Heineken Holding

Good morning once again, and welcome to our webcast audience as well. Welcome to our 2025 Capital Markets event by Heineken. Before we start proceedings with our CEO, Dov van den Brink, it is my duty right now to make sure that you read the following disclaimer, otherwise my legal guys will be very upset. There we go. And this is to tell you that this presentation hopefully will contain many forward-looking statements and expectations based on current management's current views evolve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, and that it's possible that the actual results may differ materially. So please take your time, and this applies to the whole day today. All righty. With that out of the way, it is my absolute pleasure to introduce Dol van den Brink, Chief Executive Officer of Heineken.

Okay, good morning to all of you, those here with us in Seville, as well as the people on the webcast. Beautiful, gorgeous morning in Seville, and it's not only the beer capital of Spain, but the weather is also significantly better than Amsterdam this time of year. We have an exciting day ahead of us as we will share our plans to deliver superior balance growth while delivering attractive shareholder return while future-proofing our company. As we all know, the world is changing fast, and change brings both challenges as well as opportunities. And we are very confident in our sharpened Evergreen 2030 strategy and our ability to deliver, and we hope that as the day evolves, you feel so too. We have a very focused and targeted agenda. I will kick off today talking about the overall Evergreen journey, where we're coming from, where we are, where we're going, and I will introduce our three strategic priorities. Dan Brom, Westenbrink, our chief commerce officer, will double-click on accelerating growth, our number one priority for the company. Then Harold, who you know well, our chief financial officer, will double-click on productivity, our second big strategic priority. And then towards the end of today, Harold will close us off how this all comes together and how we drive value creation. We have two key moments for Q&A to give you the opportunity to ask questions. And throughout today, even though it's the three of us here on stage, we will bring between 10 and 15 leaders from all over the Heineken world in through videos. So that is what we have in stock for today. There are five key messages that, in a way, recap what this day is all about, as well as what I will start with this morning. It starts by taking stock on the Evergreen journey, the progress as well as learnings over the last five years, and the sharp priorities going forward. Then we'll spend time on accelerating growth in consumer goods. It is all about growth. It's all about winning our consumers and customers. And our specific ideas on how we believe we can shape structural growth in the category, as well as through differentiation of focus, really accelerate our growth trajectory going forward. Stepping up productivity. We made a lot of progress the last five years, but we see opportunities to take that to the next level as we see ways to leverage skill and scale in ways that we have never done before at Heineken. Third priority is future fitting the company. building around a digital backbone which we're rolling out as we speak the biggest transformation in the history of the company enabling new ways of working opening up new ways of value creation and then i will close with our in a way shareholder investor promise starting on that first chapter sharpening evergreen Now, strategy doesn't happen in a vacuum. Strategy is always in response to both the external environment and the journey you have been on. And we have been on this amazing 160-year-plus journey as Heineken, always pioneering, pioneering by building the first global premium brands, pioneering in putting together the most advantaged global footprint, and more recently, pioneering in the way that we're expanding our brand and product portfolio across segments and categories. But we also know there's a lot of change happening in the world around us affecting the industry. I made this version about four or five years ago, not realizing how much more change we would see across these five dimensions. And we just need to accept this is how it's going to be, and we need to adapt and change. And as such, Evergreen, when we first launched that back in February 21, in the middle of COVID, It was not an in-person capital market event. We did this at that moment virtually. It was all about picking up the pace of change within the company. We had this 160-year journey. We came out of a decade of very good and strong, consistent performance. But we also felt at that time that internally we really had to pick up change and transformation adapting to new realities. And that's where we launched this Evergreen 25 strategy with five clear priorities. We introduced our growth flywheel and we introduced the green diamond with four key dimensions on how we track and measure value creation and this has served as well in all the twists and turns of what the world you know threw at us as a world and as an industry this has served as well and provided clear direction and clear priorities now across you know, the many dimensions and priorities that we set ourselves, we can be proud of a lot of progress. Whether it was in Brent Heineken, which grew, you know, by almost 50%, the fastest growth in the history of the company, how we expanded premium, how we accelerated and pioneered low and no, becoming the global leader in zero-zero beer, how we jump-started from almost nothing our digital B2B platform, Easel, On productivity, this was one area that we prioritized in Evergreen. We were known for our footprint and our portfolio, our marketing. We were not known for efficiency and productivity. Over the last five years, we made a major step forward in creating a much stronger productivity muscle and culture capability in the company, delivering over $3 billion in gross savings. We started with digital. my first person i appointed to the executive team was ronald else as a chief digital technology officer up till 2020 that function was not represented in the most important leadership team of the organization and under the leadership of ronald we started on this digital transformation that you will hear much more about in the course of today and we made a lot of progress on the sustainability targets that we set ourselves Now, saying that all, while we were changing and transforming, our performance has not been where we like it to be. We have had decent years, we had very challenging years. And all in all, I want to be crystal clear that this is unsatisfactory and that we're really hungry for more and better. And this was the starting point when about a year ago, six months ago, as a leadership team, we got together, taking stock of the progress, but especially also the learnings to make sure that going forward, we are able to deliver more consistent, predictable results. Now, I will share in some detail some of these key learnings because these are the learnings that inform some of the sharpening and additional priorities that we will be setting for the next three to five years. First on growth, we made a lot of progress on Brent Heineken and premium and zero-zero playing to our strength. We made some big interventions in our global footprint in adding UBL India as a major growth platform for the future. Namibian breweries, Distell, more recently, Vivco. But having said that, overall, our growth has been stagnant. Across that very advantage footprint that we believe is a core strategic asset for the company, there's also a lot of fragmentation. There's a lot of complexity. Within that footprint, there's underperformance, and we feel we have an opportunity and a need, a necessity, to do a major step up in how we differentiate across our global footprint and how we focus. And a lot of what I will be sharing and Bram and Harald will be speaking to leveraging this unique geographical footprint as well as brand to product portfolio, and through differentiation of focus, accelerate performance. On productivity, again, we were not known for efficiency and productivity. That, I dare say, is changing in a profound way. This is not an episodical thing we do now every five years. This is part of our everyday operating in the company. But we still are doing it really opco by opco. And that has unlocked 3 billion of cost savings. But to go to the next level of productivity opportunities, it is really about tapping into above-opco opportunities, which is something that in the belief system of the company has always been kind of blocked. And we're now crossing that bridge, and we're creating the conditions, both in terms of process and data and systems, as well as the cultural shift to start tapping into major productivity opportunities above Opco level. On cash, we have been stepping up operational capital allocation, the way we allocate hard currency, capex, to emerging market operations with challenging macroeconomic conditions. But in the aggregate, we realized that we have made more progress on productivity than on the cash and capital deployment. And especially Harald will speak to this later today, that there is again the opportunity, but also the necessity of stepping up how we think about working capital, stepping up how we think about resource allocation, stepping up how we go about... ultimately improving our returns on capital. And as such, we are introducing return on invested capital as a key metric that we will target our senior managers on. More to come on this later. And then on sustainability and responsibility, an important part in future-proofing the business. We have a huge industrial base across 70 countries, very important on whether it's carbon or energy or social responsibility dimensions to make sure we deliver the right impact. but we're also bumping against some technical constraints and financial viability constraints, and we'll update how we think about that going forward. So these are kind of both the pride of the progress we've made, but also the candor and the humility we needed in terms of the leadings and how we will sharpen our strategy. Now, our strategy starts by reaffirming our purpose. Beer, since the dawn of human civilization, was about people coming together. It was about sociability. It is the original social lubricant. And as such, we believe, and you will see Bram bringing this to life through advertising we're doing on so many of our brands, We brew the joy of true togetherness to inspire a better world. And I think we all agree in this world of war and conflict and loneliness and mental health issues that we need more joy of true togetherness. And again, I hope you will agree by the end of today that we are fully leveraging our brands, our marketing to contribute to that. And in the end of the day, there are so many things that we need to think of and do, etc. But in the end, it is all about our winning aspiration, which is about crafting legendary brands, products, and experiences to delight consumers. That is at the heart of what it's all about. Everything else should be at the surface in order to be the world's pioneering beer company. For 160 years, we have been pioneering, and there are countless examples of that, and we will share them. And we need to make sure that we're setting the intention to keep on pioneering for another 160 years. On our strategic framework, we're simplifying it. We're going from five priorities to three, because three is easier to remember, and it's about accelerating growth, stepping up productivity, and focused future fitting of the organization. We're keeping the green diamond. It's very clear. It has four quadrants. Those are the four key components of how we create long-term value for all our stakeholders. But we are sharpening and updating the specific underlying metrics, including return on invested capital that I touched upon earlier. So this, in a nutshell, is what anybody within Heineken should be able to dream and replicate. Today is all about this. You see that clear hierarchy of priorities accelerate. We also are unapologetically there. It implies in hierarchy with accelerating growth as the number one priority for the whole company. Even Harold agrees about this. But we have to step up productivity and all the value creation to come with it. But all joking aside, this is about consumers and customers. It is about growth. Our model doesn't work if you don't have growth and no operating leverage. For each of these three priorities, there's basically three or four focused actions. And each of these three or four, so a total of 10, 11, that is what this whole organization is focused and targeted against. And today we will impact them. Across the different presentations, we'll introduce the three priorities and these 10-11 focused actions that together form the Evergreen 2030 strategy for our beautiful company. Starting with our number one priority, accelerating growth. I will speak to how we believe we can shape structural category growth and, as I earlier said, sharpen differentiation and focus across the footprint at the segments and the brands. And I will do that by starting to speak about the category. Before speaking about Heineken, I want to speak about the category, because this is the elephant in the room. The whole debate that many of you fill, pages full of analysis and reflections, and a lot of that is very helpful and instructive, I find. But the essential question that we are all facing is, is the glass half-full or is the glass half-empty? And what I find super informative, you won't be surprised that I will make an unapologetic pitch that the glass is half full. that the glass is full-full, but it's a nuanced story, and you need to disaggregate it because it's not a black-and-white story. So I've put together a couple of slides to speak to the category and why we believe that a lot of what we're facing is cyclical, that there's some structural concerns that we better adapt and change to, but that overall, we believe firmly in the structural growth of our category going forward. now why are we even having this debate and that's because of course after long decades of growth in the low single digit as a category the last five years have been challenging and if you would end 25 it would be a negative kecker for the five years with a lot of ups and downs and that started by some major once in a generation Or some would say once in a century kind of one-off events. COVID, of course, being one major one. I don't think an industry was more affected in consumer goods than beer during COVID because it hit us at the heart of what we are about, which is togetherness, which is the on-trade bars and restaurants. Even now, in Europe, on-trade never recovered and it basically lost about a fifth of its volume. For us as Heineken, we were doing slightly better, it's about 15%. But that, of course, was a major reset impacting the category. Good thing is, more recently, we start to see on-trade doing relatively better than off-trade. We had a once-in-a-generation inflation spike, triggered by the war in Ukraine, triggered by the swingback coming out of COVID, the energy crisis feeding its way through input cost. That, luckily, is abating now, but I think a lot of what we're facing are the lingering effects of that inflation spike. And then, in a way, the war in Ukraine, energy spike, food price spiking around the world, triggered major macroeconomic disruption in some of the emerging markets. Countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, having massive devaluations. actually the biggest devaluation since the early 1980s. So we have been rocked by a couple of these very big one-off events, and we like to believe all of them were starting to be to the back end of them. But there are lingering effects, and the key lingering effect concerns affordability. and this is some global data where pre-cofit in a majority of regions pricing was actually trailing consumer inflation and the sweet spot for the for the industry seems to be you know that 80 of inflation give or take that actually allowed the industry to grow in that low single digit. And that dramatically changed because of the war in Ukraine, energy crisis. And why did this affect beer so much? And that's because beer is relatively very energy intensive. The brewing process is very energy-intensive due to all the heating and cooling over a 28-day period. Our packaging, aluminum cans, one-way glass bottles are the most energy-intensive packaging. So that energy crisis worked its way through an explosion in our input cost. And we traversed something that's extraordinary over time, is that our input costs