Industry Sectors: Beverages

Ian Shackleton & team Nomura

second team Nico Lambrechts & team BofA Merrill Lynch

third team Trevor Stirling & team Sanford C. Bernstein

Shooting straight in at No. 1 after being unranked last year is the Nomura duo led by Ian Shackleton, 53. “What Ian Shackleton doesn’t know about beverage companies isn’t worth knowing,” insists one money manager. The analysts upgraded Anheuser-Busch InBev in December 2008, telling clients that the newly merged company would sell noncore assets and use the proceeds to pay down debt. In the months since, AB InBev sold its stake in theme parks, entertainment industries and breweries in Asia and Central Europe. The company’s share price had soared from €11.81 to €32.80 — a jaw-dropping 177.7 percent gain — by late October, and the analysts downgraded the stock to neutral, on valuation. It gained a further 11 percent by December 31, just ahead of the sector’s 10.4 percent advance over the period. Shackleton, who earned the fellow chartered accountant qualification from Oxford University in 1983, worked as a beverages analyst at Credit Suisse before joining Lehman Brothers in 2004; Nomura acquired the Asian and European assets of Lehman Brothers Holdings in 2008.

The BofA quartet conducted by Nico Lambrechts, which drops one notch to second place, impressed investors with a contrarian buy recommendation on France’s Pernod Ricard in April, at €42.34, on the belief that concerns about the company’s ability to refinance loans had been overstated. The stock had bubbled up 41.5 percent, to €59.91, by late December.

Down one rung to third place is the Sanford C. Bernstein trio guided by Trevor Stirling, described by one buy-sider as “a treasure chest of information.” In January 2009 the team highlighted its outperform rating on Carlsberg, citing the Danish brewer’s strong growth prospects. By the end of the year, the stock had outpaced the sector by 82.3 percentage points.