GUANGZHOU, April 4 (Xinhua) -- Leading U.S. brewer Anheuser-Busch has announced that it will build a brewery in Foshan of south China's Guangdong Province, in an attempt to double sales of its Budweiser beer in the next five years.

    China's beer market grew nearly 15 percent last year, the third consecutive year of double-digit growth.

    "China's beer market has great potential for development, and building a brewery in south China could help improve the productivity of Budweiser and lower the cost," said Cheng Yeren, managing director of Greater China of Anheuser-Busch's Asian branch.

    Scheduled for completion in late 2008, the brewery will cover 249,000 square meters and cost 63 million U.S. dollars. It will have a production capacity of 260 million liters.

    In 1995, Anheuser-Busch established its first brewing facility in Wuhan, capital city of central China's Hubei Province. The brewery has since quadrupled its original capacity to 420 million liters.

    With Budweiser the world's largest-selling beer, Anheuser-Buschalso holds a 27-percent stake in China's biggest brewery group Tsingtao and acquired the Harbin Brewery Group in 2004. Its investment in China has exceeded 1.8 billion U.S. dollars.

    China produced 35.15 million kiloliters of beer in 2006, up 14.7 percent from the previous year, leading the world in beer production for four straight years, according to the 2006-2007 yearly report on China's sugar and wine market.

    The report also noted that China will face increasing demand for beer, and will keep 10 percent growth in the coming two years.

    The report said that great market potential and optimized market environment will lure more foreign brewer giant into the Chinese market, and a new round of beer industry integration will take off.

    There were eight brewers in the country that each boast pre-tax profits more than 500 million yuan (about 62.5 million U.S. dollars) in 2006, and their output accounted for 44.6 percent of the country's total.

    Major brewers in China got 83.88 billion yuan (about 10.49 billion U.S. dollars) of sales revenue last year, according to the report, an increase of 16.37 percent on the previous year.