Heineken half-year profit misses on higher costs

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Heineken NV <HEIN.AS>, the world's second-largest brewer, missed estimates for first-half profit on Monday, as rising input costs offset higher beer sales.

The Dutch maker of Heineken, Europe's top-selling lager, maintained its full-year forecast that operating profit before one-offs would increase by a mid-single-digit percentage.

For the first half of the year, operating profit grew by just 0.2% on a like-for-like basis to 1.78 billion euros (£1.6 billion), missing analysts' estimate of 1.92 billion euros, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

(Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)