billion, eighteen months after buying control at a $10 billion valuation and forfeiting more than a decade of remaining tax amortization
- Apollo agrees to inject $2.6 billion into the Yankees, one of the largest single private capital commitments ever made to a North American franchise
- A consortium including Jeff Bezos nears a deal for 30% of Liverpool at £1.35 billion, valuing the club around $4.4 billion
- Mercedes generated $848.5 million in revenue and $180 million in net profit last year, numbers that would place it among the highest-earning NFL franchises and support a $6 billion valuation built almost entirely on Formula 1’s cost cap
- Private equity deals for teams and leagues went from 13 deals worth $1.9 billion in 2014 to 71 deals worth $18.45 billion in 2025
- Buffalo opens its $2.2 billion outdoor stadium and immediately fields complaints about obstructed views and scoreboards, after engineering around every reason to build a dome
- The Dodgers carry a $430 million payroll, more than double the median MLB team, and owe more in luxury tax than twelve clubs spend on players outright
Why it matters: The fastest $2 billion in sports history
Walter bought control of the Lakers at a $10 billion valuation in February 2025 and is selling at $12.5 billion eighteen months later. On paper that is a $2 billion gain.
But in practice it is stranger than that, because the whole point of owning a team is the fifteen-year intangible amortization schedule that shelters other income, and selling this early throws most of it away. Which means the price had to be high enough to beat not just the asset’s appreciation but its tax shield too, and someone was willing to pay it.
A basketball franchise with a hundred-year brand and no substitutes is about as close to unhedgeable scarcity as an investable asset gets. The financing layer is arriving at the same time, with Apollo putting $2.6 billion into the Yankees and Bezos taking a third of Liverpool in the same fortnight.
Sports valuations used to be justified by media rights. Increasingly they are justified by the argument that there will never be another one of these.
Prediction Markets
- New York’s City Council opens an investigation into how Kalshi and Polymarket advertise in the city and is weighing local rules on marketing tactics and social harms
- FlightAware sues Kalshi over its flight-cancellation contracts, alleging unauthorized use of its data, then drops the case within a day once the volumes turned out to be tiny
- Both venues now list contracts on clinical trial outcomes and FDA approvals, a category patients and researchers have called ghastly for turning drug readouts into tradeable events
- Trump Media scraps its planned Crypto.com prediction market for Truth Social alongside a digital asset treasury, unwinding two deals at once
- Insider trading is becoming the category’s defining integrity problem, with traders who knew outcomes in advance surfacing across both platforms
Why it matters: Prediction advertising is what finally drew regulators
Prediction markets have spent two years winning the legal argument, one federal court and one CFTC no-action letter at a time. What they have not won is the political argument.
New York’s City Council just showed why that matters. The council is asking: what are these companies putting on subway walls and phone screens, and who is it aimed at.
That is the sports betting playbook running in reverse, since state regulators eventually came for DraftKings and FanDuel’s marketing long before they came for their licenses, and marketing restrictions bite immediately in a business whose entire growth model is paid acquisition.
The category is not helping itself. Listing contracts on clinical trial readouts invites exactly the framing that regulators find easiest to act on, and the insider trading problem cuts at the one thing these markets sell, which is that the price is honest information.
Crypto
- Majority Leader Thune files cloture on the CLARITY Act, setting up a September 15 vote after the market structure bill missed its window before the August recess
- Coinbase launches 24-hour, five-day trading in roughly 4,000 US stocks for UK customers, extending its everything exchange strategy beyond digital assets
- Riot Platforms signs a 20-year, $9.1 billion compute deal with Anthropic, sending the stock up around 20% and confirming that bitcoin miners are now AI landlords
- More than 100 crypto projects have folded so far in 2026 in what looks increasingly like a dot-com style shakeout, including several long-standing names
- Trump Media unwinds its Crypto.com digital asset treasury and prediction market deals, pivoting toward energy instead
- Ondo drops 13% in a week, the worst in the top 50, as the late founder’s mother sues to oust the CEO and take control of the tokenization platform
- BlackRock sets a 1-for-3 reverse split for its spot Ethereum ETF in October, with the fund trading near $14
Why it matters: CLARITY keeps getting one more chance
Two weeks ago the CLARITY Act looked dead for the year. Then Thune filed cloture on the motion to proceed, which schedules a September 15 vote and puts market structure back on the calendar before the midterm window closes it for good.
