Carlsberg As Shs A

Thank you very much, and good morning, everyone, and welcome to Carlsberg's Q1 2024 conference call. As said, my name is Jakob Ove Andersen. I'm the group's CEO, and I have with me CFO Ulrike Fern and Vice President, Investor Relations, Peter Kondrup. Let me begin by summarizing the key headlines for the quarter. First of all, we delivered a solid start to the year. We saw good growth for our key strategic growth drivers, such as premium beer and growth in Asia, and we maintained the earnings guidance for the year. Finally, we had this morning announced a new quarterly buyback program amounted to $1 billion. I will provide the key group headlines for the quarter, and then Ulrike will take you through the regions and the full year outlook. Let's turn to slide number three. We delivered 6.4% organic revenue growth, driven by organic volumes of 2% and an increase in revenue per hectolitre of 4%. The volume growth was mainly driven by some of our key markets, such as China, India, Laos, and Ukraine. All three regions achieved mid-single-digit increases in revenue per hectolitre. That was a result of positive brand mix, positive pricing to offset cost increases, and rollover benefits from last year's pricing actions in some of our markets. Reported revenue was $17.1 billion, which is an increase of 4.4 percent, impacted by a currency effect of minus 2.6 percent, which mainly related to the Chinese and Laotian currencies. Please turn to slide four and an update on some of our strategic priorities. In February, as you hopefully recall, we launched Accelerate Sale with updated higher long-term growth ambitions. Since then, we've been combining planning and implementation mode, and let me share some details on the progress so far. We started the step up in commercial investments, both in marketing and in sales. The higher marketing investment will mainly be in support of our premium brands, while the higher sales investments will mainly be increased distribution in certain Asian markets. We also indicated that we aim at returning gross margins to the levels we saw in the years prior to the pandemic of around 48% to 50% when excluding Russia. We'll deliver the first improvements this year, but as this will require significant efforts, we're still operationalizing many of the initiatives. As we said in February, coming out of several quite turbulent years, as an organization, we now need to become more long-term in our thinking and planning and nurturing a growth mindset. Therefore, a few weeks ago, the extended leadership team, which is made up of the executive committee, the managing directors in our markets, and senior managers from the central and regional functions, we all came together to discuss culture and how to instill and nurture an even stronger growth mindset in our more than 30,000 colleagues. Of course, at the same time, maintaining our strong performance management and cost culture, which has served us so well and is the core of our DNA. I must say that I'm very encouraged by the engagement, the commitment from everyone in the leadership team, and I'm confident that we'll be able to develop and drive a growth culture across the organization. To further drive the growth mindset balance with a continuous focus on cost, we've increased the weight of the revenue KPI and incentive schemes. Before going into the regions, let me comment on the changes to the management team that we announced this morning. After a very long career at Carlsberg and before that Scottish and Newcastle, Graham Fuchs has decided to retire from his role as Executive Vice President of Western Europe. However, I'm very pleased that Graham has agreed to stay with us as Special Advisor to me, with a main focus on partnerships. Søren Prehn, who is currently heading up Group Commercial and Strategy, will take over the responsibility for Western Europe. Søren has been with us for many years, during which he has held multiple management roles in Copenhagen, in various markets across Europe, and in the Asia region. Given CERN's strong track record and long experience, this is going to be a very seamless transition. To ensure the right focus on our commercial agenda in support of accelerated sale, we will split the group commercial and strategy role in two. One with responsibility for sales and strategy, and one with responsibility for marketing, with both roles being part of the executive committee. We are delighted that our