Graham Mackay

Graham Mackay anticipated the global consolidation of the beer industry and helped transform his South African brewing company into SABMiller, the world’s second-largest behind Anheuser-Busch InBev. Mr. Mackay was a rising executive at what was then called South African Breweries when Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990. Until then, South African Breweries had dominated the country’s beer market, but expanding internationally was impossible because of sanctions imposed on the country’s apartheid government. Those sanctions were lifted on Mr. Mandela’s release, and as apartheid ended the company began looking overseas. Mr. Mackay, who was appointed chief operating executive in 1994, looked elsewhere. He started in Eastern Europe, where the fall of the Berlin Wall permitted the company to purchase beer companies in Central and Eastern Europe. Although South African Breweries was a rising player in the developing world, it was not until 2002, when it merged with the Miller Brewing Company in a $5.6 billion deal to form SABMiller, that it established itself as a major contender in the global beer industry. Other big deals followed, including a joint venture between SABMiller and Molson Coors in 2008, and the purchase of the Australian beer Foster’s in 2011. Today, the company sells 200 brands of beer and employs 70,000 people in 75 countries. Last year, it brought in $34.5 billion in revenue. Mr. Mackay was also a nonexecutive director at Philip Morris International Inc., which was spun off from Altria, and Reckitt Benckiser PLC. Ernest Arthur Graham Mackay was born on July 26, 1949, in Johannesburg and grew up in Swaziland, the South African province of Natal, and Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe. After earning degrees at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of South Africa, he joined South African Breweries in 1978, where he helped manage computer processing. Mr. Mackay became the company’s chairman in July 2012, but stepped down from all his duties in April 2013, when he left the company because of illness.He is survived by his second wife, Beverly, and six sons.