The procedural detail matters more than it sounds, because cloture on the motion to proceed is the cheapest possible commitment a leader can make: it forces senators to declare themselves without guaranteeing the bill ever gets a final vote.
Read it as a whip count in public. The 60-vote threshold still requires Democratic support that the ethics provisions keep burning, and nothing about the substance has changed since July.
What has changed is the cost of waiting. Coinbase is now selling US equities in London rather than fighting for the right to sell them at home, which is what regulatory arbitrage looks like when it stops being a threat and becomes a product roadmap.
Meanwhile the industry underneath the policy fight is consolidating hard, with more than 100 projects folded this year and the survivors, like Riot, earning their keep by renting infrastructure to AI companies. Washington is legislating for an industry that is busy becoming a different industry.
Collectibles, Culture and Luxury
- Monterey Car Week auctions could clear a record $500 million this year, with buyers under 45 taking a growing share of the bidding across RM Sotheby’s, Gooding and Broad Arrow
- Goldin’s Summer TCG Elite auction generates more than $18 million, with seven cards topping $500,000 and a 1999 promo Bulbasaur clearing $800,000
- Three first-print sealed Pokémon Game Boy cartridges sell privately for a record $2 million, two of them graded a perfect 10
- A gated car condo development outside Las Vegas is selling storage units to collectors for as much as $1.6 million each, the latest in a wave of purpose-built garages for people who ran out of room at home
- Live commerce remains a seller’s market, with breakers and streamers under no obligation to disclose odds or true acquisition costs, leaving buyers exposed on price discovery
- Spencer Spirit agrees to buy Hot Topic, BoxLunch and Her Universe, putting the mall-era alt-culture brands under one owner across 3,000 locations
Why it matters: The car market’s generational handoff
Monterey is the week the classic car market prints its comps, and a record $500 million would be notable on its own.
For most of the past decade the concern about collector cars was demographic: the buyers who wanted air-cooled Porsches and Ferrari Daytonas were aging out, and nothing in the pipeline suggested a younger cohort willing to pay eight figures for a car they cannot drive.
This year the auction houses say bidders under 45 are taking a materially larger share, and they are skewing toward the 1980s and 1990s machinery that was on their bedroom walls rather than the prewar coachbuilt material that dominated the last cycle.
That is the same pattern reshaping every collectible market right now. The Pokémon results at Goldin and the $2 million sealed Game Boy set are the trading card version of it, priced by people who owned the objects as children and now have institutional money.
Two lessons fall out.
- First, nostalgia is a supply-constrained asset class with a thirty-year lag, so the buy signal is whatever ten-year-olds obsessed over three decades ago.
- Second, the infrastructure follows the money: purpose-built car condos selling for $1.6 million a unit are what happens when storage becomes a real estate product.
Private Equity & Private Credit
- Apollo agrees to acquire easyJet for £5.7 billion after Castlelake walked away from the bidding war, taking control of a modern A320 fleet, slots at London, Milan and Geneva, and a fast-growing holiday packages business
- Private equity firms are now sitting on nearly 34,000 unsold portfolio companies, a record and roughly double the pile from a decade ago
- Blackstone pitches investors on a $36 billion debt package to finance Anthropic’s use of Google chips, which would exceed the $35 billion arranged just two months ago
- Franklin Templeton is in talks to buy AlTi Global, a publicly traded wealth manager with $90 billion in assets, as fund firms keep buying distribution
- Blackstone’s publicly traded private credit fund cuts net asset value by the most in six years, driven by portfolio markdowns rather than non-accruals
- Ares scales back a €1 billion private credit continuation vehicle after investors balked at the valuations assigned to loans moving into the new fund
- Nontraded BDC fundraising falls to its lowest quarterly level since 2020, even as Carlyle’s evergreen range reaches $20 billion on 60% inflow growth
- KKR closes its largest infrastructure fund ever at $19.2 billion, targeting core-plus assets across North America and Western Europe
Why it matters: Apollo buys an airline nobody wanted to own
Airlines are the asset class investors love to quote Buffett about and then avoid. Apollo just paid £5.7 billion for one, and the interesting part is what it is actually buying.
