Coca-Cola Europacific Partners PLC (NASDAQ:CCEP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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So — and that also helps us as we look at ’24 with the coverage that we have, and we’re just under 50% covered there, which gives us the opportunity to continue to look at the market. Based on what I see today and if those trends continue, clearly, you would expect that to be a tailwind in ’24. Quantum, hard to quantify right now.

Mitch Collett: Understood. If I can follow-up, just how specifically if you do move to a tailwind, how would you expect pricing and promo and I guess revenue growth management more generally to behave if you start to get a tailwind from inputs?

Nik Jhangiani: Well, I think it comes back to a point that Damian made earlier, right? We’ve had a very disciplined approach to how we think about revenue growth management initiative and we want to balance and get that spectrum from affordability to mainstream to premiumization, and that’s back to, again, pack diversification through the various channels. So I think we always have that promotional mechanic to play with as we look at what might be happening. But keep in mind, you’re looking at one element which is commodities. There’s other elements that drive inflation as well, right, that we need to be looking at across the levels of our P&L. So it’s not like suddenly everything turns into a deflationary environment. We haven’t seen that in terms of wage inflation, haulage, logistics, et cetera. So you’ve got to look at it holistically as opposed to just the commodity space.

Damian Gammell: Yes. And I think just to build on Nik’s comment, I mean we’re also looking at in most of our markets, circa 40% of our revenues coming from outside of retail. And I suppose that’s quite a different dynamic to most CPG businesses. So we do enjoy diversification not just on the package side, which we’ve been really focused on over a number of years to make sure if you go into a supermarket or convenience store, most of our markets, you’re going to see a lot of different pack sizes from minis all the way up to value packs that allows us to play a lot better with pricing on that affordability mindset, but also on premiumization, which we haven’t walked away from. So despite some of those consumer challenges, there are a lot of consumers who are still happy to trade off.

So we want to make sure we capture that. So you’ll still see glass packaging, premium mini cans and smart promo pricing. For example, in Australia, our promo percentage discount has gone from 50% to 40%. We’ve actually gone below that in some periods and not seen a drop off, so that’s encouraging. And then on the other side, we’ve got our away-from-home business, which was our challenge during COVID for all the reasons we know. But clearly, having 40% of your revenues coming from outside retail gives us a lot more levers and tools to deal with some of those commodity headwinds and other inflationary points, including labor, which we can’t forget that clearly, we’re seeing labor inflation also increase in Europe, and that’s something that we’re mindful of keeping our employees engaged and committed to our business.

So we’ve got a lot of tools, and I think we’ve demonstrated and Nik said a disciplined approach to using them, but they’re well in place now after a number of years of really focusing on it.

Operator: We will take our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Charlie Higgs from Redburn.

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