were a multiple of the consumer inflation. So that consumer inflation was at a once-in-a-generation high point. Our input cost inflation in Europe in 22-23 was above 20%. Now, you really get in a squeeze when your input cost inflation for multiple years runs ahead of consumer inflation, and that meant that we ended up as an industry taking pricing above inflation, affecting the relative affordability of the category compared to adjacent categories, but also this not happening in a vacuum, but this happening at a moment where consumer confidence has been rocked and in the recent period, actually slipping. So it's not happening in a vacuum. That relative affordability is happening at a moment where consumers are really pressured from many different dimensions. And what we do know, this is not new news, that beer and alcohol in general is very discretionary, that out-of-home behavior is very discretionary, going to bars and restaurants, but also purchasing alcohol at home. And as such, it did and is affecting at this moment the volume trajectory and momentum in the category. Now, this is a bit called comfort, but beer is relatively better off than other alcohol segments. But that's not the whole story. We do believe there's those one-off shocks where we see we're getting to the back end, that the affordability in an environment of weak consumer confidence, that's real, and that's something that we deal with. But we believe them all ultimately to be cyclical. But we also need to have the debate about penetration, because there is a lot of media coverage about alcohol penetration going down. Again, it's important to be very nuanced and very specific. And in all the reporting, the first thing to always check, is it claimed penetration or is it actual penetration coming from household panel data like NielsenIQ? And what we see, and that is true, is that claimed penetration of alcohol is slipping across key developed markets. That is a reality. But we don't know to what extent that spills over into real penetration declines. The data that we do have, which is the household data from, for example, Nielsen, is actually much more stable than the claim data. So there's a big difference between the two. What we do see and that we are concerned about is that is that frequency is affected. So right now, we are more concerned about frequency than about household penetration. Household penetration seems to be holding up. Frequency is really affected. We believe that is partly, mostly related to relative affordability. People used to have three pints, now they're having two pints, might also have some moderation that people think, okay, one night a week, I'm having a zero-zero or an alternative rather than the alcohol. That is the picture, that's the data we're seeing. Claim penetration in developed markets is under pressure. Household data is from what we see holding up. Frequency is weak. We believe it to be mostly cyclical, but time will tell. Now, again, it's important to talk about the elephant in the room, but how about Gen Z? And what we do see is that with Gen Z, in developed markets like North America and in Europe, it's under pressure. Not just the claimed, but also the real. And you see just a handful of markets how that's playing out. What we don't know what is causing this. Is this health concerns? Is this because the initiation rituals of entering the category was disrupted because people at the moment of going to college were stuck at home because of COVID? the housing crisis the number of young people staying at home longer than prior generations affecting these kind of behaviors we don't know we see emerging trends that in more recent data we see penetration on gen z starting to go up this morning there was an article in the economist who also quoted data in that direction we also see if you follow gen z the people who three years ago had a drop in penetration Later on, as they probably become more economic independent, move out of the house, you see a normalization. So there's something going on there, and we should not be naive about it. At the same time, it's nuanced, and we do see emerging trends of trends starting to normalize. What's very important, especially given our footprint, that in emerging markets, the picture is very different. In emerging markets, we see penetration of Gen Z holding up. And just look at the numbers, 80% of Gen Z is in the world, is living, and the number is going up, as you can imagine, just by the population growth. We took our supervisory board to India just a couple of weeks ago, and there's 25 million young people entering legal drinking age every year. That's almost two times the size of the population of the Netherlands. So again, it's a nuanced story. We don't want to kind of hide some of the more uncomfortable conversations, but we believe you need to disaggregate and be balanced in terms of the key takeaways. Now, it is not the first time in history that our industry has been under pressure. And I won't speak to the details here, but there have been moments where in major markets, whether it was the US or Europe coming out of the great financial crisis, that we have had years where the growth in the category stagnated. But time and again, as cyclical factors, as economies and consumer dynamics normalized, we saw the category stagnate. coming out and restoring growth. And as such, we are confident in the long-term prospects. Because we believe, and I won't speak to all the detail on this slide, we believe in the fundamentals of the category. There is no alcohol segment that has such broad penetration, that represents so much of the spend. We see actually bear a share of disposable income holding up. we are accelerating our share of throat within spirits. And in that emerging market footprint, there's so much opportunity with per capita consumption not even being at half the level of the more developed markets. And in the end of the day, it's about fulfilling consumer needs. And this is not static. This is something that we as an industry and we as a leading company in our industry need to invest in day after day. That's fulfilling the key consumer needs. And as such, our starting point as a beer category is not bad. Whether it's in connecting, that sociability, that togetherness, feeling good, thirst quenching, enjoyable for longer, responsible, the agility, the versatility of beer in coming with all sorts of lower and even no propositions gives us a lot of confidence for the future. And as such, and this is directional data, on the right side you see external sources like IWSR and others predicting mid-long-term growth of the category to return to 1% volume, 3-4% value. We have our own proprietary model called Telescope, which predicts more or less the same. What's very important, and this is at the heart of our strategic story for the rest of the day, you really need to disaggregate and differentiate across geographies, across segments. We see premium growing in all market typologies, developed and emerging. And we see good overall revenue growth across the different, where the US is probably the most challenged, Northern Europe rests. The Mediterranean actually provides a lot of solid growth, and we'll speak to that later on. And then the emerging markets, that goes without saying. So summarizing, we recognize and we're open-eyed about the short-term challenges the industry has been facing and is currently facing, but we're very confident in the long-term structural growth of our category. And that's what we also, you don't suffer the category, you're not just a category taker, you should be a category shaper. We actually take pride in taking a proactive role in making sure that we continue invest in this category shaping it adapting it to new realities so that that long-term 1% minimum volume growth will be there that's the part about the category and I found it was important before we talk about Heineken that we establish our perspective or what's going on in the category Now it's all about Heineken and what we will do. And we see four major shifts. We take a lot of pride in a lot of strengths that we have, whether it's in premium or the Heineken brand or our global footprint. But there are four ways how we believe we can unlock accelerated growth. The first one is all about our geographical footprint, where we can have much more differentiation and focus. And I will speak specifically to that quite extensively. And then later on, Bram will really show how we're shaping the category across the different segments of premium and mainstream, a lower no and beyond beer, how we see an opportunity to really focus and differentiate on fewer, bigger, better brands, as well as building the future fit capabilities to do the others. So this framework of four shifts is what you will hear in what I'm going to share and what Bram will share later on. starting with our balanced and diversified footprint. And if there's one major strategic accomplishment of the last 20 years, under the leadership of my predecessor, was putting together this high-growth global footprint. On the back of major acquisitions like Scotch Newcastle, FEMSA, Kirin Brazil, APB. And we take great pride at the balance, the breadth and the depth of our geographical footprint across Europe, the Americas, the Africa Middle East region and APEC. With in total 53 leading positions where we're number one or two in these underlying markets. And we're now broadly represented in about 90-95% of the key profit markets where we should be. But what's really important is that within that 70-plus Opco network, we're starting to differentiate much more. And we introduce a framework for that, and that we start to focus much more in an unapologetic way than we have done before. And I will double-click on both the differentiation and the focus. First, on differentiation. And basically, we distinguish three archetypes. across two axes, economic development, GDP per capita, as well as beer as percentage of total alcohol. And on the right side, we have the developed archetype. This is where you will find your North America markets, Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, give and take are in that bucket. And towards the higher end are the more northern markets, like the UK, Canada, US. to the south, to the lower part of that green box is where you would have the Mediterranean markets, where there's still massive share of throat opportunities, stealing from wine in particular. What we call the advancing archetype, that has been the key value generation over the last decade, decade and a half. This is where your Mexico, your Brazil, your Vietnam, your South Africa sits. big markets, still with decent growth opportunities in terms of population urbanization, but already with relative higher share of throat. And then the third archetype is what we call the value archetype. These are the least developed markets economically, and there's a bit of a range between having very low share of throat, for example India or Myanmar, to relatively high share of throat, like for example in Nigeria. And again, we take pride that we have major market positions, leading market positions in each of these three market archetypes. And to be precise, about 16 leading positions in markets like India, Nigeria, Myanmar, Indonesia, what have you. In advancing, our most important operating companies are there, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Vietnam, Malaysia, and then, of course, the developed markets with Spain or the UK and some other key markets. So you get a bit the notion of three archetypes driven by three different consumer and economic realities. What I will do in the following is, for each of these three archetypes, share quickly three operating companies and how we have been transforming and performing in those different markets. First up, value archetype. Ethiopia. Heineken entered Ethiopia slightly over a decade ago, back in 2014-15. We did two very small acquisitions of regional government-owned state breweries, and on top of that, drove a very persistent organic strategy, unlocking massive growth. 14% kekker, it's now over 5 million hectoliters, and we have now become the market leader from literally being absent of the market. Ethiopia has a population of more than 100 million people and is growing fast, both in population growth, urbanization growth, middle-class development. So we only feel we're at the beginning. We are coming out of the biggest devaluation in half a century, and this year we're up high single digit in the market. So these are markets that also, when they are hit, they bounce back in a very vigorous way. Very proud of the progress that we have been making in Ethiopia, with, by the way, an almost fully local portfolio led by the Harar brand. Let's see in the Q&A if we have time to speak a bit more in detail. Rwanda has been a market that has been with us for a while. This is a different story. This was a business that was candidly a bit too complacent. And we really, when they were starting to run out of capacity about four or five years ago, we really upped the operational intensity of the market. And without adding capacity of capex, we unlocked a lot of additional capacity by better operational excellence. And we basically were able to jumpstart the profit in the market and the operating margin. And we're now in a position of considering a greenfield operation for a next chapter of growth in Rwanda. And then Myanmar. About 10 years ago, we entered Myanmar with nothing. We built an empty brewery. Here we were able to leverage the Tiger brand, the Heineken brand, and the ABC brand, a growth of 33%. And even to my own astonishment, we are now the market leader in Myanmar with a lot of growth still to be had. This is a country with 50, 60 million people. Volatile macroeconomics, politics, but the team has been able to show persistent performance, even with all the twists and turns. Again, these are countries with high population growth, still relative low urbanization rates, urbanization below 40%, so they have still ways to go in terms of urbanization, growing middle class, growing GDP per capita, translating to per capita consumption. So these are markets that we feel are very critical growth engines for the future. And again, we have over 10 leading positions in this archetype. Then moving on to the advancing. Again, this is... You know, the core of our portfolio and some of our largest operations are here. Mexico, super, super important. I had the joy and the honor of leading this operation for a couple of years. We have had a lot of growth over the last decades. The last four years, growth slowed because of the oxo mixing. But actually, we're able to convert the oxo mixing from a threat into an incredible value creating opportunity, basically driven by the six retail format with now 17,000 stores. And we'll have a video on that in a minute. Brazil, incredibly important. We have had... know impressive strategic patience i would say because when i joined heineken 27 years ago there was already a guy in a little office in rio selling 20 000 hectoliters of heineken we have been incubating the heineken brand for decades and it was only with the femsa acquisition as a step one and then the kieran brazil acquisition as a step two they were able to unlock the scale and in particular you see it visualized Because gross margins were so notoriously low in our portfolio and to some extent the market, that we didn't want to deploy billions in additional capex to create a lot of capacity for that low margin economy. That we basically have converted the portfolio from a predominantly economy branded portfolio to mainstream and premium. And you see the effect that has had on profit and margin. And we now have, in Heineken and Amstel, two of the most important and most healthy and fastest-growing brands in the Brazilian market. And then Vietnam. Incredible growth trajectory until 2023, 23 was a big economic, political, real estate crisis that created a step back, but very happy that this year we have returned to mid to high single-digit growth. We have retained and strengthened our number one position in the market, built over a 30-year portfolio. We've reset the operating margins, which were in 40% plus to the high 20s, as we have discussed in the past. but we believe still a very important market going forward. Urbanization rate, even though we qualify Vietnam as an advancing market, amongst those markets, urbanization rate in Vietnam is still below 50%. In Malaysia, that's 70-80%, or in Thailand. And it has 100 million people. So Vietnam still, we believe, has a lot of future growth ahead. Now, as I said, the Mexico story is important. It's our number one operating company globally. So let's hear from Oriol, our managing director in Mexico.