Underneath the flying business sits a fleet of relatively young A320-family aircraft, a slot portfolio at Gatwick, Milan and Geneva that cannot be replicated at any price, and a holiday packages arm that is essentially a high-margin travel agency stapled to an airline.
Those are three separable, financeable assets wearing one ticker. That is the shape of large-cap private equity in 2026, because with 34,000 companies sitting unsold and exit markets still narrow, the deals getting done are the ones where value can be unlocked by rearranging the pieces rather than waiting for a multiple to expand.
The same firm’s credit arm is running the identical playbook one floor down, financing chips, receivables and stadium cash flows against contractual streams rather than enterprise value. Not everyone is enjoying the transition.
Blackstone’s BDC just took its biggest NAV cut in six years, Ares had to shrink a continuation vehicle when LPs disputed its marks, and nontraded BDC fundraising has fallen to a six-year low.
The money is still flowing. It is just flowing to whoever can point at the collateral.
Creators are building real businesses, and a whole new private financing layer is emerging to fund them: advances, revenue-share deals, credit lines, and catalog loans.
On October 6 we’re bringing the people writing those checks (and the people taking them) together in Los Angeles for an intimate evening of straight talk on how creator lending actually works.
Real Estate
- BREIT completes its exit from self-storage and deploys $3.3 billion into data centers in the second quarter, a wholesale rotation from consumer property into AI infrastructure
- US existing home sales fall 1.7% in July while the median price sets a record $434,100, the second straight monthly decline
- HOA foreclosures jump nearly 40% as underfunded associations chase unpaid dues, with almost three-quarters of associations short on reserves
- Data center construction spending in the US tops $81.5 billion in six months, already beating all of 2025, though a shortage of skilled trades is pushing out completion dates
- Commercial real estate finishes first in a new investor preference survey, ahead of stocks and bonds, with apartments leading even as respondents still favor holding over transacting
- A Kushner-backed resort on Albania’s Sazan island has triggered a protest movement big enough to reshape the country’s politics, complete with forged Ottoman deeds and inflatable flamingos
- Lightstone REIT directors must face a suit over a $59.8 million conflict that was never disclosed to investors
- JPMorgan will launch an infrastructure and real estate interval fund with GCM Grosvenor, adding to the semi-liquid product wave
Why it matters: The largest nontraded REIT stops being a property fund
Blackstone built BREIT on a simple pitch: institutional-quality real estate, mostly rental housing and industrial, with quarterly liquidity.
This quarter it finished selling out of self-storage entirely and put $3.3 billion into data centers.
Self-storage is a consumer business dressed as real estate, priced on household formation and moving activity, and it has spent two years getting worse.
Data centers are an industrial business dressed as real estate, priced on power availability and the credit of a handful of hyperscaler tenants, and they have spent two years getting better.
Swapping one for the other means BREIT’s investors now own concentrated exposure to the AI capex cycle inside a vehicle they bought for diversification.
The macro case is real, with $81.5 billion of construction spent in six months and skilled-trades shortages holding supply back. The risk is that everyone reached the same conclusion at once, and the tenant list is short enough to fit on an index card.
Meanwhile the residential market that BREIT is stepping away from keeps sending stress signals, with record prices and falling volumes and HOA foreclosures up 40% as associations run out of money.
Artwork
- Christie’s public auction sales jump 71% to $3.5 billion in the first half on $4.5 billion of total revenue, with a 91% sell-through rate and 85% of bids arriving online
- London’s Sid Motion Gallery will close after a decade, with its founder saying she is stopping while ahead rather than waiting for the finances to force it
- Gagosian exits its spaces in Basel and London’s Burlington Arcade, trimming the physical footprint even as the top of the market recovers
- The new US tariff regime largely exempts art and antique imports from most countries, removing a threat that had frozen cross-border consignments
- The Aspen Art Fair leans into immersion over expansion, a sign that fairs are competing on experience now that scale has stopped paying
Why it matters: Auction houses are booming and galleries are closing
Christie’s just posted a 71% jump in public sales and Sotheby’s its best half ever, which by any normal reading means the art market has recovered.
