While wine does not have an excise tax in Romania, although it is alcohol, beer has also increased this year: by 10%. “Do we like taxes? No, but we pay them. We accept responsibility. We are beer producers and we pay all the necessary taxes,” Michal Mrovec, president of the Romanian Brewers’ Association, said at a press conference.

According to him, the level of taxation is, of course, important, but predictability is much more important.

“The worst thing that can happen is to be surprised by a change in the law because we can’t adapt, we can’t adapt,” he says.

The general director of the same organization, Yulia Leferman, states that last year the beer market shrank for the second year in a row: by 5%, which was reflected in the volume of 15 million hectoliters.

“As an industry, we have repeatedly faced increases in this tax, which usually occurred at the beginning of each financial year. This was the intended mechanism that the industry has advocated with government and that we have had for the last 5 years, but in the last 2 years we have had a difference in approach at government level. The industry faced an excise duty hike that took place in the middle of the financial year,” she recalls, adding that this put additional pressure on manufacturing activities.

Also, according to his statements, we are talking about a 6% increase in excise duty compared to August 2022, which came into force on January 1, 2023.

“The difference between 2022 and 2023 was 11% (increase). This year, from January 1, 2024, a new increase of 10% came into effect. Today, we have an excise duty on beer that is 18% higher than in Germany. And this is in conditions where the purchasing power of Romanians is 3 times lower,” the representative of the Association of Romanian Brewers also noted.

*Last year, the Association stated that in Romania the excise tax was almost 8% higher than in Germany (0.85 lei/hl/°Plato vs. 0.79 lei/hl/°Plato).

She believes that the level of taxation of the industry has reached its maximum limit.

“From this year, the mechanism of annual indexation, which was an element of predictability for the industry over time, has been discontinued. We have initiated a dialogue with the Ministry of Finance to hold a discussion to finalize the legal framework that would ensure a level of predictability regarding the size of the excise tax in future years as well,” she says.