Boston Beer Company, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Boston Beer Company first quarter 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. And it is now my pleasure to introduce to you Mike Andrews, Associate General Counsel and Corporate Secretary. Thank you, Mr. Andrews. You may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome. This is Mike Andrews, Associate General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of the Boston Beer Company. I'm pleased to kick off our 2025 first quarter earnings call. Joining the call from Boston Beer are Jim Cook, Founder and Chairman, Michael Spillane, our CEO, and Diego Reynoso, our CFO. Before we discuss our business, I'll start with our disclaimer. As we state in our earnings release, some of the information we discuss and that may come up on this call reflects the company's or management's expectations or predictions of the future. Such predictions are forward-looking statements. It's important to note that the company's actual results could differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements is contained in the company's most recent 10Q and 10K. The company does not undertake to publicly update forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. I will now pass it over to Jim for some introductory comments.

Thanks, Mike. I'll begin my remarks this afternoon with a few introductory comments and then hand over to Michael, who will provide an overview of our business. Michael will then turn the call over to Diego, who will focus on the financial details of our first quarter results, as well as our outlook for the remainder of 2025. Immediately following Diego's comments, we will open the line for questions. Our first quarter results are a solid start to the year in a dynamic operating environment. Depletions are down 1% compared to the first quarter of last year, and we performed in line with the beer category and measured channels while increasing our overall market share. As we expected, shipments were significantly ahead of depletions at 5% growth for the quarter. This was primarily driven by the timing of wholesaler demand for our Sun Cruiser and Truly Unruly innovations as well as the continued expansion of Hard Mountain Dew. Our margin enhancement initiatives continued to show strong progress and together with the volume growth resulted in our highest first quarter gross margin since 2019. The business continues to generate strong cash flow and we have repurchased $61 million in shares year to date. While we are encouraged by our first quarter performance, we are operating in a challenging and unpredictable macroeconomic environment. As I mentioned on our last call, we expect the broader beer category to remain highly relevant to consumers with significant growth opportunities in the fourth category, also called Beyond Beer. There are some factors such as health and wellness and cannabis that seem to be having an impact on the beer category as a whole. However, our current view is that inflation and economic uncertainty are also significant drivers of the recent weakness, as well as some impact from the timing of Easter this year. Our priorities for 2025 continue to be supporting our category leading brands to improve market share, launching strong innovation, and continuing to expand our growth margins. As I mentioned on the last call, we're stepping up our advertising investment in 2025 to improve market share trends, ensure a successful national launch of SunCruiser, and return to long-term volume growth. We continue to believe that increasing brand investments will drive improved long-term performance, and we will be disciplined in our approach and only invest where we see clear opportunities. In summary, I'm confident that we have the right strategies and team in place to deliver on our 2025 plans and generate long-term sustainable growth. We are highly focused on controlling what we can control and executing in the marketplace to improve share trends and expand our margins. I'd like to thank our Boston Beer team, our distributors, and our retailers for their continued support and a good start to the year. I will now pass the call over to Michael.