Asahi Group Holdings has decided to play cyberpunk hard mode: keep the taps flowing, rebuild its systems, and absolutely refuse to talk to the people holding its data hostage. In the ongoing “Cyberpunk Beer Crisis” saga, this is the moment the protagonist looks the villain in the eye and says: no deal—even if the villain is a ransomware gang staring at Japan’s beer pipelines.
Where the Story Was
Back in early October, Asahi shut down domestic operations after a ransomware attack froze its ordering, shipping, and call center systems, forcing most of its 30 Japanese breweries to halt production. Beer shortages followed fast, with supermarkets and izakaya discovering that just-in-time logistics plus “no orders can be processed” equals very dry shelves for Super Dry.
As covered in our article “Cyberpunk Beer Crisis Pouring Over Japan”, rivals like Kirin Holdings and Sapporo Holdings suddenly found themselves as emergency suppliers in a market that usually runs like a well-oiled tap. The result looked less like normal competition and more like a live-fire systems test of Japan’s entire beer supply chain.
Asahi’s New Stance: No Chats With Criminals
In the latest turn, Asahi’s CEO Atsushi Katsuki has stated that the company has not communicated with the attackers and would not have paid even if approached with demands. For a firm that has already postponed third-quarter earnings and now warns that its full-year results will also be delayed, this is not a cost-free ethical stance. The company is still collaborating with outside experts to restore its IT systems and verify financial data before giving investors a proper look at the damage.
“We thought we had taken full and necessary measures (to prevent a cyberattack),” Katsuki said.
“But this attack was beyond our imagination. It was a sophisticated and cunning attack.”
Operationally, Asahi has leaned into a strangely analogue future: some shipments have resumed, but only thanks to manual order-taking and prioritised distribution. Production has restarted at a subset of its beer plants, but the national logistics brain—those centralised order and shipping systems—remains impaired, limiting how effectively the kegs and cans can actually reach drinkers.
Retailers and restaurants, especially convenience chains and izakaya, are still dealing with patchy availability and awkward substitutions as they navigate a market where one of the big players occasionally has to write down orders by hand like it is 1985. The irony is sharp: years of digital optimisation, undone in days, and suddenly clipboards are back on the critical-path flowchart for getting beer into glasses.
For consumers, this “beer crisis” has meant forced experimentation: when your usual Super Dry is missing, you reach for whatever is cold and available—and a certain percentage of those emergency picks will stick as new habits. In market terms, Asahi is paying twice: once in direct disruption, and again in slowly eroding brand exclusivity at key on-trade accounts.
For our readers the “Cyberpunk Beer Crisis” now has a clear thematic arc: phase one was shock and empty shelves, phase two is Asahi’s principled refusal to pay the villains, and phase three will be the slow, spreadsheet-heavy reckoning where the company discovers how much market share and margin can vanish in a few compromised servers. It is all about beer—but apparently, it is also very much about backups.
