Michel Doukeris: Hi Olivier, Michel here. Good morning. Thank you for the question. So I’ll take both, starting with the UFC. I think that is just like emphasizing and overstating that UFC is like a global vibrant and growing international sport. It reached hundreds of millions of fans around the world, and it’s a great fit for Bud Light in the U.S. and for Budweiser in our other markets. So the combination of global and presence in the U.S. gives us an incredible opportunity to partner with UFC and tap into the fan base both in the U.S. with Bud Light and globally with Budweiser. You know that as a company, globally with support sports period, so from soccer and FIFA to basketball and MDA to football NFL, Golf and PG and many, many other sports platforms because it’s a great way to connect with consumers globally in a very relevant occasion.
In the U.S., if you go back in time, Bud Light was the official, original UFC sponsor. That was like more than 15 years ago and was only like a natural fit for these two great brands to come back together. So UFC has shown tremendous growth, has over 500 million fans worldwide. And since our revisional sponsorship, it’s incredible, amazing to see the growth that the UFC and all the accomplishments of Bud Light to create a truly global brand. So I think that beyond the passion for celebrating our fans, UFC NAV share this American routes, track record of employing American people, driving economic growth part, supporting veterans and first responders. So we could not be more excited about taking this partnership to the next level. And to answer your question, is a normal partnership agreement with as any other partnerships fee payment and then activation around the platform.
So there is no variable pay involved in any end of the agreement. So it’s a great partnership. I could not be more excited about joining or rejoining UFC on this come back and to have Bud Light in the U.S. for the fans and Budweiser being activated globally, so leveraging the best of both worlds. On the GLP, we’ve been seeing a couple of questions and people talking about that. But I think that the key point here is beer category remains vibrant, is growing globally, gaining share of throat and is projected for all sources, IFWR, Euromonitor to continue to grow globally, volumes and gaining share of throat. At this stage, I think that’s too early to assess any overlap or change in behavior in relevant consumer groups. You see that the penetration of these drugs is still very small, and that is like a relatively wide range of points of view on where this is going with very limited data.
I think that for us, we don’t see any impact so far in the business. Our portfolio, as you know have several different options for socialization and consumers understand that. And the big distinction because we are not in the indulgence business, right, so you see a lot of the conversations around sweet and more things that are related to indulgence, which is not the case of our portfolio. And on top of that, we have like an incredible range of offers with low calorie, low-carb, non-alcohol, think about Michelob ULTRA, low-calorie; Corona Cero, 56 calories; Budweiser, 50 calories. So we have a portfolio that has some broad range, we see no reasons to make any consideration at this point. And I think that without more data and seeing the developments of deals is going to be more of speculation, so at this point, nothing else there.
Olivier Nicolai: Thank you very much.
Operator: Thank you. Our final question will come from the line of Andrea Pistacchi with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.
Andrea Pistacchi: Yes. Hi Richard and Fernando. Two, please for me. The first one is on the consumer environment. I mean some of your peers have called out in some markets, mainly in Europe and Asia. Some deterioration in recent months, LatAm seems to be quite fairly resilient for now. So I wonder if you could provide a quick assessment in terms of what you’re seeing in consumer environment in your main markets around the region and whether you have seen any change since the last update of Q2. And the second question, please, is on your SG&A in North America, which increased 2.5%. Now there’s clearly various buckets within your SG&A. I imagine distribution costs will be declining support to wholesalers going up. But in terms of your media spend, a couple of quarters ago, you had you’d said that this year, it would be very focused on the summer months as there’d be a step-up through the summer month.
So I was wondering whether that has taken place or whether maybe over the last few months, your plans have evolved a bit. Maybe you’re waiting for the dust to settle before really stepping up media spend in the U.S. Thank you.
Michel Doukeris: Andrea, thank you for the questions. I’ll take both here. In terms of the consumer environment, I will follow the sequence of your question, starting with Europe. I think that the categories, I think, dollar-wise remains resilient. And most importantly for us, consumer — underlying consumer demand for our brands is going very well. So if we look at the volumes in this quarter, we saw a decline like high single digits, and a lot of that was weather-related. And it’s interesting because the south of Europe was very hot. But our footprint is more concentrated on the center and northern part of Europe that was very cold, very wet. And we saw July, August, very bad with some improvement in September and further improvement in the early readings of October.
So difficult to precisely say how much was weather, how much is consumer environment, but was more on the weather, less on the consumer environment. And the consumer environment, of course, has inflation and prices up and solids that are catching up. So as you see the disposable income, September also marked a point where disposal will increase because of the salaries increase. It’s now at par and recovering versus inflation. So I think that, that is an interesting combination of better weather, more disposable income as we face from quarter three to quarter four. In China, we saw a similarly complicated industry, mostly impacted by weather. So the El Nino hit the South China and the Southeast China as well. I just came from China two weeks ago, spent a lot of time there, 12 days in the region.
The consumption, you see that is thriving. The market is open. Consumers are coming back. The beer category, resilient overall other than the ones that impact. And most importantly, for our portfolio, premiumization remains a very important trend. I think that the overall environment in China is a one-off recovery with utility recovering, activity recovering. You see that some structural issues in the real estate, which is not our business, but of course, impacts the overall economy and a little bit more cyclical in exports, but this doesn’t change the long-term prospects for China for our business, and particularly because both the industry remains very resilient. And the most important thing, which is premiumization, where our portfolio is performing very well, continues to move in the right direction.
