Red Bull is an energy drink company, or is it really a marketing company?
Nathan Chadwick · · 12 min read
TLDRRead the short version
- Red Bull sold 13.969 billion cans in 2025 and booked €12.196 billion of turnover. Most of that comes from one product, a can of sweet caffeinated fizz, so the interesting question is why people pay a premium for it.
- The answer is that Red Bull behaves like a media and events company that happens to sell a drink. Reported marketing spend has been around 25 to 30 percent of revenue, versus single digits for most big beverage brands.
- Stratos is the proof. Felix Baumgartner jumped from 38,969 metres in October 2012, broke the speed of sound in freefall, and more than 8 million people watched live on YouTube. It sold cans without ever looking like an advert.
- Beyond Stratos: two Formula 1 teams, a global network of football clubs, Cliff Diving, Rampage, Flugtag, breaking, a record label, a TV station, a streaming app, and a hypercar. Each one makes content for the brand and several now make money in their own right.
- The core business is lean. Production is outsourced to contract bottlers, the brand does the selling, and the media, sport and tech arms either pay for themselves or feed the can.
Is Red Bull an energy drink company#
On paper, yes. The company is called Red Bull GmbH, it is based in Fuschl am See, a village of around 1,500 people near Salzburg, and its income is overwhelmingly from selling one drink.
In practice I think the better description is that Red Bull is a marketing company that found a product cheap enough to sell at scale. The can is the revenue. Everything else is the reason anyone buys the can.
Most people can name three Red Bull athletes before they can name a single ingredient. Most people have seen a Red Bull F1 car, a Red Bull helmet, a Red Bull event on YouTube, or a Red Bull stunt on the news before they have ever read the side of the can. That is not an accident. That is the business model.
Where it came from#
The drink was not invented in Austria. A Thai entrepreneur called Chaleo Yoovidhya launched a tonic called Krating Daeng in 1976. It means "red gaur", a gaur being a wild Asian bison, and it was popular with truck drivers and labourers who needed to stay awake.
An Austrian marketing executive called Dietrich Mateschitz tried it on a work trip to Thailand in the early 1980s, reportedly found it helped with his jet lag, and spotted the gap. In 1984 the two of them founded Red Bull GmbH, each with a 49 percent stake and the remaining 2 percent going to Chaleo's son Chalerm. The agreement was that Mateschitz would run it.
Here is the part I find interesting. Between 1984 and 1987 Mateschitz did not rush to market. Red Bull's own company profile says he spent nearly three years working on the formula, the positioning, the packaging and the marketing concept before launching in Austria on 1 April 1987. He changed the recipe for Western tastes, carbonated it, and put it in a slim silver and blue can.
He did not just build a drink. He built a category, and he built the story around it at the same time. Mateschitz died in October 2022. The Yoovidhya family still holds a majority stake, and his son Mark inherited his share.
The marketing playbook#
Most drinks brands pay famous people to hold their product. Coca-Cola and Pepsi have decades of that. Red Bull did something different and, at the start, much cheaper.
A Forbes profile from 2005 put Red Bull's marketing spend at about 30 percent of revenue, against roughly 9 percent for Coca-Cola. It also noted that rather than pay pop stars, Mateschitz sponsored hundreds of fringe athletes, the sort of people who would "surf in Nova Scotia in January or jump out of a plane". Later estimates have sat in a similar range. Red Bull does not publish a current marketing figure, so treat that as an outside estimate rather than a hard number.
The idea is simple:
- Do not interrupt people with adverts. Be the thing they choose to watch.
- Own the event instead of sponsoring somebody else's.
- Back athletes early, when they are cheap and unknown, and grow with them.
- Film everything, and own the footage.
"Red Bull gives you wings" is the slogan, but the strategy is that Red Bull gives other people the budget to do something extraordinary, and then makes sure the cameras are there.
The jump from space: Red Bull Stratos#
You asked about the guy who jumped from space, so let's get into it. One small correction first: it was not from orbit, and strictly speaking it was not from space either. It was from the stratosphere, below the Kármán line at 100 km that is usually treated as the edge of space. It was still absolutely mad.