Then look at the primary market, where a well-regarded London gallery is shutting after ten years while its finances are still healthy, and Gagosian, the largest dealer on earth, is quietly giving up space in Basel and Mayfair.
Both things are true because they are describing different businesses. The auction houses trade a few hundred trophy lots a year, and trophy lots are doing what trophy assets do everywhere in 2026: absorbing money that has nowhere better to go.
The gallery system exists to discover and develop artists nobody has heard of yet, which requires patient capital, physical space, and a middle market that has been hollowing out for three years.
Strip the middle and you get a barbell, where the top compounds and the entry ramp disappears. The gallery layer is the R&D function for the entire category, and the material selling for $100 million today was cheap in someone’s small gallery thirty years ago. Fewer of those rooms means fewer of those artists.
Precious Metals and Gems
- The Pentagon commits a $400 million conditional loan to Sunrise Energy Metals to build the world’s first scandium mine in Fifield, New South Wales, Australia in a market China currently dominates
- Trump announces roughly $3 billion across critical minerals and battery projects in a single afternoon of meetings with mining executives
- Sunrise has already agreed to sell Lockheed Martin 25% of its output for the mine’s first five years, giving the project an offtake before it has produced a gram
- More than 90% of China’s heavy rare earth imports, including dysprosium and terbium, come from Myanmar’s border region, one of the quieter reasons Beijing props up the junta there
Why it matters: A mine built for one buyer
Scandium is not scarce in the crust, it is scarce in production, because almost all of it comes out as a byproduct of other mining and nobody has ever built a mine dedicated to it.
The Pentagon just underwrote one with a $400 million loan for a project in New South Wales, Australia, on the reasoning that the metal makes aluminum dramatically stronger while staying light and heat-resistant, which matters enormously for aircraft and increasingly for data center hardware.
China restricted scandium exports for defense uses last year, and the entire Western response has been to go find a new supply chain.
What is notable is the deal structure rather than the geology. Sunrise has a Lockheed Martin offtake for a quarter of production, an allied government loan, and a bilateral minerals agreement behind it, which together mean the project’s economics were settled before a shovel moved. That is industrial policy replacing price discovery, and it is now the default template: Washington announced $3 billion of similar commitments the same week.
For investors this creates an odd asset. These are mines with guaranteed buyers, sovereign-adjacent credit support, and prices set by strategic necessity rather than marginal cost, which makes them look less like commodity plays and more like infrastructure with a mining risk attached.
Farmland
- Cotton’s rally started as short covering after two years of net-short positioning and now has a genuine weather story behind it, with West Texas taking essentially no rain for 24 days and Xinjiang running 99 to 102F through the boll development window
- Global cotton production is forecast down 4% to 5.5% while mill use climbs to a six-year high, leaving world stocks at an eight-year low
- The Rhine hits a record low and shipping stalls across Europe, with the Danube disrupting cruises, energy supply and food routes while surfacing everything from Roman-era finds to mammoth bones
- The World Meteorological Organization now expects the Pacific anomaly to average +2.9C through the fall, which would make this the strongest El Niño since records began in 1950
- Malaysian growers are racing to feed China’s durian boom while extreme weather squeezes margins, a reminder that the demand shock and the supply shock now arrive together
Why it matters: Cotton’s positioning trade
The description of cotton’s move a month ago was a squeeze.
Hedge funds had been net short for nearly two years, that positioning began unwinding in April, and short covering into fresh buying did most of the work while the fundamental picture barely moved.
What changed in the past fortnight is that the weather turned up to justify the price after the fact. West Texas is the largest dryland cotton region in the country and has had essentially no rain for 24 days with highs near 100F and no relief forecast.
Xinjiang, which grows about nine-tenths of China’s crop, stepped from the low 90s to 102F in the first week of August. Both are in boll development, the stage where heat destroys yield permanently rather than temporarily.
