Molson Coors Beverage Company (NYSE:TAP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Unidentified Analyst: Great. That makes sense. And then, just a quick follow-up is on your emerging growth portfolio. If you could maybe talk about — you obviously went through some changes with La Colombe and some other things over the past few months. Maybe just how you’re thinking about like a sales target for that, if it’s moved at all versus $1 billion previously and just kind of which of the core brands do you see driving the majority of the target or of the growth going forward? Thanks, guys.

Gavin Hattersley: Thanks, Greg. Look, our $1 billion MSR target remains our ambition. We could be a little challenged to achieve that mark in 2023 because obviously, we’re mindful of the challenging economic environment in which we’re operating in our Latin American business, particularly, both from a political and economic point of view, that is fairly volatile. There is industry softness in U.S. craft, to be sure, and that’s impacted our Tenth and Blake business. And you rightly point out the discontinuation of La Colombe and also our Truss U.S. CBD drinks business. But those are only slight headwinds to our NSR goal. Not all our efforts are going to be successful in this space, and we’re absolutely not going to deliver NSR targets or NSR, absolutely, at any costs.

We try and balance our top line aspirations with an objective to improve our overall margins and the emerging growth division as a whole. So, in terms of brands where we see a strong performance, I mentioned ZOA in my opening remarks; we’ve got Topo Chico Spirited, which is coming this year. We’ve made some changes to how we’re bringing ZOA to the market. We’ve learned a lot over the last three years. And we’re moving to scale in energy drinks and both full-strength bottle spirits and also on the ready-to-drink side. Not a short-term play for us, Greg. I think the progress we’ve made in beyond beer has been — has laid a nice foundation for us.

Operator: Our next question comes from Eric Serotta of Morgan Stanley.

Eric Serotta: First for Tracey. Any color you could give us in terms of the phasing of revenue and profit delivery versus the guidance for the year? The last few years were clearly nothing but nowhere close to normal. So, it’s a little bit tough to judge where you stand versus some of these really unusual comparisons. And then, for Gavin, the past year, you had some really outsized great contribution from innovation, particularly Topo Chico. And simply, how are you looking at incremental innovation contribution this year, particularly as you cycle the Topo Chico national launch and of course, the hard seltzer category has been soft. So how are you thinking about incremental innovation this year?

Gavin Hattersley: Thanks, Eric. I’ll take the second question first. And then Tracey, you can take the other one. Look, I mean, I think there’s still lots of upside with the innovations that we launched last year. I mean we launched Simply Spiked in the middle of the year and the reception for that was amazingly positive, and we weren’t able to meet demand as I think we were very packed about it. We’ve got process in place where we will be able to meet demand this year. So lots of upside in Simply Spiked, and we’ve got great innovation coming with that brand as well, right, with the Peach coming. The way we’re looking at our innovations is — we’re looking at flavor more broadly. So, it includes seltzers, but it also includes FMBs and RTDs. And when you look at those segments together, we grew more share than any other supplier in the last 52 weeks.

We’ve got the number 4 and 5 seltzers with Topo Chico and Vizzy. We’ve got the second fastest growing hard seltzer in Topo Chico. And in Canada, we’re the only large brewer growing share of hard seltzer. So, we’ve still got lots of upside with our existing innovations that we just launched. And as I said, we’re launching Topo Chico Spirited in this year. We’ve got a nice line extension with Peach on Simply Spiked. And the awareness for Topo Chico is still a lot less than its largest competitor. So, we think we’ve got a lot of opportunity to drive more awareness for Topo Chico and improve the momentum there. So, — improving momentum — maintain the momentum, right? It’s already growing triple digits. Tracey, do you want to cover off on that?

Tracey Joubert: Yes. I mean, in terms of phasing, look, Eric, we’re always going to have quarter-to-quarter swings in our shipments and inventory levels. But we don’t expect to have the same magnitude of shipment swings as we have seen over the past several years. So, that’s a little bit about the top line. In terms of the cost, we’re still in an inflationary period, and we do expect inflationary pressure to continue and be a cost headwind for the year. But we expect the impact of the cost inflation and our COGS to slightly moderate in the back half of the year. So, yes, we don’t give sort of quarter-by-quarter guidance, but hopefully, that helps you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Nadine Sarwat of Bernstein.

Nadine Sarwat: Two questions for me, please. The first on your 2023 underlying profit guidance. Are you anticipating that the 2023 pricing that you spoke about earlier will be able to fully offset the input cost headwinds this year? And then, my second question, in your prepared remarks, you called out consumers actively down-trading to smaller pack sizes. Could you provide a little bit more color on this type of consumer behavior? Are you seeing consumers also down trade from one brand to another or at the moment, is it just on the pack sizes? What assumptions about the health of the consumer and down-trading have you baked into your full year guidance?

Gavin Hattersley: Thanks, Nadine. Tracey, do you want to take the guidance question?