In Mexico, we've been navigating a significant transformation in our route to consumer. Following the end of our exclusive distribution agreement with OXXO, we had to adapt quickly to a new reality, one that has opened the door to stronger opportunities. The original OXXO contract, while profitable, impacted both our revenue and our margins. At the same time, Heineken Mexico already had a strong network of own stores in which we saw a chance to create more value. This is where our six network has made a true difference. It is both revenue and margin strengthening with highly competitive presence, managing not only beer, but more than 900 SKUs of other categories. Its model is relatively asset light and offers high return on investment. At the same time, we are building the six of the future using digital tools to enrich the user experience, like the Shopper app that provides us with rich consumer and customer insights. This is testimony of our pioneering spirit. In just a few years, we have expanded from 9,000 to over 17,000 stores. This expansion has not only enhanced our profitability, but also strengthened our distribution system to support and grow our sources of revenue. The lesson is clear. By actively shaping our route to consumer, we can turn disruption into opportunity. SIX is proof that with focus, agility and ambition, we are building a stronger future for Heineken Mexico and for our global businesses. Thank you.

Fantastic. When I left Mexico in 2018, we had 10,000 stores, now 17,000 stores. So for over half a decade, we opened more than three to four stores, six stores, every single day five, six years in a row. Just the skill of the expansion, and this is a very physical thing. You need to get buildings, you need to reconstruct those buildings, you need to equip them, you need to find commissioners to run them, etc. An incredible strategic asset for the company. And when we were looking at FIFCO, there's actually very interesting synergies there with the emerging convenience change that FIFCO had been building in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. So convenience retailing, not everywhere, but in certain market archetypes, is part of our strategy. Now on to the developed market. archetype, basically the history, the legacy of the company. Where you have a market like the UK, which is more Northern Europe, where share of throat of beer is relatively higher, we have been able, and this includes the full impact of COVID, and of course, as losing the Kronenburg brand, which was around a million hectolitre, corrected for that underlying, you can still have decent volume, But with the premiumization and the development of the purpose state, there's very good underlying value creation as well. So we have been taking a portfolio which historically was dominated by economy brands like Foster. We have been transferring that to mainstream brands like Heineken. Now we launched the Cruzcampo brand, which is already a million hectoliters in mainstream. We have, with Moretti, the number one lager brand in the on-trade, and we acquired Beafortown, the number one craft brand. And we did the same in Cider, where our legacy was in Strongbow, but we have building premium brands like Inches and Old Mood. And the combination of transforming and premiumizing the portfolio, together with investments in our purpose state, we have been able to drive persistent, consistent value creation in important UK markets. In Spain, where we are right now, super important market, four key players, pretty much regionally defined. Also here, we have been on a journey of premiumizing our portfolio with the Landronde Manzana. You have tasted it last night. The Algila, which is a non-filter brand, which was basically an idea originating with Ignoosa in Italy, reapplied to Spain. Super important and healthy profit pool for us as a company. And Italy has been incredibly important. a positive volume cacker even through the COVID and even while having a very large size on-trade business. And again, a combination in all of these markets of premiumizing, developing the portfolio, a lot of productivity savings that Harald will speak about, but also a transforming of our on-trade business. So key, key markets. And again, The way we think about it is we are more conservative on the volume expectations from the more northern markets like North America and Northern Europe, but the Mediterranean, where beer share of throat is still relatively low, we still see very good structural growth for the beer category. In Italy, in France, in Portugal, in Greece, in Croatia, in Switzerland, we have number one or two positions in many of these countries surrounding the Mediterranean, where red wine is still the dominant form of alcohol and where beer is actually kind of the progressive choice for the youth and growing persistently. So all in all, we believe that we have the most balanced and advantage footprint across these archetypes. If you compare to our leading global competitors, in a way, we have a good basis in developed markets that I just spoke about, where you have very strong value creation, very strong cash flow generation, Then that core of advancing where you have the best kind of combination of both growth and good profit conversion. And then this critical exposure to value markets where the bulk of the future growth in the category is going to be. And we are becoming much more discerning in how we differentiate our growth strategies, our segment strategies, our brand strategies across these archetypes. And again, Bram will double click on this extensively later this morning. So that is about differentiating and having, in our belief, the most balanced advantage footprint. But there's another thing that historically we didn't do that much, which is focus. Heineken originally was a very, until recently I would say, very democratic, where I basically let many flowers bloom, and there was a lot of kind of leeway locally to do as you saw fit. And we were spreading the resources kind of in a democratic way across the network. that we intend to change, and we are actually already starting to change that in the more recent past. And we do that using this framework. We call this our Opco Value Rules across two dimensions. Our market position, where on the right you have your strongest position as a reflection of relative market share, and on the vertical, the growth potential of the market, both in relative growth as well as the size of the growth. And our most important markets are our lead markets, where you have a strong market position and where there's enough absolute growth to be had. Your challenge markets are markets where your market position is still kind of growing, needs to further develop, but where there's a lot of future growth and value creation. Strengthened markets are actually key, because they are our bread and butter. This is where the bulk of cash flow generation in hard currency is coming from. And then we have to resolve opcos. And Heineken, it was always a rather nice culture where we were tiptoeing around this. But we have to acknowledge there's a number of opcos who are not in a good place because they're having weak positions in a low growth, low opportunity environment. And historically, we were a company that planted flags. We never took a flag down. And we're now starting to have quite edgy conversations with these markets to either fix it or exit or partner in these kind of markets. That is a big change in how we operate the company. We're very clear on how we differentiate actions, resource allocation, CapEx availability, expectations across each of these four I'm not going to talk to all these bullet points, but so we are clear that there are real consequences in prioritization of resource allocation and expectations according to these four different rules. And although we are in over 70 operating companies globally, we're now also becoming unapologetic about 17 markets that represent the bulk of the future growth of the company. And those are these markets, and you will hear them come back time and again. A couple of key challenge markets were, and let's be honest, even though Mexico is such a proud opco, We're still not satisfied with our relative market position. We are far number two, the same in Brazil. And we're still very hungry to do better and fight for market share and make sure that we start moving that to a lead position over time. Strengthen markets, there are key markets like Austria or Portugal or Ireland. So strengthen is still a very important archetype in our company, but those opcodes will have to do with significantly less capital, for example. So there are real resource allocation consequences and there are real differences in terms of expectations that are coming there. And as I said, On Resolve, there's a whole other series of implications. Now, this is not static. This is what we have been putting in place in the recent past. And we will continue to sharpen that going forward. Now, our footprint is not static. We are continuously working on further strengthening what we already believe a very advantaged footprint. In different ways, from the China joint venture to entering very attractive profit pools like Peru and Ecuador with super large companies. profit pools, but with relative smaller positions. India, which is the sweet spot because it ends a very strong market position, the leading company in the market, but with a lot of growth. Southern Africa, which was all about strengthening in the most important profit pool of AME, and then, of course, the FIFCO acquisition more recently. But very importantly, we are also exiting more and more operations that are in that resolved box. And again, this was something that Heineken culturally didn't do. We never bit the bullet on these markets, which were just perpetually draining cash, or worse, perpetually draining managerial attention. I remember running APAC and having to deal with a couple of markets that were nothing in terms of growth opportunity, but still managerial. You had to allocate a lot of time. And things that we exit are either small positions where there's no meaningful profit pool to be had or to be shaped, or positions that just don't provide a credible, sustainable path to long-term profitable growth. And we will continue in this spirit of focusing much more explicitly in our global footprint between the value roles if the opportunity arises to keep investing in strengthening, adding important opportunities, but also cleaning up some of the long tail while we're at it. Let me speak shortly about some of the more recent additions to our global footprint, starting with India. So we had the minority stake in UBL India since the S&N acquisition, but without any managerial control or involvement whatsoever. That changed in the summer of 2021 when we were able to buy a last 15% stake from the government without paying a control premium. We were a bit lucky in how that all played out, giving us over 60% economic ownership of UBL and full managerial control. And we have been going through a couple of phases. And the first thing is that we had to dramatically transform the company from a leadership point of view, replacing the independent boards, replacing the executive team, cleaning up the router market, really significantly driving up compliance, installing the basic capabilities. And that had a bit of an effect, particularly in 22-23. But I would say since last year, we cost um the corner on that and we now have strong local leadership with a very compelling strategy centered on the kingfisher brand which is the absolute mammoth brand in the country both in the mainstream as well as its premium freight we're starting to add our global brands now to it it has the broadest industrial base And knowing the regulatory framework, which is the number one challenge, having over 30 breweries owned and licensed across all the relevant states put us strategically in pole position to take advantage of what we believe is by far the biggest opportunity in beer going forward. One is a share of throat opportunity. There are 150-200 million people drinking alcohol in India, but 90% share of throat for spirits. That's changing rapidly. Beer is starting to become the more progressive alternative, more moderate, more inclusive. an alternative really taking off in the urban centers. And then, of course, there is the demographic and urbanization opportunity on top of. And again, we are really investing and positioning ourselves to take advantage of this huge opportunity. Let's hear from Vivek, the Managing Director of UBL India.

Hello everyone, I'm Vivek Gupta, CEO and Managing Director for United Breweries, a Hanneken company in India. United Breweries is brewing beer for almost 150 years in India and we lead the iconic brand Kingfisher, which is not only a signpost brand for the category, but also a symbol of good times. India is probably the largest potential market for beer in the world. With the favorable demographics, with almost 23 million young consumers entering this category every year, and 50% of the families who are going to be nuclear, India is going through a big demographic and societal change. We at Henneken, with a great portfolio of Henneken, Amstel, Ultra, Kingfisher, Ultramax, are in the best position to capture this opportunity. We have a strength of widest brewery network with 19 of our own and 16 of contract manufacturing. a great organization, a heritage of selling beer, and a strong portfolio, we are going to win in India. Now, India is not going to be easy because it's state-by-state business. The regulatory is challenging. But if there's anyone going to be the category maker, it is going to be UBL and Henneken. Thank you.

Very good. Good hearing from Phil. Let me clarify, the nuclear has nothing to do with... bombs, what have you, the nuclear family, that's big change. Traditionally in India, people grew up in multi-generational households where three, four generations were living together, but that also kind of perpetuated rather traditional conservative family values. You see a massive shift to the nuclear family, which is... like the two-generation family as we know it in the West, which is actually creating a lot more social freedom, which is allowing now, for example, the adoption of beer. Next one up, Southern Africa. And two, three years ago, we were a bit at the crossroads Again, like what we did historically in Brazil, in China, over decades we had built a very important beach hat with the Heineken brand, and to some extent the Amsterdam brand, but we were not making profit, and we simply lacked the skill to take on the market incumbent in an effective way. And South Africa, together with Namibia, is by far the most meaningful profit pool across the African Middle East continent. And with Distel in South Africa, and by acquiring Namibian breweries, we create a regional platform significantly bulking up in scale, giving us a much higher fighting chance of taking a big bite out of this important and meaningful profit pool, giving us the leading position in premium beer, leading position in cider and flavored malt beverages, leading position in wine, and number two position in spirits. The same in Namibia. We announced the deal November 21, And we were only able, due to all the local government regulations, to close in April 23. And as we all know, the world dramatically changed between those two moments. So actually, at the moment that we closed the transaction, the reality was very different. And we have been working very, very hard to restore the historical profitability And more importantly, by integrating the two companies, building the capabilities to take advantage of the opportunities that this market is providing. And in this year, we're starting to see real momentum now on our beer portfolio, growing market share in the most recent quarters. Importantly, Namibia Breweries on Fire is doing extremely well. And what we don't advertise that much, but we are taking about a quarter of the profit pool in markets like Botswana, like Zambia, on a very asset-light basis. But our brands are fully available in those markets, serviced out of Southern Africa, and then a lot of optionality with an emerging position in Kenya. And then last, but certainly not least, FIFCO, very attractive growth markets at high margins in Central America, leading position in Costa Rica, leading position in Nicaragua. We're able to consolidate fully now to 100% in Panama, some further optionality in Guatemala and other markets. beer, but also soft drinks, multi-format, including the retail format. And let's take a look at the video to bring this to life a bit more.

