This is what we don't drink: shares of the Chinese beer manufacturer fell sharply after a video of a worker who urinated in a vat of malt
Category: Eyewitness, PEGI 16
4 November 2023
“It's not beer, it's urine” - the common phrase is more accurate than ever when it comes to Qingdao. Just recently, a video went viral showing a worker urinating in a vat of malt at a brewery.
The video instantly went viral and received millions of views. It turned out that the video was filmed at the Qingdao brewery, and the tank where the crazy Chinese relieves himself is used to store ingredients - in particular, malt.
After the video was made public, plant representatives had to give explanations. They reported that they had established the identity of the outrageous man and told about the nuances of what happened. A worker surnamed Cui was helping unload containers of malt from a truck, but was in a bad mood. Shortly before this, Cui had quarreled with a heavy truck driver because he parked poorly and did not want to remove his car.
As a result, the worker climbed into the malt container and relieved his bad mood by urinating into the container. All this was filmed and posted on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, by the same truck driver. A huge scandal broke out.
The worker will be placed under administrative arrest “for causing material damage” (he faces up to 15 days in prison). In addition, of course, he was fired, and the company strengthened measures to monitor the quality of employee behavior in order to prevent similar incidents in the future. The affected batch of malt was sealed and not allowed into production. Qingdao is also working on a logistics option that would eliminate contact between personnel and raw materials throughout the entire process, even if this modernization costs a pretty penny.
However, all these explanations were received with a fair amount of skepticism, and the stock market reacted to the incident immediately. If last week the fall in shares on the Shanghai Stock Exchange was recorded at 1.15%, then after the video appeared online, they collapsed by almost 7%.
There are jokes on social networks:
"I always said the beer here tasted like horse urine. Turns out I was wrong."
But the beer manufacturer is not laughing, because it is sold throughout Southeast Asia. Tsingtao, registered in Hong Kong, is the second largest brewer in China, and it would be very sad to lose the market due to the stupid antics of a disgruntled worker. And in South Korea, the popularity of the drink began to fall. Visitors to eateries began to order other beer, and restaurants and cafes that had purchased the drink for future use would like to return it to the suppliers and get their money.
By the way, if Asians declare a boycott of this beer, then bad times may await the company - the American concern will not let you lie.
