TOKYO (TR) – Japan’s Fair Trade Commission is expanding its investigation into a suspected price-fixing cartel orchestrated by the nation’s top four beer companies, with new evidence suggesting the collusion extended to popular canned chuhai beverages, sources revealed on Saturday, reports the Sankei Shimbun (Oct. 10).
Asahi Beer, Kirin Beer, Suntory, and Sapporo Beer are already under heavy scrutiny for allegedly coordinating price hikes on beer and “third-sector” malt beverages.
However, investigators have now found that the companies also uniformly raised prices on “Ready-To-Drink” (RTD) products — a highly lucrative market category that includes canned chuhai, highballs, and mixed cocktails.
Citing soaring raw material costs, the brewing giants carried out consecutive, simultaneous price revisions on beer products in October 2022, October 2023, and April 2025.
Crucially, with the sole exception of the October 2023 hike—which was implemented to align with national liquor tax revisions that lowered taxes on regular beer while raising them on cheaper alternatives—all four companies hiked their RTD prices in lockstep with their beer products.
Further fueling suspicions of illegal collusion, sources indicate that at some of the accused companies, the exact same sales departments were responsible for handling both the beer and RTD product lines.
The Fair Trade Commission is now carefully scrutinizing the internal operations of the “Big Four” to determine if the alleged cartel directly manipulated the canned cocktail market.