Not every jewel is found in the earth. Some are built by people, vision and time. Shining proudly from Costa Rica, expanding to its surroundings. For more than a century, we have built trust through quality and resilience. Our roots are Costa Rican, but our spirit belongs to the region. Our brands build a legacy of taste and belonging. Beyond beer, our beverages shine with innovation and refresh millions every day with bubbles that brighten, juices that nourish, and drinks that awaken joy. We toast at every celebration with the spirit of our brands. Our bakeries rise with the sun, nourishing families each morning. Moussi and Mousmani are trusted names in daily life. Our shops elevate beer into an experience worth sharing. From brewery to bakery, our supply chain flows with precision. Each step reflects a discipline built on care and innovation. Data and insight make us agile, anticipating needs before they are spoken. Innovation is not a project. It is our lifeblood. It shapes products, processes, and the way we connect with consumers. We are guided by expansive sustainability, our triple bottom line. People are empowered, opportunities multiplied, communities strengthened. Planet is cared for through stewardship and circularity. Profit is aligned with purpose, reinvested for growth and impact. This balance makes us special. Pura Veda captures optimism, authenticity, and excellence with heart. we bring a better way of living to the world.

Very good. We are very, very excited in FIFCO joining the Heineken family, pending regulatory approval, of course. We expect that end of Q1, beginning of Q2, and it will be immediately EPS margin and growth accretive and will become a top five operating profit generator at the company. Now, there's a last part of our footprint I would like to talk about, and that's our JVs and license business, which has actually expanded very rapidly. And because it's not part of the consolidated results, typically gets much less attention, both in what we share, but also what you possibly pay attention to. We have over 10 critical strategic partnerships, whether it's with CR in China, with Molson Coors in Canada, with CCU across Latin America, with Emirates in Dubai. And in each of these businesses, we're expanding, we're growing. We're building right now the first brewery in the Emirates, in Dubai, where we are immediately going to phase two because the beer market is growing so fast. You see in the middle our license volumes growing at a 14% cacker right through this period of COVID and all the disruption. And very importantly, the share of profit on an over 20% cacker. Right now, these associates and JVs represent 10-11% of the absolute net profit of the company. So this is a very important and meaningful part of the business and the value creation of the company. Now, of course... A very important part of that is our operation in China, where we joined forces with CR back in 2018, started early 2019. 1.2 million hectolitres. We crossed the 7 million hectolitre mark last year. Year to date, we're growing double digit again. And very importantly, we're right now also adding Amstel as a possible second engine, half a million hectolitre and growing very, very fast. Share of profit has been going up, but then on top of that, after we waived the royalties in the initial years, we're capturing more and more royalties per year. So you have a dual way of capturing value. We're only in a quarter of the outlet base of China resources. We never want to be in 100%, but we believe we can double the distribution and again in the coming years. So this growth engine is not done yet. So there you have it, our advantaged, but now increasingly more differentiated and focused footprint. We believe we have the best balance across these three archetypes, more than 50 leading positions. We're much more actively optimizing our footprint in the past, not just with acquisitions that we have done for a while, but also by exiting the lower conviction parts and really focusing on those 70 markets that drive 90% of the upside. As I said, this is only one of the four shifts that we are making. I deliberately spent more time on this one, knowing that Bram will spend time on the other three shifts. I do want to speak to the category and the segment for a little bit by introducing this concept, because there's a lot of debate in the industry. What are you? Are you a beer company? Are you a beer and beyond company? Are you a multi-category? Are you in all beverages? And we want to be clear about how we prioritize and what we focus on. And you see in the middle, is lager beer, and towards the right of you, you see all sorts of expansion on alcoholic propositions, from specialty beers to craft beers to seltzers, ready-to-drinks, flavored malt beverages, and ultimately in spirits and wine. On the other side, it goes from lower-alcohol beer propositions to no-alcohol beer propositions, to malt drinks, to energy malts, culminating in the end in soft drinks and water. Now, what we are unapologetic about is that the strategic focus of our company is that yellow box and everything that sits in that yellow box. And why is that? Because those are the things where we can leverage our existing capital base. Everything in that box, of course, the middle, the lager beers, the premium beers, the mainstream beers, but all those ready-to-drinks, flavored more beverages, seltzers, ciders, craft specialty, zero-zeros, you can all easily produce that in a brewery. You can package it in a can, in a bottle. and you can distribute it on a beer truck through our beer route to market. This is very important because the minute you go out of the yellow box, it is really significant additional capital deployment, whether you go into spirits or wine or whether you go into soft drinks. Now, mind you, In about a quarter of our operating companies, we're selling soft drinks, either through our wholesale operations or through bottling operations. But it needs to make sense from a local by local market. For example, FIFCO, it makes fully sense to have an integrated multi-category platform. In some other markets, it makes less sense. What we're really focused on is first and foremost the yellow box, which is true in every market across the globe. But then selectively, we play multi-category, whether it's soft drinks, water on one side, or for example, spirits and wine, which there's about 10 operating companies where we have our own wine and spirit from the Bahamas to Jamaica to Egypt, and of course now across southern Africa. In that yellow box, you leverage your existing base, and the common denominator are adults, natural, and more premium propositions. And then within, we prioritize specific segments. We prioritize always, first and foremost, premium beer, which is our bread and butter. Second is mainstream beer, which is critical because that's the base, the volume base of the category and our portfolio. We have become the pioneer and the leader in the low and no space. And then last is beyond beer, where selectively we see in a lot, particularly in the developed archetype, a lot of opportunities. We have focused and differentiated ambitions and strategies for these four priority segments. And importantly, we believe we have the right to play and the right to win in each one of them. We are the leading premium player across the three archetypes with disproportionate growth, even during this last challenge period. Outside of the US, we are a leading mainstream player with key market positions like Takata in Mexico or Kingfisher in India. We know we need to do better in this regard, and we're sharpening some strategies. We have been the pioneer in low and no, whether it was the Rattlers 10 years ago, whether it's zero-zero today, and a lot more ideas on our way. And then beyond beer. We actually launched over 100 propositions, but with a steep learning curve in terms of what works where. And again, Bram will share that in more detail. So that is what we call shape the category. What do we prioritize first and foremost? What is the hierarchy of priorities in the focus segments? And then differentiated winning strategies for each. Again, I'm going to leave it at that now, but Bram will double-click on that extensively. And then the third shift, which is about fewer bigger brands, which is the core of our DNA as Heineken. This is what we all grew up doing when we entered this company, which is brand building, which is marketing. But we ended up with a very fragmented global portfolio of over 250 brands. And again, in Heineken fashion, very democratic, you know, spreading the peanut butter potentially too thin. And under the leadership of Bram, we are now dramatically focusing on five global brands and 25 local brands. Those global brands actually already provide the bulk of the growth, of course, led by Brand Heineken. There's an emerging global platform on Amstel, on Moretti, on Desperados and Tiger. But we're actually crossing the bridge and putting new governance in place like we have from Brent Heineken on these four other brands to really jumpstart and accelerate the growth momentum. On the local brands, again, we literally have hundreds of local brands. But in the end of the day, there are 25 who truly matter. These are big, big, important power brands like Cruz Campo in Spain, Sea Wedge in Poland, Kingfisher in India, Anchor in Cambodia, Tecate in Mexico. And we're becoming more intentional about these brands. And we also see a lot of good best practices that can transfer across the global footprint. I'm going to leave it there. So I double clicked extensively on footprint. That is our core strategic asset. And we see a lot of opportunity for differentiation, for focusing, for sharper, more edgy decisions while we continuously add new attractive profit pools to our footprint, as well as exit some lower conviction markets. And then these three other shifts that Bram will bring to life. And all of that needs to sustain our you know, strategic intention of growing our revenue mid-single-digit over time. And again, all the underlying reasons to believe, from structural market growth to differentiation of focus, et cetera, will bring to life as we go today. That closes chapter one, priority one, growth. Now, shortly onto productivity. I only have three slides on productivity because I'm leaving this to Harald, who has a dedicated presentation on this. We made a lot of progress. We unlocked 3 billion in growth savings. We started with a much more cost-conscious culture, building the capability, building the funnel, and new ways of working. But we also know not enough flow to net savings, and Harald again will double-click on that while we're learning how we're going about it. From really focusing on capturing productivity on an opco by opco basis, we are now making the step to really starting leverage scale and skill through a scaling of Heineken Business Services. This is enabled by a new harmonized data process system network that we're putting in place because through digitizing our operations, we see a lot of further saving. And we know on cash that we need to go from more reactive interventions that we have been making to a much more systemic approach. Within productivity, there's three priorities. We will continue with our FNF2Win program, which is our continuous improvement productivity platform. But there are three key step-ups that we're making. One is around agile supply chain networks. Learning from the progress we have made in Europe, where we have made a huge step in regionalizing our global supply chain, stepping up operational excellence, optimizing the network, closing eight, nine breweries, and still more to come. We announced a brewery closure in Poland last week. So that is one key step up that we are doing. The second one is Heineken Business Services. We started the journey 14 years ago, but rather timid. We now see a way of more than doubling the scale of that, as well as in procurement. In procurement, we're doing a hell of a job on global categories like aluminum cans, one-way bottles, and barley. But a lot of the local commercial business services procurement is still done fully local by local. And there is a huge value unlock that we're going to pursue, and this is underpinned by the DBB, our digital backbone. This gives us the confidence that we can accelerate our commitment to the savings we generate on a year-by-year basis, and we're raising our commitment of 400 a year to 400 to 500 million a year, driven by these three, four key initiatives where we're stepping up. And that then should allow us to continuously up the ante in terms of the investments in growth, as well as make sure that there's sufficient profit flow through, which has not been there to the extent that we aspire to. So that is on productivity. And again, you're going to get a whole 45 million treatment by Harold on all the fun stuff they were doing on productivity. Then the third and last priority, future fitting our organization. There's basically three key shifts that we want to make. Heineken historically has been more a confederation of 70, 75 operating companies, were basically all operated in a silo across four regions, across eight, nine global functions, which all operated relatively independent. The advantage is clear ownership, clear accountability. The disadvantage is, a lot of reinventing the wheel, not leveraging skill and skills, not exchanging best practices, not sufficiently leveraging benchmarking, slowing our decision making. So we're making a couple of interventions. You have seen our announcement two weeks ago now that we are dramatically focusing our global head office, reducing 35% of the FTEs, over 600 roles, really focusing the global head office on the governance, strategic, expertise role that the head office should focus on. But we're dramatically ramping up our Heineken Businesses organization, going from these very fragmented local cost structures to more shared capabilities working out of a network of global business services. And we are dealing right now, we're in the middle of it, with our legacy systems and data and process infrastructure by implementing the digital backbone, by going to a full harmonized process and data design. Now, I see your eyes glazing over, you know, another ERP thing. And that's what I thought too when I became CEO. But this is so incredibly important. Last night over drinks, somebody asked me, did you expect to be spending so much time on IT? And no, I didn't expect it. But this is, I think, one of the most important transformations that we make. Up till today, we're faced with 43 different ERPs, non-harmonized process, non-harmonized data. And when I became CEO four years ago, I knew it was an absolute necessity that we started dealing with that and transforming it. Today in the world of AI, it's existential. It's no longer just a necessity, it's existential. Now this also provides an opportunity because in a way we're so far behind that we can leapfrog one or two generations of transformation. and going from that world of very inflexible, static, wall-to-wall ERP systems to a world of modular, flexible, cloud-based global platform. And that is what we have been planning, designing, piloting over the last five years. We're about €600 million into that investment. We have built around half the underlying platforms. And next year is the first year where we really start to scale and roll that out. It's not sexy. In and by itself, it doesn't sell beer. But it's a critical foundation for all the other good stuff that needs to come. And that is this, by putting that system in place, by harmonizing our process and data, people focus too much on the system. The system is almost secondary. It is really about harmonizing the underlying transactional and operational processes and data definition. Because that's where the value unlocks it, whether it's in growth, in how we're digitizing our route to consumer, how we're generating eB2B and linking it back to our distributed information system, how we link it back to our ERP transactional core. How we're going to transform how we do marketing by building an in-house agency. Bram will speak about that. In productivity, we're digitizing our breweries, creating one global data lake. With agentic AI, you can start optimizing not just a packaging line or just a brewery. You can use agentic AI to now optimize the whole network of breweries. So the digital backbone, not sexy, but absolutely critical foundation in the pending Evergreen 2030. We're halfway in. Mind you, half the money is spent and all the planning, designing, piloting and building is done. We're now really at the moment where we start deploying at scale across our operating companies. And on top of that, at the bottom, you see all these little logos. These are all the kind of data analytics, AI, machine learning AI or more agentic AI tools that we're starting to build off of this important core. The DBB will enable that new operating model with much more intentional differentiation and focus across operating companies with this more strategic head office that is right size and a fast acceleration of Heineken business services. Now, while we are doing this, we really try to hold this notion of balancing the best of both worlds. We believe we are truly the best of both worlds of being a family controlled business with long term perspective, but also be a public listed company with performance intensity. We are very good at local relevance, but we know we need to dial it up in terms of global skills and skills. We're good at growth, it's in our DNA, but we're now building an additional muscle of productivity. We love creativity and take great pride in it, but we need to dial up discipline as we're starting to work in a more connected, interdependent way across the globe. And we are a company that's willing to make the long term bets and investments with strategic patients, but also with the performance and operational intensity to deliver in the short term. This is very important because you're talking about governance and decision rights and systems. This is what we have in mind as we're transferring and evolving the operating model. And at the heart of it, as always, are people. And we're very intentional about how we are transforming our leadership bands as well as our culture. And it all starts by making sure that we continue to attract the best talent. This is absolutely key, especially in a world that is being disrupted in so many different ways. We always had localized graduate programs in the Netherlands and some opcos. We now have launched a global graduate program leveraging our global opco system. We're going to hire at least 1,000 graduates, top, top global graduates over the next year. On the first year, we're hiring 100. We have 35,000 applications. so there's our employer brand luckily is still extremely strong very important is that we learn to move our talents much faster so we're very determined in terms of giving our best talents bigger opportunities faster we're meticulously focusing talent retention rates to make sure that the top talents stay with the company as we move them forward More higher up in the organization, we're also renewing leadership. I had the opportunity within the first 12, 18 months of my tenure to replace the full global executive team, bringing in a new generation, majority promoted from within the organization with deep organizational and industry knowledge, also bringing in external talent, bringing fresh perspectives. Over the last two years, as we are making this move in our operating model, where we expect operating companies to be more interdependent, to be more differentiated, to take some more guidance, to collaborate with business services, it requires new leadership. we brought almost 30 new general managers into our operating companies, next-gen leaders who are embracing these new ways of working. Our top 150, over a third have been newly appointed in the recent years. And then this notion of culture, of protecting what needs to be protected, but changing what needs to be changed. We are updating our leadership remuneration incentives. Harald will speak to this in greater detail. We are resetting the performance expectations, really dialing up operational intensity, whether it's in productivity, whether it's how we run our operations, breweries all the way to how we're running our sales organizations. And we are also becoming more differentiating in how we reward performance, both outperformance as well as addressing underperformance. As you can see on the left, we have been also accelerating, moving some people out while we were giving other people accelerated opportunities. And I think here it's good to hear from Jola, our chief people officer.

