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Greene King runs pubs, restaurants and hotels across the UK and brews well-known beers like Greene King IPA and Old Speckled Hen.
Greene King is one of Britain's biggest pub companies. It owns and runs hundreds of pubs, restaurants and hotels, mostly in England, and it also brews beer — including Greene King IPA and Old Speckled Hen — that gets sold in its own pubs and in shops and supermarkets across the country.
The business works like this: people pay for a pint, a meal, or a night in a hotel room, and Greene King keeps the money left after paying staff, rent, and the cost of the beer and food. It owns many of its pub buildings outright, which means it doesn't just sell drinks — it collects rent-like value from the property itself. Brewing its own beer helps too, because a pint of its own brand costs less to stock than a rival's. Greene King was a publicly traded company on the London Stock Exchange for decades, but in 2019 the Hong Kong conglomerate CK Assets Holdings bought it in a deal worth around £4.6 billion. So it's now privately owned, though its beers and pubs remain household names. The pub industry in Britain has had a rough stretch — rising costs, changing drinking habits, and pandemic closures hit everyone — but Greene King's scale and its mix of food, drink, and lodging give it more room to absorb shocks than a small independent pub.
The company's real strength is that it owns the whole chain: the brewery makes the beer, the pubs sell it, and the hotels fill rooms above the bar. That's a tidy setup, but it also means Greene King is deeply tied to the fortunes of the British high street and to how often people choose to go out rather than stay in.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026