Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically impacted societies and economies all over the world, although some industrial sectors, including more specifically Food & Beverage, despite having been undoubtedly penalized, have shown considerable resilience. In the wine sector, even more particularly, there has been a significant shift, due to force majeure, from on trade consumption to off-trade consumption. In this scenario, e-commerce has been one of the channels interested by the greatest development in the wine market (also due to the limited pre-pandemic size, at least in Italy) and in this context, a considerable investment was carried out in June 2020, i.e., the acquisition (substantially) of the Tannico platform by the Campari Group. This operation has been characterized by a very high strategic potential, whose examination constitutes the focus of this study; however, some critical issues can also be found in this transaction, which must be appropriately governed and handled by the entrepreneurial and managerial team of the Campari Group, being this business case relevant, from a scientific perspective, also with a view to benchmarking for possible other experiments by other market players.