People are at the heart of Heineken's success. For 160 years, we have built a strong business with a pioneering culture that sets us apart. This gives us confidence as we navigate volatility and set renewed ambitions and bold priorities in our Evergreen 2030 strategy. We are redefining the way we operate, keeping what's special and changing what's needed to ensure we are future fit for the next stage of growth. A lot has been done over the last five years. We have strengthened our capabilities, from productivity and digital to talent management and transformation. Our diverse talent pipelines are delivering a new generation of leaders, and we have accelerated progression into senior roles with a sharper focus on winning and shaping the future. We know that more transformation is essential to remain competitive and to win with consumers. We are redesigning our operating model, continuing to strengthen our leadership pool, accelerating talents for growth and sharpening our performance culture, driving accountability, results and differentiation. Building on our pioneering mindset, I am truly excited about what is next and I am confident in our ability to deliver.

Very good. Thank you, Jola. What's very important, at Heineken we say we are a people-centric company, and we have been taking this company to, I would say, maybe the most intense period of change and transformation of the last decades. But if there's one metric I take great pride in, that actually the social texture is stronger than ever. our engagement level, our innovation mindset, our employee MPS, our pride level is actually at an all-time high. So while we're managing through these waves of change, our people are with us. We don't take this for granted, and this is something that we pay special attention to, but also take great pride in that our people are with us on this journey. Last element of future fitting the organization, very importantly, is sustainability. We have made a lot of progress across the metrics and the targets that we have set ourselves as part of Brewing a World 2030. We have been updating because we have met a lot of targets that we are kind of consolidating. We're launching a couple of new targets and we're really focusing. Very important on this is there's a lot of heavy lifting on the environmental targets, on net zero and on water. Huge progress made, but also bumping up against some technical viability constraints and financial constraints. And Harold later on will show the model and the framework, how we are trying to navigate that, living up to our commitments while doing this in a responsible manner. And that brings me to the final couple of slides, how this all comes together in driving value creation. We have this sharpened strategy with three clear priorities, as you have seen, but it needs to culminate in value creation across the four quadrants of our green diamond. And as you have seen in the press release that went out this morning, these are the ambitions we are setting for the midterm. on growth to deliver mid-single-digit growth. And I hope you have seen the reasons to believe underpinning that. On profitability, we believe and reaffirm our commitment to operating leverage, that operating profit should grow ahead of revenue growth, but also that our earnings per share should grow at least with operating profit. We're really stepping up on cash and are making now a more explicit ambition on cash conversion, going from historically below 80% to above 90%, introducing return on invested capital as a new internal metric, guiding our senior leaders in making the right decisions while staying the course on our sustainability and responsibility targets. Again, there's a lot here, but we have plenty of time in the remainder of today double-clicking on the different elements and the underlying actions, as well as reasons to believe why these, we feel, are the right ambitions. So, in closing, This is what you heard, our update on our strategy, both the candor of the progress we have made as well as the humility in some of the learnings with a sharpening of priorities going forward. Really stepping up growth has been historical strength of the company, but we see four major shifts accelerating growth in a very determined way. Stepping up productivity, we have created a good base, but we know we need more and can do more. while changing a future fitting the organization enabled by this digital backbone transformation, adapting the ways, the culture, the capabilities in the organization, in the end, to make sure that we drive attractive shareholder returns now and in the future. As I said, we are excited. The world is changing fast, and it brings both risks, challenges, but also opportunities. And I hope, listening to this story and as the day goes, that you feel the confidence in our ability to now fully deliver this sharpened strategy, as well as the value creation that we have set as an ambition. My confidence in the end goes back to our people. That slide that slowed on pride levels and engagement, this super intensification of change and transformation, bringing much more edge to the organization, while our company actually remain very energized, very engaged, very passionate about our journey. And the last words would be for you. Today is all about you. And I want to close my presentation now by thanking all you, our shareholders, for your confidence and for your loyalty, for our prospective shareholders who are there, for your interest, and hopefully we can convince you to step into our company, and for the analyst community, for your never-ending curiosity and constructive questions and challenges. I hope today is going to be as learning and insightful as possible, and that in the end, like us, you are very confident about our future. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Dolph. We're going to take a short 30-minute break now for coffee to basically reflect on what we just heard as well. So I'm going to ask everybody to go downstairs and be back here exactly again at 11 o'clock. Be seated. And for our webcast audience, we'll go dark now and be back at 11 o'clock. Thanks. Thank you.

Thank you. ... ... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. so

Okay, welcome back. I hope everybody got to grab a coffee. Please take a seat. Welcome back. Welcome back to our webcast audience as well. And now we're ready for our next speaker, our Chief Commerce Officer, Mr. Bram Westenbrink. Good luck, man.

Good morning. I hope you had a good break. I'm really excited to be here and talk to you about growth. But as a lot of you I'm meeting for the first time, let me start with a short introduction about myself. I'm Bram Westenbrink. I'm Dutch. I started as a commercial management trainee in the Netherlands. just like Dolf, had different commercial positions in the Netherlands and Singapore. I moved to frontline sales, leading wholesale and on trade in the Netherlands. Then I led marketing in Hungary and the Netherlands. And after that, I was asked to join Brazil, to lead the commercial integration of Brazil Kirin, develop a new commercial strategy, and stay as head of marketing to help execute the strategy. And then I had the ultimate privilege and honor to lead the most amazing brand in the world, the Heineken brand. And since two years, I'm chief commercial officer. And I'm going to be talking to you about growth. Dolf explained to you that Evergreen 2030 has three priorities. But within these priorities, growth is the absolute number one priority. We are a growth company. But how do we deliver the growth? That's what I'm going to be talking to you about today. It always starts with our purpose, the joy of true togetherness. And we bring this to life with our winning aspiration. We craft legendary drinks, brands and experiences to delight more consumers globally the right way. We don't want strong brands. We want legendary brands. We don't want to serve consumers. We want to delight consumers. And it's about more consumers. It's about growing the category. It's about growing penetration. And if you look at our purpose, it's more relevant than ever. We know that young consumers have been socializing less, and that's led to loneliness. But actually, nearly 70% of them want to socialize and want to meet new people. And that's where we come in. We want to help them socialize, to inspire them and encourage them. And strangely enough, it happens a lot in big cities. That's what they call the proximity paradox. There's a lot of loneliness there. Let's have a look how we bring this purpose to life in Korea, which we did a couple of weeks ago.

Seoul is full of people wherever you go. When you want to hang out with your friends, it's not easy to gather at home. I think the reality is that there's not enough space.