The wider frame is that this is what a strengthening El Niño looks like arriving in the actual data rather than the forecast, and Europe’s rivers are telling the same story from the other direction, with the Rhine at a record low and barge traffic stalling.
For farmland owners the takeaway is the one that repeats every cycle: the commodity trade needs the heat to hold through August, and the land trade needs it to happen roughly once a decade somewhere else.
Farmland I docs going out this week
Thanks to everyone who expressed interest in Farmland I.
We’re gathering final commitments. Investment docs go out this week.
Want to get in last-minute? Express interest ASAP or smash reply. Doors are closing on this one.
Tip: Use your IRA to fund this deal
Farmland I is about as long-term as investing gets. It’s a 22-year hold.
If you’re in the US, that makes it a natural fit for a self-directed IRA. You can put this investment into a retirement fund, and let earnings grow tax-advantaged along the way.
Don’t have an SDIRA yet?
We’ve partnered with two companies to make it easy. Both give your discounted fees.
- IRA Financial: SDIRAs, Checkbook IRAs, Solo 401(k)s, and Self-Directed HSAs. Use code ALTS for $100 off your first year of fees on any account. (Questions? Talk to John Maas)
- Alto IRA: An IRA platform purpose-built for alternatives. Altea members like you get 50% off account fees for the first year. (Questions? Talk to Kacie Connors)
Wine, Whiskey, and Spirits
- Diageo unveils an £890 million restructuring targeting about $1 billion in savings, leaning on Guinness and premixed cocktails to arrest subdued growth while braving a $150 million tariff hit
- Global beer production has fallen 3.9% from its 2013 peak and declined on every continent except Africa last year, with insiders describing prolonged stagnation rather than a cyclical dip
- Alcohol-free beer is the category’s one bright spot, growing about 6% this year and outpacing alcoholic beer for most of the past decade on just over 6% of global revenue
- Indonesia’s Multi Bintang posts 20% revenue growth and 30% profit growth on Bali distribution and a new local brand, a reminder that young populations are still expanding output
- The UK is the outlier among developed markets, with brewery output actually rising while Europe and China decline
Why it matters: World’s biggest spirits company reorganizes around beer
Diageo owns Johnnie Walker, Don Julio and Tanqueray. It just announced £890 million of restructuring and told investors the turnaround runs through Guinness and ready-to-drink cocktails, which is a remarkable thing for a spirits conglomerate to say out loud.
The logic is defensible. Guinness has been the company’s genuine growth engine for three years, carried by a younger, more female and increasingly non-drinking customer who orders it as much for the ritual as the alcohol, and Guinness 0.0 gives it a version to sell to people who are not drinking at all.
Set that against the global beer data, where volumes have been sliding since 2013 everywhere except Africa, and the picture sharpens: the category is shrinking while a handful of brands inside it take share.
Japan trip: Still time to join us!
Three nights in Tokyo. One night in the Nagano highlands.
Our Japan trip is 75 days away, and we’re excited to share the trip is taking shape.
Updates:
- Hotels locked in: Cerulean Tower Tokyu Hotel (Shibuya) for 3 nights, Hotel Silk (Madarao) for our night in Iiyama
- Bonsai Day is fully confirmed: Shunkaen Bonsai Museum, a traditional tea ceremony, and a private live bonsai performance with renowned artist Mr. Saeki
- Sumo show is set. This is gonna be epic.
- Traditional tea ceremony in Shinjuku (matcha and sencha)
- Nagano day: Now includes the Jigokudani Snow Monkey Park before our distillery tour and tasting at Kiyokawa
- Vinyl hunting in Shimokitazawa added for those sticking around before departure
More details to come as we lock in the final pieces.
4 Spots Left
Tokyo, sumo, bonsai masters, snow monkeys, sake at a private distillery — this trip is going to be epic.
Early bird pricing is over, but you can still lock in before it’s fully booked.
- Price: $3,999
- Bring a guest: +$2,999
- Includes: All meals, drinks, activities, events, and transportation. Everything except flights.
Lock in your spot with a $1,000 deposit. Fully refundable up to 60 days before departure.
See you next time, Stefan.
