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Auction to begin on home of Absolut vodka

Sweden is set to begin its sale of state-owned wine and spirits manufacturer, Vin & Sprit.

Published: 11 December 2007 11:12 CET

The government said it would contact all interested parties over the course of the day before beginning an auction process, Minister for Financial Markets Mats Odell announced at a press conference on Tuesday morning.

“We are now coming to the end of the preparatory phase and the beginning of a more active phase. We expect a transaction to be made public next year,” sad Odell.

The minister said that the government had decided to conduct the sale in the form of a bidding process in order to maximize the value of Vin & Sprit.

Vin & Sprit has been valued at 40 billion kronor ($6.15 billion).

A number of leading drinks makers have expressed an interest in the Swedish company since the government announced its privatization plans in March of this year. These include Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Fortune Brands and Bacardi.

The Swedish state is the sole shareholder in Vin & Sprit, which owns the Absolut vodka brand.

Spain has second highest rate of daily alcohol drinkers in EU

Photo: Cristina Quicler/AFP

Thirteen percent of people in Spain drink alcohol every day, a similar rate to Italy, where 12 percent enjoy a tipple on a daily basis, and only behind Portugal, where 20 percent of people have an alcoholic drink seven days a week.

That puts Spaniards above the EU average of 8.4 percent daily drinkers, data published by Eurostat in July 2021 reveals.

This consistent alcoholic intake among Spaniards is far higher than in countries such as Sweden (1.8 percent daily drinkers), Poland (1.6 percent), Norway (1.4 percent), Estonia (1.3 percent) and Latvia (1.2 percent).

However, the survey that looked at the frequency of alcohol consumption in people aged 15 and over shows that weekly and monthly drinking habits among Spaniards are more in line with European averages.

A total of 22.9 percent of respondents from Spain said they drunk booze on a weekly basis, 18.3 percent every month, 12.5 percent less than once a month, and 33 percent haven’t had a drink ever or in the last year.

Furthermore, another part of the study which looked at heavy episodic drinking found that Spaniards are the third least likely to get blind drunk, after Cypriots and Italians.

The Europeans who ingested more than 60 grammes of pure ethanol on a single occasion at least once a month in 2019 were Danes (37.8 percent), Romanians (35 percent), Luxembourgers (34.3 percent) and Germans (30.4 percent).

The UK did not form part of the study but Ireland is included.

Overall, Eurostat’s findings reflect how the Spanish habit of enjoying a glass of wine with a meal or a small beer (caña) outdoors with friends continues to be common daily practice, even though 13 percent does not make it prevalent.

Spaniards’ tendency to drink in moderation also continues to prevail, even though a 2016 study by Danish pharmaceuticals company Lundbeck found that one in six people in the country still drinks too much.

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