NEWS
JAPANESE BEERS FLYING OFF THE SHELVES IN S. KOREA AS “BOYCOTT JAPAN” SUBSIDES
By Susan Lewis
15-5-2023
Source: Asahi
Japanese beers are flying off the shelves in South Korea as relations of the two countries improved and the "boycott Japan" campaign since 2019 quickly subsided.
South Korea’s retail giant Lotte reintroduced a small amount of Japanese beer products at the end of last month upon consistent request from local consumers.
The result was that all of them went out of stock in just a week, the company has now placed more orders to ride this trend of a return of Japanese beer’s popularity.
Other South Korea retailers are also racing to place more orders for Japanese beers to meet high demands.
At E-mart, South Korea’s largest retail store chain owned by Shinsegae group, nearly 10,000 cans of Asahi super dry draft beer were sold in each store each day since its launch on 1 May.
This is a remarkable number considering that the amount of imported beers sold each day at large retail stores is normally around 1,000 cans.
According to the South Korea Customs’ statistics released on 8 May, the value of Japanese beer imports in the first quarter of this year was W8.77 billion (USD6.62 million), more than doubled that of the same period last year.
When compared to the import value of the previous quarter, the figure has also soared nearly 60 percent.
Japanese beer exports to South Korea plunged 99.9 percent in 2019 due to the "boycott Japan" campaign which was trigged by arguments over treatments of wartime labour and trade related issues.
Japan Finance Ministry’s figure showed that a mere Y588,000 (USD5,300) worth of Japanese beer was shipped to South Korea in September 2019 at the height of the campaign.
The September 2019 figure was almost a total wipe-out from the approximately Y783.6 million (USD7.2 million) worth of beer exports in September 2018.
The trade only started to improve in recent weeks as relations between the two governments warm up under South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
The two leaders have paid state visits to each other displaying rare scenes of harmony between the two countries whose relationship has long been plagued by Japan’s iron fist rule on the Korean Peninsula between 1910 and 1945.
(the writer can be contacted at: info@thewinechronicle.com)
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