Daniel Fisher: Yeah. They’re — ex Brazil, they’re quite resilient even with the inflation levels that you’re seeing in Argentina. Our volume was up double-digits in the country year-over-year. So, it’s incredibly resilient. Chile is performing well. Paraguay very well. Some of the other areas that we export into continue to perform well despite all of the geopolitical turbulence and the inflationary pressures you see in there, that’s holding in, and the team is doing a wonderful job managing all of that — all of those challenges. In Brazil, it’s less about the cost savings relative to the expenditures. Obviously, labor is incredibly cheap there. So, yeah, you shutter a facility, you’re not going to see near the savings that you would in Europe or in North America.
But operating in a tighter supply/demand environment gives you the ability in your other facilities to keep them full and to run them full out and that generally benefits efficiency levels, reduces spoilage, all of the things that we’re asking our plans to do and manage on a day-to-day basis. It gives them a a greater ability to do that, manage their quality aspects, stay in touch with customers, manage their supply chain more effectively. So that’s where you see the savings and the benefits and the earnings profile being impacted in South America.
Anthony Pettinari: Okay. that’s helpful. I will turn it over.
Daniel Fisher: Thank you.
Operator: Next question from the line of Adam Samuelson with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Adam Samuelson: Hi. Thank you. Good morning, everyone.
Daniel Fisher: Good morning.
Adam Samuelson: Good morning. So, I guess, the first question is thinking about the demand side, maybe come back into North America. And Dan, our comments on — January has had a better start, maybe seeing some pickup in promotional activity. Your comments seem to be a bit more focused on beer as a category versus CSD or elsewhere. And I’d love to just get your perspective on, are you seeing that change in customer behavior and promotional intensity across all categories? Or is it right now exclusive to beer. And corollary to that is, in discussions with customers across different beverage categories, is there any where you’re seeing kind of a step-up in innovation and new product introduction that is giving you more optimism.
Daniel Fisher: Yeah. I think it’s a really good question. Beer is being more aggressive on the promotional activities because beer had the most precipitive drop-off in volume. So, it correlates and the magnitude of the volume declines in terms of the promotional activity. So, yes, you’re seeing it across every single category because every single category was down in the last six weeks of the year. But it’s certainly more pronounced, and that’s probably a reason bias in my comments are relative to really — a really nice uplift in beer right out of the gate. Some of it is attributed clearly to the Super Bowl as we’re two weeks out. Now, you always see some promotion and some lift there, but it’s more pronounced than that from a historical standpoint because of the volume fall off.
And on innovation, I made this comment earlier on the question, but maybe I can dive into a little bit more. There’s innovation in every category. But the most innovation, and this has been a consistent thematic here with the exception of that accordion effect relative to COVID where there were less SKUs just trying to get cans out the door. But as the large CPGs become beverage companies, they’re leaning heavily into alcohol and mixers and those types of cocktails. And that’s where innovation is really stemming. And you’ll continue to see that for the foreseeable future. And those are most of what we expect to see here in 2023. There are other things obviously being worked all the time that are — but what I know is planned for retail shelves is going to largely fall into cocktails and innovation and around that for the can.
