Hilton Schlosberg: We’ve always spoken about the fact that internationally, we compete very strongly against — in the main Red Bull. And we really try and keep our pricing. We have a pricing strategy that’s worked well for us, and that’s really keeping within a particular percentage of Red Bull pricing. And the minute we stray from that, we find that our market shares really suffers. So we really have an interesting dynamic in that we have, obviously, relationships with The Coke partners. And we have a pricing structure that kind of has a ceiling, right? So it’s — while we are always on a mission to improve gross margins, and we do that on an ongoing basis, there are some areas where it is very difficult to get gross margin.
And I’ve said this before, that I think it will be very difficult in the main to get gross margins internationally to the levels that we have enjoyed in the U.S. You can see what happened in EMEA. They nudged their margins up by 1% in the fourth quarter. And it’s an ongoing battle to improve margins, bearing in mind the dynamics of what we are working against.
Operator: This concludes — I’m sorry, go ahead, sir.
Rodney Sacks: Sorry, I just finish the other part of the question that Mark had raised just before we sign off. Just to talk about the international opportunity, I think what Mark is alluding to is correct. In many markets, the international markets have really followed the U.S. We have a far broader portfolio in the U.S. Innovation continues from year to year. But what — the benefit that the international markets have is they see what we’ve introduced in the U.S. and the large number of additional SKUs and literally brand families we have in the U.S. And they’re able to try and look to those and try and introduce selected SKUs, which gives them a very large runway. In some markets, the runway is focused on the Monster premium brands.
And in some markets, the growth is coming from an affordable sector. And we have addressed that. So we have Monster in many markets, but we’ve also — where we see that the premium sector has more of a limited percentage of the population that can really afford to have the buying power. We are growing, and that’s where we’re starting to grow brands like Predator in many international markets and that will help us continue to see growth and Predator also has a lot of depth. We were launching Predator in China this year. We’ve just launched Predator in India in cans. We are now just rolling out PET in India. We are trying to address some volume production issues because there’s not a lot of availability, but that will sort itself out reasonably soon.
And we see enormous opportunity once we get some availability for production in PET for PET in India. So there are a lot of opportunities, but they vary from market to market and continent to continent. As you know, we’ve just recently launch, for example, in Egypt, we launched both Monster and Predator. Predator’s quickly made a name for itself as a growing brand. So we have these opportunities in different countries around the world. And so we’re quite excited about seeing that. As I said, we did have some slowdown in some of the more developed countries in Asia. The category slowed, but I think that those — we are taking steps to address and introduce more and different innovation in those markets and to grow them. So we do look forward to having a really attractive runway around the world for us.
Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Rodney Sacks for any closing remarks.
Rodney Sacks: On behalf of Monster, I’d like to thank everyone for their continued interest in the company. We continue to believe in the company and our growth strategy and remain committed to continuing to innovate, to develop and differentiate our brands and to expand the company both at home and abroad, and in particular, capitalizing on our relationship with the Coca-Cola bottler system. We believe that we are well-positioned in the beverage industry and continue to be optimistic about the future of our company. We hope that you remain safe and healthy, and thank you very much for your attendance.
Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.