Yeah, I think a great example how we bring our purpose to life. You maybe ask why Korea? Well, Korea, and especially Seoul, is a global trend capital. A lot of global trends now start in Seoul. Think about Squid Game, think about K-pop. So if we do something in Korea, we get the global amplification that we want. But we have been delighting consumers, of course, for more than 160 years. And our recipe for success, our competitive advantage, it starts with superior insights. Really, truly understanding our consumers. And then we bring that to life in the most creative way possible through legendary creativity. And then we add excellent execution every day, in every store, in every point of sale. And this is something we will be keeping in Evergreen 2030. This is actually something we'll be doubling down on. But as Dolf has mentioned, we have also taken the moment to look back and see what have we achieved, what worked, what have we learned, and what are we going to do about it. And Dolf spoke a lot about it. We have a very strong and growthy footprint. However, we have been treating the off-coast too much as one size fits all, and we're differentiating and making much more focus within that. We have outperformed and are undisputed leaders in premium and zero-zero. We created those segments. However, our mainstream brands, we need to do a better job. And we need the mainstream brands to drive the volume growth. Our beyond beer strategy has been too unfocused and not successful enough. We have a superior growth on the Heineken brand and a very strong proven model. What we now need to do is be sure we replicate this model to all the other global brands as well. We didn't maximize the power of some of our other brands. We can do a better job there. And we have been spreading our investments to TIN. And if you look at the commercial capabilities, we have really boosted our commercial capabilities, we have harmonized the way we work at commerce, and we have very strong proven AI cases. What we actually need to do better is step up RMG, revenue margin growth, to restore the brand value equation in some markets for our consumers. And we need to scale AI end-to-end in our organization to really get the full benefit. And how are we going to do that? By implementing these four shifts. And this is exactly what I'll be talking to you about today. we are going to deliver superior balance growth by finding the optimal balance between local relevance and global scale and this is what we call the best of both worlds by implementing these four shifts the advantage and differentiated footprint shaping the category fewer better bigger brands and skill execution with ai Let me start with the first shift. I'll be relatively short about this one because Dolf has been speaking extensively about it. We have built a very balanced and advantageous footprint, a very growthy footprint. We are now focusing on 17 clear opcos that deliver 90% of the growth. What Dorf hasn't spoken that much about, and I will be doing, is how do we use these archetypes to create differentiated strategies per archetype. Because the jobs to be done are different. In value, it's about building the category. In advancing, it's about challenging and playing asymmetric. And in developed, it's about revitalizing the category. So let me now move to the second shift to show how we bring this to life. Shaping the category. We want to keep on leading and pioneering in growth by really shaping the category across all segments and archetypes. And when we talk about shaping the category, we always start with our consumers. And in every market, we call this consumer obsession, we look at these three things. We look at consumer needs, why and when do consumers drink alcohol products. We look at consumer behavior, the shopper repertoires, really important to add that lens always, who, what, where. But then we add the future perspective to it. We look 10 years ahead to a trend star, that's how we call it, to see what are the trends coming that will be affecting the local markets. So this is what we do in every market. And then we overlay that with the differences by archetype. Because you can imagine the archetypes differ from a consumer, customer, or category lens. If you take a value market, you have young consumers. The per capita consumption is still low, but you need to work 150 minutes to be able to buy a beer. While if you go to the developed markets, you have a more older generation of consumers. The per capita consumption is high, and it takes about 15 minutes to buy a beer. Also from the trade perspective, from our customer perspective, you see a difference between the archetypes. where in value markets you have fragmented trade, mostly indirect, and of course in the developed markets it's more about modern on-trade and a mix of direct and indirect. And if you look at the category, the category in value is starting to grow. It is a very big opportunity to grow share of growth in an environment with population growth and economic growth. And in advanced markets, you have a high share of throat with still economic and population growth. And in a developed market, the share of throat of beer has been declining because it is competing with wine and spirits. And it's more about creating value and driving value growth in the category. So that also means our focus on which segments we want to win with and develop differs per archetype. In a value market, it's all about building the category. And you start doing that with a big mainstream brand. And then you start premiumizing. So it's about mainstream and premium. Then if you move to advanced, it's doubling down on premiumization and starting to build low and low. And in selective markets, start with Beyond Beer. In the developed markets, that's the place where they are all important. It is about and mainstream, and premium, and low NO, and beyond beer, and you're competing the most with the other categories. And in these differences, we do have a very clear ambition per segment. We want and will shape and be the undisputed leader in premium. We want to strengthen mainstream and challenge the status quo. And in low NO, the segment that we created, we want to keep on pioneering and remain the clear number one. And then beyond beer is about being selective. And it's all about growing penetration and growing your share of throat again. So let's start with looking at the premium segment. I'll take some time to explain this because it will come back a couple of times. So what you see is that in value-advancing and developed markets, we are outgrowing the market in all of these archetypes, on average three times. And in all of these archetypes, we have the leading position, if you exclude the U.S., But what is the most important thing is to always understand what are the consumer needs that we're serving in these segments. Because at the end, the consumer decides every day which brand to buy. And in premium, it's of course all about high quality and looking good. That's the aspirational part. And the more the market develops, you get the element of discovery. People want to try new things, new flavors. And in our demand map, premium plays in the top. And when we play in premium, it always starts with the Heineken brand. That's the anchor. The Heineken brand built the premium segment globally. That's the starting point. But the more a market develops, you start adding brands. because they are serving different needs, like Bira Moretti in Sharing a Meal or Tiger in Connect and Celebrate. And it's not only that they're serving different needs, you also hit different price points because these are more affordable premium propositions. And when a market even evolves further to a fully developed market, we complement that with local premium brands that basically deliver especially on the discovery need. But let's start by having a look at the Heineken brand. The Heineken brand is an extreme success story of premium at scale. It is a case that we build in Brazil very successfully. We're the number one in value share, but still with a very high price point and growing. And we have replicated that model very successfully in China. And in Vietnam. In Vietnam, we did adjust it for the consumer tastes, and there we're doing it basically with silver. So a very clear model that we are scaling with the Heineken brand around the world. Premium at scale. But if you then go to a different market like the UK, You cannot only win in premium with Heineken. You need more to meet the consumer needs. So it's about Heineken, complemented with Bira Moretti in the sharing a meal occasion, very successfully, and the local craft brand, Beavertown. This is how we do that in a developed market like the UK. But even though when we start playing with local brands in premium, we also want to find repeatable models for scale to balance the local relevance with the global scale. And this is what we call repeatable solutions. And an example of how we do that in premium is what we call easy discovery. Markets get more developed, there's much more choice, and consumers want to try something new, want to try something different, but it still should be refreshing. It's about looking good, discovery, and refreshing. And this is the unfiltered concept. that we replicate, but it shows up different ways in different markets. In Italy, with IGNUSA, Eisenbahn in Brazil, and here, Agila, of course, and I hope you tried it. So it's a great repeatable solution where we get local relevance and global scale. Now let's shift to mainstream. In mainstream, it's a little bit a different story. Yes, very good performance compared to the market in value and in advancing. But as I said, in developed, we need to do a better job. And that's what we'll be doing. So we have strong positions, number one in value, number two in advancing, and XUS, we have a strong position in developed, and therefore we also want to be doing a better job there. If you look at the mainstream needs, They're different, of course, than premium. It starts all with connecting. The root heart of beer, it's also all about connecting. And it's not about looking good, but it's about feeling good. And extremely important, affordability. That's the role that mainstream plays in the total portfolio as well, and it's more on the low side on the demand map. And how we play in the archetypes in mainstream differs. If you look in Ethiopia, we have Harar, a fantastic local brand born in the east of the country and really growing, and now number two, soon will be number one. In advancing in Brazil, for instance, it's all about playing asymmetrically. You have all these big local players and you're entering the market in the mainstream segment, so you do that in an asymmetrical way. While in the UK, in a very developed market, it's on the one hand, of course, focusing on your existing mainstream brands, but also revitalizing the category and creating more value in mainstream. And we did that through the Cruz Campo brand from here, bringing it to the UK, one of the biggest and successful launches there has been, and really, really delivering value in the mainstream category and riding on the Mediterranean trend. But like I said, also in mainstream, we want to balance local relevance and global scale with repeatable models. And therefore, here we also have the repeatable solutions that show up in markets through different brands, from sessionable to local rituals to dark lager or local flavors. Let's now move to low and low. the category that we actually created as a pioneer. And because we created this category, we have a very strong position. We are outperforming in every archetype. We have a number one position in every archetype. And if you look at the needs that you need to address, it starts, of course, with control, because people that choose a zero-zero, they don't want the alcohol. But they do want the right taste. And this was, of course, historically the issue with the zero-zero beer category. And it is the right taste with looking good. It has to be an aspirational choice. And this is exactly what we have been doing with Heineken. If you look historically, we had also zero-zero beers, but they were more a punishment than a pleasure to drink, if you're honest about it. And it needed a technological breakthrough by us to be able to brew a zero-zero beer that was really tasting right. That we first brew the beer and then take the alcohol out. And then we put 25% of our marketing, Heineken marketing money behind it. And we used our sponsorships to make it an aspirational choice. And we have become the icon of the category with that. And we will not stop. We are now going into 10,000 draft outlets around Europe. And more distribution, of course, the more you normalize the category, the more you normalize the behavior, and the more growth there will come. And you see it started in Europe very successfully. It's also really working in the US, but also in a market like Brazil, an advancing market. You see that it is really taking off and it keeps on growing. And we truly believe the category will keep on growing. We believe the category will double in size in the coming five years. And why is that? Because it's so in sync with a couple of big consumer trends that we see in our trend star. Controlled enjoyment, holistic well-being, active socializing. A lot of people that want to socialize have fun, but they also want to really take care of their health and well-being. so because of these trends we really believe the category will double and therefore we play with different solutions in in in this category to capture the growth and lead the growth of course it always starts with our heineken brand heineken zero zero it's at the heart and then we complement that with local zero zero solutions I don't know if you've tried it here in Spain already, but it's a different flavor. It's with roasted malt. So you complement the Heineken 00 proposition with different flavor propositions. And then we'll add innovation to that. We'll add innovation in 00, like we will be doing with Heineken 00 Ultimate that you see here. I don't think you tried it yet, but I hope you'll try it at lunch. This is a proposition we are launching next year. We piloted it this year in the US, and it is for consumers. that have an active lifestyle, they want to go out, they want to socialize in an active way, play padel, go running, play soccer, and after that, they don't want the calories. So it is a zero-zero proposition with zero alcohol, zero calories, and zero sugar. Let's have a look.

With Heineken Zero Zero, we dare to dream differently. We launched a revolution where zero beer wasn't a compromise, but a positive choice. And this is just the start. Consumer well-being trends continue to evolve from striving individual performance to connection, balance, and enjoyment. But the beverage world? Still behind. Compromising taste, sophistication, and joy deliver functional needs. Now is our time to dream again, creating a world where beer is seen as the choice for premium natural adult drinks that are better for you. To do this, we will pioneer once again by introducing Heineken Zero Zero Ultimate. Zero alcohol, zero calories, zero sugar. A smart, healthy choice for active socializing. The ultimate zero-zero segment. Bold, pioneering, and unmistakably ours.

Yeah, a fantastic proposition. I really encourage you to try it throughout the day. You can drink it the whole day. No calories and no alcohol. Let's move to Beyond Beer. Like Dolf said, we have been very active in this space, but we have looked back and sharpened our strategy. We have a good position. We are number one in basically every archetype, excluding the US. But if you look at Beyond Beer, it is about getting more penetration with Gen Zs and female consumers. And why is that? Because if you look at consumer needs, the number one reason the consumers go to be on beer is taste. They find beer too bitter and they find beer too bloating. And that's the main reason they go for something else. But when they do that, they also want to have the need looking good. It has to be aspirational. And what we call for everyone is the unisex proposition. And we have been extremely active in this area with more than 100 launches, but not successful enough. And actually, the acquisition of Distel gave us a lot of intellectual synergies about this space. If you see what they have done with Savannah, how they have catered a proposition to really go after the beer occasion in a unisex way, and they've complemented that with Bernini, a female proposition. It is really good to see, and we have taken that on board, and implemented that in our strategy. So basically, it's quite simple. Beyond Beer, we start with Desperados, the beer plus spirits. That's always the number one action we take when we move into Beyond Beer. And then we complement that with Savanna, Bernini, or a hard fruit proposition like Ladron here in Spain. and then with selective investments if there are winners in the markets we complement that like with stealths in the netherlands or served in the uk and you see that it works in in different markets differently in desperados in nigeria the first step into beyond beer working very successfully savannah in south africa absolute success story. But also here in Spain, you see Desperados is working as it's giving a proposition that is different for the consumers. But now let's listen to Andrea, our marketing director in South Africa, to hear about the success story of Savannah.

Savannah, one of our flagship brands and the world's number one cider by volume and value, played a pivotal role in Heineken's acquisition of Distel and a testament to its potential. We have tripled our volume and grew revenue fivefold since 2019, while significantly improving our brand power. a blueprint for success that can be replicated across markets worldwide. Savannah plays an intentional role within our portfolio. First, it meets consumer needs that traditional beer does not, offering a crisp, dry alternative with broader appeal. Second, it drives disproportionate growth in mixed gender occasions, expanding our reach in key consumption spaces. We are clear on how to win with compelling points of difference. A crisp, dry profile with a toasted oak taste and a 6% ABV, Savannah is crafted for versatility. Secondly, Savannah's communication is as distinctive as its product. Delivered through crisp, dry humor and a bold yellow visual identity, Savannah stands out in the market and connects with consumers like no other brand does. Savannah is not just growing, it's leading. With an accretive role in our portfolio and a proven growth model, Savannah continues to demonstrate its strength as a reliable engine of value and a scalable blueprint for global success.

Yeah, I think a fantastic example how you go after the unisex occasion in beer with a different taste profile, higher ABV, a beautiful bottle, and a campaign and a proposition that's all about humor to combine and make it sure that it's a unisex proposition. Let's have a look at one of their ads where they... Juniper Rainforest, please.

Yeah, Savannah making fun of the cocktails in a very nice way.

