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Japan is just a few days away from running out of Asahi Super Dry as the producer of the nation’s most popular beer wrestles with a devastating cyber attack that has shut down its domestic breweries.
The vast majority of Asahi Group’s 30 factories in Japan have not operated since Monday after the attack disabled its ordering and delivery system, the company said.
Retailers are already expecting empty shelves as the outage stretches into its fourth day with no clear timeline for factories recommencing operations. Super Dry could also run out at izakaya pubs, which rely on draught and bottles.
Lawson, one of Japan’s big convenience stores, said in a statement that it stocks many Asahi Group products and “it is possible that some of these products may become increasingly out of stock from tomorrow onwards”.
“This is having an impact on everyone,” said an executive at another of Japan’s major retailers. “I think we will run out of products soon. When it comes to Super Dry, I think we’ll run out in two or three days at supermarkets and Asahi’s food products within a week or so.”
The executive said that it would look to other brands such as Suntory or Kirin to quench Japanese drinkers’ thirst but acknowledged that many customers are fiercely loyal to Super Dry’s taste.
Asahi declined to comment on any possible shortage or retailer inventories. Japan’s largest brewer produces the equivalent of 6.7mn large bottles of beer per day on average in the country, based on Financial Times calculations using its 2024 sales figure.
The Asahi incident follows a spate of cyber incidents at other major companies that have proved highly disruptive. Earlier this week, the UK government provided a £2bn emergency credit line to Jaguar Land Rover after production stopped for a month due to a devastating cyber attack.
According to cyber security experts at the Tokyo-based group Nihon Cyber Defence (NCD), Japanese companies are increasingly seen as attractive targets for ransomware attackers because of their poor defences and the fact that many companies simply paid the demanded sum through back channels.
In 2024 Japan’s National Police Agency said it had received 222 official reports of ransomware attacks — a 12 per cent rise from the previous year but experts at NCD said it represented just a small fraction of the real volume of attacks.
In a survey conducted by the agency, Japanese companies said that in 49 per cent of ransomware cases, it took at least a month to recover the data lost in the attack. Asahi said in a statement that there was no confirmed leakage of customer data to external parties.
In a measure of growing public and private sector panic over cyber vulnerabilities, Japan passed a law in May that granted the government greater rights to proactively combat cyber criminals and state sponsored hackers. The chair of the government’s policy research council at the time, Itsunori Onodera, warned that without an urgent upgrade of the nation’s cyber security “the lives of Japanese people will be put at risk”.
Asahi, whose shares fell 2.6 per cent on Thursday, not only produces Super Dry beer in Japan but also soft drinks, mints and baby food, as well as producing own brand goods for Japanese retailers.
Asahi is still investigating whether it was a ransomware attack, according to a spokesperson.
As a result of the cyber attack, Asahi has postponed the planned launch of eight new Asahi products, including fruit soda, lemon-flavoured ginger ale and protein bars, indefinitely.
On Wednesday, Asahi trialled using paper-based systems to process orders and deliveries in a small-scale trial and it is in the process of figuring out whether to proceed with more manual-style deliveries.
Operations in other regions of the world, such as Europe, where it sells Peroni Nastro Azzurro, have not been affected by the cyber attack.
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