South Korea’s beer market, enjoying its peak season due in part to the ongoing World Cup tournaments and summer season events, has been buoyed by import beers that did better in sales than local brands, industry data showed Friday.

In a period of six days since the Brazil World Cup kicked off on June 13, beer sales rose 12.4 percent compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the data.

Import beers showed bigger growth, soaring 44.5 percent on-year, while sales of local brands, mostly dominated by two big brewers ― Oriental Brewery (OB) and Hite-Jinro ― increased 1.1 percent during the cited period.

As a result, the market share of imported beer jumped to 33.6 percent of the total during the World Cup period, up from last year’s 26 percent, the data showed. (Yonhap)