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Graham-Mackay

SABMiller’s giant, Graham Mackay, passes away

SABMiller said he died peacefully in Hampshire with his family at his side.

Mackay was diagnosed with a brain tumour in April when he stepped back from his role as chairman. He returned to work in September but was forced to step aside again last month.

John Manser, appointed chairman, said: “Graham was one of the most inspirational and successful leaders in international business by any measure.”

Here’s his obituary from the New York Times:

Graham Mackay, who anticipated the global consolidation of the beer industry and helped transform his South African brewing company into SABMiller, the world’s second-largest behind Anheuser-Busch InBev, died on Wednesday in Hampshire, England. He was 64.

Graham Mackay was an executive with South Africa’s largest brewer when the end of apartheid opened doors to investment.

The cause was a brain tumor, the company said in a statement.

Mackay was a rising executive at what was then called South African Breweries (SAB) when Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990. Until then, South African Breweries had dominated the country’s beer market, but expanding internationally was impossible because of sanctions imposed on the country’s apartheid government.

Those sanctions were lifted on Mandela’s release, and as apartheid ended the company began looking overseas. Europe did not look promising, nor did the United States, since both were dominated by powerful companies like Guinness, Heineken, Anheuser-Busch and Miller.

So Mackay, who was appointed chief operating executive in 1994, looked elsewhere. He started in Eastern Europe, where the fall of the Berlin Wall permitted the company to purchase beer companies in Central and Eastern Europe.

“The fall of Communism was the beginning of the big opportunity, because there were terribly run assets that were available for cheap,” said Benj Steinman, the editor of Beer Marketer’s Insights, an industry newsletter.

The company continued its purchases in other parts of the world overlooked by the industry, making acquisitions in Africa, Asia, India and Central America.

In 1999 the company moved its headquarters to London, where it began trading on the London Stock Exchange, and Mackay was promoted to chief executive. The same year, it purchased the Czech brewer Plzensky Prazdroj, maker of Pilsner Urquell.

Although SAB was a rising player in the developing world, it was not until 2002, when it merged with the Miller Brewing Company in a $5.6 billion deal to form SABMiller, that it established itself as a major contender in the global beer industry. Other big deals followed, including a joint venture between SABMiller and Molson Coors in 2008, and the purchase of the Australian beer Foster’s in 2011.

Today, the company sells 200 brands of beer and employs 70,000 people in 75 countries. Last year, it brought in $34.5 billion in revenue.

Ernest Arthur Graham Mackay was born on July 26, 1949, in Johannesburg and grew up in Swaziland, the South African province of Natal, and Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe. After earning degrees at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of South Africa, he joined South African Breweries in 1978, where he helped manage computer processing.

Mackay became the company’s chairman in July 2012, but stepped down from all his duties in April 2013, when he left the company because of illness.

He was briefly able to resume as chairman in September but learned in November that treatment of his brain tumour had not been successful.

He is survived by his second wife, Beverly, and six sons.

John Manser, who succeeded him as chairman, said Mr. Mackay had a quiet, understated style that belied his ambition. “I think SABMiller really is a testament to Graham’s life,” he said.

SABMiller paid Mackay £13.9 million last year and he leaves a shareholding worth just over £43 million.