French spirits maker Pernod Ricard sees FY21 sales rebound

Listen, we've had a great year as you mentioned, with our net sales growing by 10% over the last 12 months, which is an excellent performance growing from every single region around the world, with the obvious exception of global travel retail for understandable reasons. And as you mentioned, our sales in the US grew by 16% and hit the two billion dollar net sales milestone for us there. This is driven first of all by the remarkable resilience of the off-trade, of home consumption, but also, and we're seeing this happen, it's impacted positively by the reopening of the on-trade, and consumers are really eager to go back out and socialize and meet friends and so on and so forth. But it's also driven by a remarkable acceleration of e-commerce. So all in all, we did have a great year, and we expect, despite sanitary restrictions, to see good sales momentum continue for this current year because of what I explained, especially resilience of the off-trade and reopening of the on-trade.

Well, my understanding when I listened to the news on Yahoo Finance is what China is trying to do – they're trying to support the growth and emergence of middle-class households. And in fact, Chinese middle-class households are indeed what the core of what we focus on in China. So the fact to support income for middle-class Chinese households from that point of view could be seen as a positive.

You know, there are huge swings by channel, as you can imagine. So we go from, if I take the example of the on-trade, in some markets you see declines of 60, 70, 80 percent turn into growth rates of 150, 200 percent, or even 300 percent. So there are huge swings by channel. The situation varies quite significantly from one market to another. So there's also a mix of markets, a mix of brands, and mix of formats in an environment which is still quite volatile and where the sanitary crisis is still not over. So where we're confident enough and clearly to mention that we expect to see good sales momentum, we clearly expect as well a very dynamic Q1 off of a low base – last year Q1 was down six percent. But to start getting more specific numbers at this stage would not be extremely prudent.

Listen, we have a clear strategy of dynamic management of our portfolio. So we're on the hunt for great emerging craft super premium brands that are out there. We've been very active over the last few years and as you mentioned, during the pandemic, we've made a number of partnerships or acquisitions such as Malfi gin, Monkey 47 gin, amazing American whiskeys: Rabbit Hole bourbon which is great, Jefferson bourbon which is amazing, TX whiskey which is also fantastic, or Smooth Ambler, just to name but a few. But also Del Maguey, which is the leading craft mezcal brand out there. And I could go on and on, including other opportunities we've partnered with in Europe such as Italicus, which is an Italian bergamot liqueur. And you should expect to see more of that in the coming months and years. We intend to be quite dynamic. We have a pretty extensive portfolio of brands. We don't have any very specific white spaces. We're probably under-exposed to some categories such as tequila, of course, but we have two amazing tequila brands with Tequila Avion and Tequila Altos. So anyway, we are out there on the lookout, and you should expect to see more of that in the coming future.

Listen, you always have cycles. Tequila is a great segment. You can do great cocktails with tequila. Margarita is one of the best-selling cocktails in the US. So right now, tequila is hot, but cognac is quite hot as well, and US super premium and above whiskey is also quite hot. So there are many categories that are quite hot. It is driven by big strong brands, it is also driven by cocktail and mixology – we saw a lot of that. It is now increasingly driven by convenience as well through the e-commerce channel. And so we're quite positive on the segments I mentioned.