So, when it's about shaping the category, we have a very clear ambition per segment. And they're rooted in consumer needs. They have a very clear ambition. There's a very clear hierarchy of priorities where we focus on in each of the different archetypes. They have a differentiated approach on how we will win in these archetypes. And we have developed repeatable solutions to find the optimum with local relevance and global scale. Let's move to the third shift, fewer, better, bigger brands. We moved from one truly global brand, the Heineken brand, to five global brands. We have been investing in more than 350 different brands. We'll be investing in 25% fewer brands and focus on 25 local power brands. And we'll go from local for local solutions to solutions that we can scale and repeat more. But how do you choose the right brands in your portfolio? And how do you make them better before you make them bigger? And I'm really excited to share with you how we do that. We have developed in the last years the brand stage model. The old way of looking at brand equity was if your brand equity is higher than your market share, you are good. That's a good starting point, but it's not enough. Because in a lot of cases, you have high brand equity, but not a lot of high growth. So what we have done, we have analyzed more than 3,000 brands to understand which consumer value drivers correlate with share growth. And we now know which consumer value drivers matter. In that sense, we have demystified brand equity and made it crystal clear what we need to focus on and to what scale do you need to focus on. We have used this because it's really easy to compare your brand compared to the competitor brands and see how much headroom for growth you have. So we've used this to choose which brands we're focusing on. We also made it prescriptive to know how do you make your brands better? Which gaps do you have to close? Because you can imagine if you build the brand in the right way, with the right consumer value drivers, you can become what we call a star brand. This is what we call a legendary brand. And you have three times more growth than when you're in a popular brand if you don't build your consumer value drivers the right way. And this is the model we have been using to selecting our brands and making them better. And based on that, we have chosen five global brands that already have been performing very well if you look at revenue growth and if you look at their equity. And we're complementing that with 25 local power brands that all have strong positions and have been performing well, but that we want to accelerate. These brands will get 80% of our investments. That means also we'll be investing in 25% fewer brands. That doesn't mean we take them off shelf tomorrow. We'll do that in a way without losing shelf share or market share. So let's start talking about our global brands. We have a very big ambition for our global brands, as you can see here. This is net revenue. If it would be merchandise value, it would be more than double. And this is the ambition we are going for. And if you look at the Heineken brand to start with, the Heineken brand is the number one success story in beer. It's the only truly global brand. It's the number one in sales value. It's the number one in brand power. It's outperformed the premium segment twice. And despite its age and despite its skill, still in 40% of our markets, it's growing double digit. We have been pioneering and leading with the Heineken brand for many, many years, being the first to sponsor Olympics, the first on TV, the first to create the 00 segment. And you see a big acceleration of the growth in the last years with 47% growth. Let's have a look what's behind the magic of Heineken, what's behind the success.

There's a kind of magic in Heineken.

Our secret? A pioneering spirit that's been with us since day one. The first imported beer after prohibition. The first beer to go global on social. The first to champion social life. That same instinct to go first built more than a brand. It built a global icon. Loved in over 190 countries, never lost in translation. Transcending culture, creating moments that bring the world together.

I have a new song called Heart by Heart, but instead of dropping it on socials, I'm doing it here with you. All right, here we go.

And when we lead with creativity, the world takes notice. Ideas that start conversations. Ideas that win. But the real magic, it shows in the results. We didn't just grow the category. We redefined it. And we're still doing it. Through innovation. Through co-creation. Through reinvention. Through moderation. Always pushing forward. pioneering what's next through art, science, and courage. Because the magic of Heineken isn't just in the beer, it's in the people. The belief that being first means making a difference. The magic of Heineken. Social networking since 1873. Yeah.

The magic of Heineken... The unique combination of art, science, and courage translated in superior insights, legendary creativity, and excellent execution. And if you look at insights, it's really important we stay true to who we are. And we are about socializing. We are a social network since 1873. But you adjust when the generation shifts or culture or the size changes. And if you look historically what's happened with socializing, we've seen it shifting from FOMO, the fear of missing out, in the early 2000s when disposable income was on the rise, social networks were boosting and everyone was seeing great events and they wanted to be part of everything that they were seeing around them. And that moved to the joy of missing out because of the anxiety of that that it created. And it was accelerated a little bit by COVID with too many people staying at home behind their phones. And then we also said, get off your phone and get out. But what you see now, it's all about shifting to the joy of joining in. Consumers are realizing how important socializing is. What food is for your body, socializing is for your brain. They realize they need to go out there and socialize to feel healthy and have a good well-being. And that's where Heineken has always been about. Social networks since 1873. During COVID, when everybody said, stay at home, don't go out, we said consumers go out, socialize, but do it in a responsible way and find new ways of doing it. And we combine this consumer focus with our focus on customers. We have always been backing the bars. We've done that during COVID, but also more recently in Brazil with a bar dating program to help drive traffic to our customers in Brazil. So this is what the Heineken brand is about, champion of social life. And we bring that to life with legendary creativity. But let's be clear, our aim is not to win Cannes awards. Our aim is to drive business. And creativity drives business impact. 90% of the ads you see, you forget in a couple of minutes. It's the creative ones that you remember and drive change. And especially in our category, We are not about functional benefits. We don't wash two times faster or clean your teeth three times whiter. It's more about the emotional than functional benefits. Creativity is extremely important and this is a really good proxy. And we are the number one in beer when it comes to creativity and the second brand overall. And we combine this with two fantastic sponsorship platforms, the Champions League and F1, with a lot of weekly reach around the world. And the good news is both of these platforms are still growing in viewership. Maybe surprising to some of you, the biggest growth in F1 viewership is from young adult female viewers in F1. So they are big platforms and they are growing. And what we have done, we have created an ambassador, engaged with an ambassador on each platform. Max Verstappen on F1, Virgil van Dijk on football, and Martin Garrix, the number one DJ in music. Music sponsorships are very often local. And we're going to move from campaigns that were all about F1 or about football or about music to an overarching campaign to unify all these different worlds and to all bring it together to make much more impact. Because what is the insight that combines all these sponsorship platforms? It's very simple. Fans have more friends. Maybe you recognize it if you go to a hotel, you're traveling, if you see people watching a game. It is the most easy way to connect and talk to somebody new when you have a shared passion. So let's see how we bring this to life.

Midfield control, patient build-up. We're all set for the start of this Grand Prix. Tension rises on the track. This is it. The striker is on the move. One defender, then another closing in. Right foot, goal!

I'm in heaven And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak And I seem to find the happiness I seek When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek Heaven I'm in heaven And the cares that hung around Max Verstappen wins! The crowd is going crazy! When we're all together dancing All together dancing All together dancing cheek to cheek

Yeah, I don't know if you recognize, all our ambassadors were there. Virgil was in the spot. Max was in it. And at the end, you saw Martin Garrix. So two very big platforms that we are now combining to make much more impact on this insight, Friends Have More Friends. But we have news, and you're going to be the first to hear it. We're going to reveal it later today, after 12. We're going to add... sponsorship platform to these two and we're going to add a platform that's the fastest growing in the world that is all about socializing a lot of people do this sports because of the socializing that comes after it and you need four people to do it we are going to be the official partner of padel We're going to be the partner of Padel and from Playtomic, the app. And this is the fastest growing sport at the moment. And the reason that we're really excited about it is we see that it is the new way of socializing for a lot of people. I talked to you about Gen Z knowing that they want to socialize. And they're not all going to socialize anymore in the bar. Some of them do it through Padel or other things. And the good thing is all our ambassadors are also playing Padel and you see a lot of celebrities also playing Padel. The last part I want to discuss on the Heineken brand is innovation. And innovation is crucial to create and keep excitement around your brand and to keep growth. And our approach to innovation is shifting a bit We are much more experimenting with consumers first through the Heineken Studio, which you will experience tonight, where you'll see how it works. It's a setup that we do at events, at festivals, at different places, where we interact with consumers with new propositions, get direct feedback. And after that, we pilot specific propositions. I think yesterday you tried Fusion here. It will also be there tonight. That's designed for the aperitivo moment, the unisex moment that's now dominated a lot by all kinds of spritzers. That's where it's defined for. And Heineken Ultimate that I spoke about. So after Heineken, let's move to the Amstel brand, the fifth biggest brand around the world and with a lot of growth potential ahead. The big success story and unlock of the Amstel brand is in Brazil. In Brazil, we wanted to enter in the mainstream segment and compete in the mainstream segment, but you must realize you're playing against very big local mainstream brands. So how to win there is what we call shadow premium. We use credentials like PureMalt and Dutchies. We combine that with the international aspiration of the Amstel brand and international properties like Lever Tardoris. But we connect on a local, very relevant way, and we combine that with excellent execution. A very big success case from 1 to 10 million hectolitres with an awful lot of growth in the last years. The kegger of 60%. And we have replicated that first in LATAM, Peru, Ecuador, in Mexico with Ultra. Very successful in LATAM, and we are now doing it in more places as well. China, Eastern Europe, and Sub-Saharan. A very strong proven model that we can do on mainstream and in some markets at an affordable premium price point. Then let's move from the world of Amstel to the world of Desperados. Desperados, we actually created beyond beer in 1995. I think at the time we didn't realize it and we didn't call it like that, but we launched Desperados as the first beer that had a mix with spirits. And it was very successful, expanded to about 30 markets. But if we're honest, we had lost connection with the young adult consumers. So what we have done with Desperados is we have repositioned it and rerouted it to be the brand of Gen Z. And we have done that through a lot of innovations with flavors, because remember, the number one reason to go for Beyond Beer is that you don't like the taste of beer. And the proposition is actually perfect for people that want the best of both worlds. It makes beer more exciting with the spirits, but it also makes spirits more controllable. Because Gen Z, they want to control their night when it is about alcohol. And that's what Desperados does very well. We created a complete new social first campaign with two very famous artists, and that has resulted that we are now the number one Gen Z recruiter. Let's have a look at the new Desperados campaign.

Oh, my God!

Yeah. If you didn't get it, don't worry. You're not the target audience. I don't mean this disrespectful. But the good news is the target audience really liked the campaign and has won nearly every creative prize that we can win in social first. So we're really confident that we have positioned it rightly for Gen Z and it is working. And now let's move to Italy, the beautiful world of Bira Moretti. In the world with all changes happening and so many different anxieties around us, To have a moment around the table, to enjoy company or friends and family, that's all where Bira Moretti is about. It's an authentic Italian brand that's positioned in sharing a meal occasion. It's really strongly positioned to also get share of throat from wine. and it very often plays affordable premium pricing. It sells the best of Italy, high-quality ingredients, but more important, that family and friendship care that is around it. A very big success in the UK, But not only in the UK, we have also replicated this success in different markets. You can see it here. Romania, Ireland, Switzerland, really, really growing very fast. In markets that had very established brands and very different brands, Bira Moretti really found a place. And sharing a meal occasion globally is extremely big and extremely important. And we believe Bira Moretti is the way to win there. And you can expect more launches from us in the coming years. So to close global brands, we have a very big ambition to grow 5 billion of net revenue and with that outperform the beer market. And we're complementing the global brands with 25 local power brands. These have been selected by using our brand stage model. These have also been selected because they are big, because they are successful, and we believe we can accelerate them. And they are getting 80%. of our local brand investments. And we have a couple of very big powerhouses in markets with an awful lot of growth potential. Think about Kingfisher in India, number one in market share, number one in brand power. 1.2 billion legal drinking age consumers and the target group of Kingfisher growing with more than 4%. Bintang Number one in brand power, number one in market share. Same story, very big consumer groups with a lot of growth. And Harar in Ethiopia. I was there a couple of weeks ago and I'm really impressed about the powerhouse we have in Ethiopia and the Harar brand. Born in the east in the oldest city of Ethiopia, a small brand that is now the number two We're already number one in bottle sales. I'm convinced we're soon going to be number one. Also, there's an extreme lot of headroom for growth. And another very big local brand of us is, of course, Tecate in Mexico. But if we're honest, we had lost our positioning relevance a little bit in Mexico. We focused a lot on extreme good sales execution, but Tecate brand, we could do better. And we used our brand stage model to understand what are the consumer value drivers that we want to address. And we repositioned Tecate all back to the strength of character, where it's all about. And we used our old brand icon, Sylvester Stallone, to bring it to life. Let's have a look how we brought it to life. This is the English version. Of course, in Mexico, we have the Spanish version. Let's have a look.

We make life harder on ourselves when we say yes to everything. We need to be braver and say no. Like saying no to the boring family lunch. Like staying for overtime. We should go where we truly want to go. With those friends and those Tecate beers waiting for us.

