Red Bull's owners toast  €500m payout as sales surge

Drink maker sees income rise 10% to €818m last year

About 7.5bn cans of Red Bull were sold in 2019, according to the company’s website, making its owners among the wealthiest people on the planet.

Energy drink maker Red Bull raised the annual payout to owners Dietrich Mateschitz and the Yoovidhya family to more than half a billion euro after sales and profit swelled.

Red Bull’s net income rose 10% last year to €818m after revenue grew 8.6% and payouts from subsidiaries soared, according to a filing to the Austrian company register. The payout to founder and boss Mateschitz and Thailand’s Yoovidhya family was €554m.

Red Bull, whose subsidiaries around the world handle local marketing and distribution, further shrank payroll in the Fuschl, Austria, based headquarters. Staff was reduced to 119 employees in 2019, from 160 a year earlier, according to the document. That lowered personnel costs by more than half to €30m, implying the 41 people earned an average of more than €900,000 a year.

Thai entrepreneur and sometime duck farmer Chaleo Yoovidhya teamed up with Mateschitz in 1987 after the Austrian marketing whiz discovered the energy drink sold by Chaleo’s firm while looking to counteract jet lag on a business trip.

It’s proved a popular tonic. About 7.5bn cans were sold in 2019, according to the company’s website, making its owners among the wealthiest people on the planet. Chaleo’s heirs control a $25bn fortune and Mateschitz is Austria’s richest person with a $15.9bn net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Bloomberg