Europe
THE WORLD OF HEINEKEN
time would have been premature, he felt. A few years later, the
time was ripe. Many years later, when talking about this
acquisition, he said, "I was sitting in the Pentagon (the Heineken
Holding Head Office, Ed.) doing a few calculations to see what we
could and could not afford. It was an awful lot of money for us
back then, but we had to do it." The takeover involved an amount
of 68 million euros (150 million guilders). The rumours circulating
in the organisation to the effect that the acquisition meant the
end of the great rival Amstel were immediately quashed by Alfred
Heineken. He had never had the slightest intention of removing
Amstel from the market. He saw major opportunities for Amstel
as the number-two brand both in The Netherlands and beyond.
Thanks to this man's vision at the end of the 1960s, Heineken now
has a really strong brand in Amstel both nationally and
internationally.
In the early 1970s - by this time Alfred had been a Member of the
Executive Board for several years - the idea gradually dawned on
him that Heineken should look upon the whole of Europe as its
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