On 14 October 2012, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner stepped out of a pressurised capsule hanging under a giant helium balloon above Roswell, New Mexico. The official record details ratified by the FAI, the world air sports federation, are:
- Exit altitude: 38,969.4 metres, which is 127,852 feet or about 24 miles
- Freefall distance: 36,402.6 metres
- Top speed: 1,357.6 km/h, or 843.6 mph, which is Mach 1.25
- He became the first person to break the speed of sound in freefall without any vehicle around him
He was in the air for roughly nine minutes in total, and about four minutes twenty seconds of that was freefall. In the middle of it he went into a spin that could have been fatal if he had not recovered. He did, and he landed on his feet.
The marketing is the real story. More than 8 million people watched the stream live on YouTube at its peak, which Google confirmed was the largest concurrent live audience in the site's history at that point, and Guinness recognises it as a record. There was no ad break. There was no pitch. The Red Bull logo was on the capsule, the suit and the balloon, and for a couple of hours half the internet was watching it in silence.
It also had real science behind it. The programme had a five year build, a team of doctors, engineers and aerospace specialists, and Joe Kittinger, the Air Force colonel who held the previous record from 1960, was in mission control talking Felix through the jump. Red Bull published the data afterwards.
Two footnotes. Google executive Alan Eustace later broke the altitude record in 2014 with a jump from around 135,890 feet, but it was a quiet, low-key affair and almost nobody remembers it, which tells you something about marketing. And Felix Baumgartner died in July 2025 in a paragliding accident in Italy.
The sport and the madness#
Stratos is the one everyone knows, but it is one project in a very long list. Red Bull has done a version of this in almost every extreme sport going.
Formula 1#
This is the biggest. Red Bull started as a sponsor, bought the Jaguar F1 team from Ford at the end of 2004 (widely reported as a symbolic $1 deal on the condition that it invested heavily), and entered the sport in 2005 as Red Bull Racing. The team's own record now stands at six Constructors' titles and eight Drivers' titles:
- Sebastian Vettel and the team won four straight Drivers' and Constructors' doubles from 2010 to 2013
- Max Verstappen won four Drivers' titles in a row from 2021 to 2024
- The team took Constructors' titles in 2022 and 2023, with 2023 widely described as the most dominant season in F1 history
It also runs a second team, now called Racing Bulls, which is effectively a finishing school for young drivers. Verstappen debuted in F1 at 17 through that route. Red Bull's talent pipeline is not a side project, it is a core part of how the whole thing runs.
In 2021 it founded Red Bull Powertrains to build its own engines, and for 2026 it has partnered with Ford on the new power units, which is a pleasing bit of history given that Ford sold it the team in the first place. Christian Horner left the team in 2025 and was replaced as Team Principal and CEO by Laurent Mekies.
Football#
Red Bull has built a multi-club network that includes:
- RB Leipzig in Germany, founded in 2009 after Red Bull bought a lower-league licence. The "RB" officially stands for "RasenBallsport", which is a workaround for German rules that stop clubs being named after sponsors
- FC Red Bull Salzburg in Austria, rebranded in 2005 despite furious opposition from existing fans
- New York Red Bulls in MLS
- Red Bull Bragantino in Brazil
- RB Omiya Ardija in Japan
- Minority stakes taken in Paris FC and Leeds United in 2024
The model is to buy talent young, develop it, win some games, and sell on. Erling Haaland, Sadio Mané, Josko Gvardiol, Dayot Upamecano, Dominik Szoboszlai, Benjamin Šeško and many others came through Red Bull clubs. Jürgen Klopp joined in January 2025 as Head of Global Soccer and left in July 2026 to become Germany's head coach, but it shows how seriously they take it.
Events that nobody else would run#
Red Bull created or runs a long list of events that are genuinely strange, and it owns the broadcast rights to all of them:
- Red Bull Rampage: freeride mountain biking on cliff faces in the Utah desert
- Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series: divers dropping from 27 metres
- Red Bull Air Race: pilots racing planes through inflatable pylons, which ran for years before it wound down after 2019
- Red Bull Crashed Ice: ice skating downhill through a street course with obstacles
- Red Bull Flugtag: teams build homemade flying machines and push them off a pier, usually into the water
- Red Bull Soapbox Race: gravity-powered cars with a sense of humour
- Red Bull BC One: one of the biggest breaking competitions in the world, and breaking made its Olympic debut at Paris 2024
- Red Bull Hard Enduro and the Erzbergrodeo: motorbikes in an Austrian iron-ore mine
- Wings for Life World Run: a global charity run where the finish line is a car that chases you, raising money for spinal cord research
It also owns the Red Bull Ring, a motor racing circuit at Spielberg in Austria that now hosts an F1 Grand Prix, and it keeps a collection of historic aircraft called The Flying Bulls at its Hangar-7 in Salzburg.
