David Bourne: Yes. Thank you for the question. I wouldn’t say as set out in our opening remarks, really, we have a very clear capital allocation policy. So with regard to dividends, they’re sustainable, and we’ll continue to adopt our $0.10 per quarter. Part on that, as backed up by the strong cash generation you’ve seen in the last quarter. We deleveraged half turn during this quarter from 6.2x, which we said will be a peak down to 5.7. And we anticipate rather deleveraging through to year-end.
Operator: Our next question will come from Gabe Hajde with Wells Fargo.
Unidentified Analyst: This is Alex on for Gabe. I just want to, first, I guess, ask about the softening in North America and it’s now complete. Is that based on your conversation with the customers? Or is that based on order books? Can you just help us understand the destocking trend that you see in Q3 and then maybe the outlook into Q4 next year?
Oliver Graham: Yes. I guess, look, to be clear, we mean are destocking that. So we’ve been reducing inventories in Q2 and Q3. And that’s why we — that’s the explanation for why we don’t have the level of EBITDA growth that you might expect with this level of volume growth because we’ve been prioritizing reducing those inventories, which is what’s driven the cash flow. I mean if we turn to the customer, I think pretty much all the destocking is complete in the North American customer base in our part of the market. Obviously, we’re not sitting with a mass beer position, and we’ve not been impacted directly by the issues with one particular brand in North America this year. So there may be stock sitting in supply chain in those parts of the market.
But if you look across soft drinks, energy and the sparkling waters, the markets that we’re playing in, we don’t see customers having elevated levels of stocks any longer. And we me also — and this has been very important this year, I don’t see them having elevated levels of expensive imports sitting in their stocks, which they needed to run out. So from our point of view, that’s all cleared out, and what we’ve been doing this year is also rightsizing our inventories to drive our cash flow.
Unidentified Analyst: Okay. That’s helpful. And maybe just in Europe, you guys talk about softer demand conditions. Is this — can you maybe just help us understand is this a trend that has been getting worse from Q2 and Q3? And what your view is on to what it looks like for next year?
Oliver Graham: Yes. I think visibility into next year is not strong right now. And I think one of the major beer players came out and said they also needed a bit more time on their business planning, and I think we’re seeing that with all our customers in Europe that they’re going through their business planning cycle. I think that what my guess is that leads to is an increased focus on volume relative to price because I think when you see what’s happened over the summer, it’s clear, the price lever, I think, is pretty much done. And also, I think input costs are moderating. And so I think we’ll see a prioritization of volume relative to price into 2024, but they’ve not gone through that cycle in full yet, and so we don’t have the detail.
And obviously, we’ll be able to update much more on that in February. I mean, what we saw during the quarter was a deterioration from essentially the first part of August. So we had a strong June, 9% growth; a pretty strong July, 5%. And then we ended up at minus 6%, minus 6% in August and September. And when we then got the Nielsen data and other market data, what was clear is that from July through August, sales retail deteriorated. And it looks like the combination of a very poor summer across Northern Europe, together with the weakness in consumer spending added up to an overall weakness that our customers had not anticipated at all. So they therefore have built stock into the summer. And when they realized that they weren’t getting the sell-through, obviously, they stopped buying from us.
