2015 Foreign Policy Association Annual Dinner - Jean-François van Boxmeer

So ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honor for a beer brewer to receive such a prestigious prize. And I've rarely heard such a convincing speech as the one of Rick. I think you should join Heineken and sell the company, because my speech will now be very, very short, because you said it all. But I'd like to call out our 85,000 employees working around the globe, because they are making the brewing a better world alive day after day. Obviously it's not the CEO who is doing that; it is 85,000 people around the world who do it every day because they believe it's the right thing to do. Sustainability is the buzzword today. Everybody speaks about sustainability and everybody does something about it. Our company has been in existence for 150 years, and the fact that we're still kicking alive after 150 years means that my predecessors and all the people who worked at Heineken for the past one and a half century had sustainability in an implicit way at heart, because otherwise we wouldn't be in existence anymore. That's the very definition of sustainability. Now the concept of sustainability is evolving over time, obviously. What people do care about, because as humanity is progressing and advancing, every time we discover new frontiers and realize that certain ways of our lives are not sustainable, and if we don't address that change, whether willingly or from time to time also forced, we would not be in existence tomorrow. Now for an industry as Heineken, we have of course a large sustainability agenda, a large corporate responsibility agenda, but I'd like to call out these two specifics that Rick called for. The first one is of course that we sell a product which brings people together, which is causing to celebrate and to have some pleasure together. And I'm a little bit jealous about my colleague Alan Gilbert, who is, if I quote unquote, selling music. And you cannot have enough of music; you cannot abuse music. There is not such a thing like music abuse, right? But there is something like alcohol abuse, and that is for our industry something which is important and which we have to address. And of course you're not alone in that battle. It starts in a family and how you educate your children; it's what you got as a messaging and education part at school. Those are public policies. It's a vast arena of things, but also what those who produce alcohol and bring it to the market tell about their product. And that has been a long journey, and it's still a journey in which we make progress. But what we learned, and what the essence is of that commitment of spending 10% of our advertising budget towards responsible consumption, it is that you try to make your brands speak, using your brands and not a corporate kind of campaign, and bringing across a very difficult message that actually abusing alcohol or abusing our product, that's not cool. Rick was alluding to my career, and I spent a little time in Italy. And in Italy there is a saying that says that when you drink too much, fai brutta figura, which means basically when you drink too much you make a fool out of yourself. Now this is typically a culture where collectively people have little indulgence for alcohol abuse or people who would consume too much at a time. How can you bring, in a culture, the fact that people realize that abusing is not so cool? Now we at Heineken try to do our best with our flagship brand. It's perhaps only 15% of our volumes, but it's where we're known for. And by advertising campaigns to bring people who are credible and will bring about that message. Now we have been doing that now for quite a number of years. The latest campaign we brought was brought by a famous DJ called Armin van Buuren. He's Dutch, but he's world famous. Now I gather that we hear the public, we are not anymore going to parties where DJs are playing, I suppose. But this guy has committed himself to that campaign, and actually he was playing some evenings, and the evenings where he and his is really world famous, and when he was playing, the alcohol consumption and beer consumption went down 30% because he's making such damn good music. And that led to the campaign of saying 'Dance more, drink slow.' That is what it is, and we made a, and you can go to YouTube and check that campaign. But that is actually trying to make the point of what we're saying about alcohol abuse and trying to bring the message in a credible way. Obviously it's a journey, obviously we're not there, and obviously it's perhaps a drop in the water. But that is corporate social responsibility. We can play our part and do our best. And perhaps if I would stand here again in five years time, I would share with you a new frontier that we would have discovered in that arena. The second domain of responsibility that I would like to call out is Africa. Africa is 20% of our business today. It's a large part of our business, and if I look back to the last decade, it has been the fastest growing part of our business. And it's a promise. There are a lot of people there. When I was working in Africa 20 years ago, when I started there, I stayed 10 years in Africa. There were eight towns with more than one million people. Now you have 52 towns in Africa which boast more than one million people. So over the last decade, Africa has really taken up, for different reasons, and you know it would take me an hour to give a course about it, but Africa has been good to us. We have been in Africa for decades and decades and decades. Actually our first business in Africa dates from 1923. But you have to go an extra mile in that continent for the reason that we all know: governance is improving, but governance are not doing the job that they should do. It will come, it will take time, but then it's for cooperation to take part, not all but part of the job, in addition to just being a good taxpayer. You also have to go that extra mile, and that extra mile is the medicare that we provide to our own employees but also the families. It's the role that we have played long years ago together with Pfizer, I have to say, in treatment against AIDS. It's the role that we play in financing schools, and those are not necessarily universities but vocational schools, which Africa needs a lot. It's the role we play in the vertical integration which Rick alluded to, in our support to agricultural chains and our commitment to take our supplies more and more for Africa. Everything we do in that direction will also benefit our business. I'm not in philanthropy; I'm in business. But the business has to be sustainable. In 150 years we should still stand here, me down there with our business up here. So I really do believe that you have to go that extra mile and doing these things that matter. And for us today and for the foreseeable future, we would have that extra effort on our corporate social responsibility towards alcohol abuse on the one hand, and specifically on the African continent on the other hand. That's what my company is committed to, and I'm lucky to have those 85,000 people with me to do that. With that, I thank you very, very much for the honor you gave us tonight. Thank you.