By late $2000$s$,$ a third kind of beer was on the rise that had no malt. This approach lowered production costs even more and also exploited additional tax reductions. These new genre beers were priced even lower than happoshu and as a result, happoshu sales started to shrink. At about the same time, the craft beer revolution was quietly starting to brew with microbreweries. While Asahi, Kirin, and Sapporo continued with their happoshu business and even entered the business space of new genre beers, in $2012$ Suntory surprised its competitors by announcing that it was getting out of its happoshu beer business. Unlike the paths followed by its competitors, Suntory focused more on its premium beers that used malt as its primary ingredient. Other malt beverages also received substantial focus, and in recent years Suntory whiskey has made major inroads into the premium whiskey market of the US$.$ By $2015,$ Suntory$$s market share placed it in a formidable third position, with Sapporo moving to a distant fourth and even Kirin losing some market share.

What emergent issue caused happoshu businesses of the beer majors to shrink?