Then there are the athletes. Red Bull sponsors people in surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX, skiing, climbing, wingsuit flying and base jumping, and a lot of them started out relatively unknown. Many of the viral videos you have seen of someone riding a bike across a rooftop or jumping off a cliff are theirs.
How Red Bull makes money#
Now to the question of how it all adds up.
The can#
The core is the drink. According to the company's own numbers, in 2025:
- 13.969 billion cans were sold, up 10.2 percent on 2024
- Group turnover was €12.196 billion, up 8.6 percent from €11.227 billion
- It employed 21,924 people and sold in 178 countries
- Bloomberg reported that revenue and operating profit were both records
If you divide turnover by cans you get about 87 cents of revenue per can. That is what Red Bull itself receives, not the shelf price, because distributors and retailers take their share.
The model behind it#
A few things make the economics work:
- Asset-light production. Red Bull does not own most of its factories. Contract bottler Rauch has produced it since the beginning in 1987, with plants in Austria, Switzerland, Germany and the United States. Red Bull keeps the brand and the formula and lets partners deal with the heavy machinery
- Premium pricing. A can of Red Bull costs more than most rivals. That is only possible because of brand strength, and brand strength is paid for with the marketing budget
- A small range. The same can, a Zero version, a Sugarfree version and seasonal Editions. Fewer products means simpler logistics and bigger scale on each one
- Control of distribution. It pushes hard into bars, clubs, petrol stations, gyms and events, where people are actually tired and willing to pay
The tradeoff is the marketing line. A company spending a quarter or more of revenue on marketing needs very strong gross margins, and it has them, because energy drinks are cheap to make and expensive to sell.
The other revenue streams#
This is where the "is it a marketing company" argument gets interesting, because many of the marketing assets are also businesses.
Media. Red Bull Media House runs ServusTV, Austria's leading private broadcaster, plus The Red Bulletin magazine, Servus magazine, Bergwelten, SPEEDWEEK, Terra Mater Studios, Red Bull Studios, and a book publisher. It licenses content and sells footage to over 1,000 distribution partners, and runs the Red Bull TV app and free ad-supported channels on Samsung, Pluto, Roku and others. Advertisers pay to reach that audience.
Music. Red Bull Records is a label that develops artists, and the company has a long record of running music events and academies.
Football. Player trading. Buying a teenager for a few million and selling him for tens of millions is a real profit line, and Red Bull has done it repeatedly.
Racing and engineering. Red Bull Advanced Technologies, the engineering arm of the F1 group, designs and builds products for outside customers. The RB17 is a track-only hypercar designed by Adrian Newey with a V10 engine, limited to 50 units, and it is sold to customers rather than given away. It also worked with Aston Martin on the Valkyrie. On top of that, the F1 team brings in sponsorship from partners such as Oracle, and F1 prize money and commercial payments from the sport.
Events and venues. Ticket sales, hospitality, partnerships and broadcast rights from events and from the Red Bull Ring.
I do not have a clean public breakdown of how much each of these contributes, and Red Bull is a private company that does not publish detailed segment accounts. My read is that the can is still the overwhelming majority of the profit, and the other arms are partly self-funding and partly a reinvestment in the can. But they are real businesses with real customers, not just advertising.
So is it a marketing company#
I think the answer is yes, with a caveat.
The traditional view of a drinks company is: make a product, then advertise it. Red Bull inverted that. It decided its job was to own attention, then it used the can as the way to monetise that attention. The athletes are the creative team, the events are the campaigns, the media house is the in-house studio and publisher, and the sports teams are the loudest billboards on earth.
The caveat is that none of it would work if the can were bad. Red Bull is not a magic spell. It sells a drink with a distinctive taste, a clear job (feeling more awake), and a consistent look. The marketing amplifies a product that already does what it says.
What I find most impressive is the discipline. Red Bull does sponsorship, but its signature move is ownership, and the fan backlash when it rebranded Salzburg shows it was willing to take heat for that. It owns the F1 team, the events, the clubs, the stream, the footage and the story. When Felix Baumgartner fell through the sky, nobody was watching a brand pay for a slot. They were watching a Red Bull production.
That is why the can sells. And it is a good reminder for anyone building a brand, including a small one: do not buy attention, build something worth giving it to.