With today’s official announcement of InBev’s $52 billion purchase of Anheuser-Busch, we’re learning some details that InBev hadn’t been willing to discuss before. One big number that stands out in the press release: $1.5 billion in expected cost savings by 2011.

That’s 50 percent bigger than the $1 billion target A-B announced two weeks ago for its own Blue Ocean cost-cutting program. It’s also larger than the figures that were reported — but never confirmed by InBev — to be in InBev’s plan at the start. The first reports about an offer had InBev envisioning $1.4 billion in cost savings.

 On this morning’s conference call with analysts, InBev Carlos Brito said that, after talking with A-B executives over the past few days,  

We are very impressed with how detailed and bottom up the (Blue Ocean) plan is. … Of course, they know the business better than we do. That gives us the stregnth to do even more than we had in our original plan.

He said InBev had “carefully reviewed the underlying actions needed to achieve the savings” and had incorporated the Blue Ocean targets into InBev’s own plan.

A slide prepared for analysts shows that Blue Ocean is expected to cut costs by $1.09 billion by 2011. That’s $730 million from cost of goods sold and general/administrative expensives; $150 million from early retirements and overhead savings; and $215 million from “other” including information technology spending and “salaried benefits benchmarking.”

In addition to that sum, InBev says it can realise $55 million of cost synergies in China, where both companies have sizeable operations, and $360 million in procurement efficiencies, elimination of corporate functions and “cost-management best practices.”

The “best practices” line seems to be a reference to InBev’s famed zero-based budgeting process. But Brito said there’s not a specific amount tied to that process. Here’s how he explained the $360 million sum to analysts:

This transaction gives us an unheard-of scale in our industry, which gives us the opportunity to do things we could not do before.

Here’s one question, though: Is Blue Ocean an appropriate name any more? When you get really, really deep, doesn’t the ocean become black?