For those who dare to say no, Ducati!

Yeah, Tecate, for you, and the insight behind this campaign is a lot of Mexicans find it really hard to say no. And you see how Haslone is helping them to say no so they can socialize more. So now let's shift to the last shift, scale excellent execution with AI. We have been heavily focusing on building world-class capabilities and making sure we have one way of working from Brazil to Burundi. And why is that so important to have one way of working, to use the same language, same metrics, same frameworks, so we can scale things faster and we can benchmark easier around the world? And we have done that through our Global Commerce University and creating the Heineken ways of. The Heineken way of brand building, the Heineken way of innovation, the Heineken way of RNG, and the Heineken way of sales. To assure what we build is best class, but that we can also scale best practices very fast. And of course, the capability that we were good at, but that we also want to scale, is creativity. Like I said, fundamental to drive business in our category. And we are the number one in creativity. But if you're honest, it was all heavy lifting, a lot of it by the Heineken brand. And we want all our brands to be creative in the way they reach to consumers. So we have been focusing on this. And the good news is we already see with the external clients that more brands are winning. Once again, this is a proxy opportunity. for how good creativity is going internally. But we're not satisfied yet. We want more and more brands to be winning con lines as a proxy that creativity is skilled throughout the organization. A capability that we need to step up, and we have been stepping up, is RMG, Revenue Margin Growth. We have been very successful in premiumizing through Mix. If you look, for instance, at what we did in Brazil, it was extremely successful how we premiumized through Mix, lowering the economy portfolio, increasing premium and Amstel. But if you look at what happened to our category pricing, and Dolf spoke about it, we have taken more pricing than inflation in the category, driven by the energy crisis. And therefore, if you want to keep on growing volume and value, RMG becomes much more important. You need to have many more levers than price to get this balance right. And therefore, we have invested in better talents in RMG. We have created regional RMG hubs to really help smaller opcots. We have created the RMG Academy and the Heineken Waves of RMG. And we have created the brand value equation. We created that as part of the brand stage model that I shared with you. And the brand value equation is a very easy and simple way to check what is the brand value equation in the consumer minds from you compared to your competitor. And are you right on pricing or not? And what do you need to do to restore it? And we've complemented that with AI tools. And if you see how that works, for instance, in Vietnam, where we want to premiumize, but at the same time, we're in an economic climate that puts pressure on affordability, you see by using price-pack architecture the right way, using the BVE with conjoins, we have a very successful solution with our cool pack in Vietnam. We've also done this in Nigeria, for instance, with the 45CL, where you premiumize, but with a different pack size, so your out-of-pocket for consumer is more friendly. And this we'll be doing in many more places and have done in more places. And we complement this with more advanced AI tooling. On the one hand, we have the RMG cockpit that gives you insights much faster because in revenue margin growth, it's extremely important to have the insights fast on promos, on competitor pricing, et cetera, to be able to react. And end of 26, 100% of our revenue in developed markets will be taken care of in the RMG cockpit. We also have a promo advisor that really helps our commercial people to optimize our promo spend and our promo focus with very positive results. And at the end of 26, 80% of our revenue in developed markets will be covered. So that's on RMG. Now let's move to sales. In sales, we have talked a lot about digitization. But at the heart of sales, it's all about sell-in and sell-out. And we're ruthlessly obsessed about sell-in and sell-out. It's about driving distribution and driving rate of sale. And everything we do in digitization should support sell-in and sell-out. And we're extremely happy with the progress and the success that we created with Easel. Easel has made 13 billion of gross merchandise value really helping us to control and focus much more on the sell-in. And it's been extremely successful case for us where we focus on selling our products and we don't go into potato chips or other categories. But it's not only about Easel. We also look at other touchpoints with our customers. We look at our sales rep and the Salesforce automation system they need to be successful every day when they visit our customers. Our customer service. You can imagine now there's a big opportunity there to also digitize and help. And our distributors. How can we work better with our distributors, help them to manage their inventory, to make sure they can get their products in time to our customers? And when we digitize, we look at the one hand, does it drive sell-in and sell-out? But the other two things that we always look at, is it increasing NPS? So customer satisfaction, yes or no? And the good news is we are number one, if you look in Europe in advanced scores, we are number one in NPS in our key markets. So it needs to drive NPS improvement. and it needs to drive productivity, because digitization comes with a cost. So this is what we're obsessed about in sales, sell-in and sell-out, and making sure what we do in the different markets leads to NPS increase and productivity increase. And you can imagine, as markets differ around the world, In value markets, it's a lot about fragmented trade and not that many SKUs, about 100. Well, if you go to developed markets, it's much more about modern off-trade and many more SKUs. The way you digitize in sales and where you focus on differs. If you look, for instance, in Indonesia, we really focus on the basics. We focus on making sure our easel app is really working We can take orders. The customers are happy with that. We give sure that the sales force has the right insights when they are visiting the customers and we have the KPIs available. And this leads to an increase in sell-in, sell-out and much more time for the sales rep to spend on visits. Well, if you then move to Mexico, we have a much more sophisticated digitization agenda, which is highly charged by AI tools. We have AIDA deciding, helping us decide and recommend which customers should the sales rep visit. What should they be discussing? We have product recommender recommending our customers what to order to optimize their sellouts. And we have perks ourselves, a beautiful tool where we actually ask our customers to take pictures of our shelves and our fridges. They get loyalty points as a reward. And with that, we know where our execution gaps that we need to close. And also here in Mexico, you see driving very strong results in sell-in, sell-out, and in MPS improvements. Let's have a look at a short video on how we do that in Mexico.

At Heineken Mexico, we're turbocharging execution through AI. At the heart of our route to consumer transformation are three powerhouse solutions. Ada delivers real-time analytics to our sales force, boosting productivity by 70% and increasing engagement 2.4 times with our customers. Product Recommender powers our B2B platform with tailored offers to our customers, representing 84% of fragmented trade revenue. Perfect Shelf uses image recognition to optimize execution by matching customer assortment versus picture of success, identifying 14 million euros revenue of business opportunity. Together, these AI tools streamline orders, personalize engagement, and elevate execution, making us number one in NPS across the beverage industry. This is transformation in action, powered by AI, led by people. And the best is yet to come.

Yeah, great results in Mexico. Now let's move to marketing. If you look at marketing, we actually started our AI journey on the Heineken brand a couple of years ago. At the time, media buying and everything was still fragmented and locally. What we started doing on the Heineken brand is centralised planning, production and buying of digital assets. And that has led to a lot of benefits. And now we are using AI, for instance, to make 1,000 assets in all kinds of languages in minutes, less than minutes. So it's been a journey that we started on the Heineken brand. We're now at 32 countries that we are doing this. And it's led to a lot of efficiency and effectiveness gains. And we are much better in targeting the right consumer with the right message at the right moment. And it's also been recognized by Meta and Google as one of the best in the industry. So what you see is we have very good and strong AI solutions in the different growth drivers. But what we want to do now is we want to scale these AI solutions all over. And more importantly, make sure they work end-to-end in commerce. So not remain in the silo. Too many people have been optimizing in their silo. We want to optimize end-to-end. So from brand building to innovation to RMG to sales. And when we scale AI, it is not about AI. AI will become the commodity. It is about having your data domains in place and understanding which MarTech you need. Having the processes in place, one way of working, otherwise you cannot scale it. And have designed the interface between humans and AI that it works. And the way that we are going to be scaling this is through creating an in-house agency. It's not going to be an agency where we're going to be hiring a lot of people and putting in the agency. It's 100% AI enabled agency. And it is there to assure we can scale our AI practices around the world and work end to end. It should be the supporter of every commerce person working around the world. And of course, every agency needs a cool name. And we have chosen for our internal agency a name from a person that was the best salesperson we ever had at Heineken. And that was the best marketeer we ever had at Heineken to really show the end-to-end connectivity in commerce. And therefore, our agency is called Freddy AI. Tribute to Mr. Heineken, the best marketing and salesperson we had. So let's have a look at the movie, how this will work for marketing.

Heineken is the world's pioneering beer company. In recent years, we have been revolutionizing digital marketing through our Marcom and ROI engine across 32 markets. A groundbreaking way of working for digital advertising. Delivering relevance at scale intelligently, combining consumer and contextual data powered by AI. Connecting expertise through a common way of working. Increasing impact and productivity with real-time insights and the latest technology. Legendary marketing has always been key to fueling our growth. Freddie AI will continue to ignite the Heineken magic. We will scale what has worked. From digital marketing to all media. From 32 to 50 plus markets. From two global brands to all global brands. Delivering an additional 20% in efficiencies and effectiveness in all our advertising investments. How? An in-house agency setup. Using superior insights, the most sophisticated tools and smart predictive modeling to optimize media investments. Boosting our commercial performance with a growth focus and a productivity mindset. The Heineken Magic. Turbocharged through AI.

So, Freddie AI in marketing will have an insight engine, has the marketing engine and an ROI engine to measure the results fast. So, we'll keep on investing in commerce and we combine that with the efficiency and effectiveness gains of Freddie AI. Freddie AI will not be there overnight because you can imagine you need to onboard all the brands and do that in the right way from a data process, et cetera. But we believe in two to three years, we'll have every brand onto Freddie AI. So let me close by recapping what you heard from me today. We are going to be delivering superior balanced growth by implementing four key shifts. We have an advantaged and differentiated footprint that is very growthy. We are focusing on 17 markets that will be delivering 90% of our growth. And we have differentiated strategies by archetype. We want to shape the category and we are leading in the fastest growing segments. And we'll lead and pioneer in premium and low NO. And we'll strengthen our mainstream proposition and we'll selectively play in beyond beer. We'll go for fewer, better, bigger brands. Five global brands, 25 local power brands. They will receive 80% of our marketing and selling expenses. And we are going to be scaling proven solutions, repeatable models. We're going to be scaling excellent execution with AI, scaling creativity, stepping up RMG and reassuring that the brand value equation is fixed where needed. We're going to digitize sales to maximize sell-in, sell-out, drive MPS and productivity. And we are going to integrate our AI solutions end-to-end to be able to scale them everywhere through Ferdi AI. And with that, we are really confident that we can deliver our ambition of mid-single-digit net revenue growth. But we can only do this with really good and engaged commerce people. And as Dolph mentioned, we don't have an issue in hiring and keeping really strong people. But the most important thing is our engagement rates, despite all the volatility, is 10% higher than the market. And we need these engaged people to go out there and win every day. So let's listen as a closing to a video of Freddy Heineken and the magic of Heineken and our people.

And what's your latest dream that remains to be fulfilled as far as the company is concerned?

Well, I hope that the people that work in this company feel happy when they go home from the work. And I quite realized that it's they that made this organization a success. And what I sincerely hope is that those that work here now and those that will succeed them will keep up the good work.

Heineken, a family name that grew into a family of brands. For over 150 years, we've been the company that defines the true essence of beer. But we didn't get to where we are by accepting the status quo. We got there by challenging it. We were the first beer to enter the US after prohibition ended. We were the first to sponsor sports at the 1928 Olympics. The first to sponsor the UEFA Champions League. The first on Facebook. And the first to create a successful 0-0 beer. But how did we achieve all this? By igniting the Heineken magic. Making the impossible possible. Combining art, science, and courage through our great people. By being Heineken. By having the best of both worlds. We are brewers and brand builders. With local focus and global scale. Family heritage and publicly listed. We have global brands and local jewels. We are close to consumers and customers. We craft legendary drinks, brands, and experiences and bring the joy of true togetherness. We are Heineken, the world's pioneering beer company.

Thank you. Thank you, Bram. I think... Goosebumps. If I can ask Dolf to join us as well, we're just going to have 30 minutes of a Q&A session to start off with before we break for lunch on that side. So who wants to go first? I know which one. Trevor, please. Can we get a microphone, please, for Trevor here up front?

Heineken Silver. Last time we were with you, Dolph, we spent a lot of time talking about Heineken Silver. It's been a huge success in Asia, but it hasn't worked to the same extent outside. So I guess one is what learnings have you taken from that? But also the research process. When you talked to us two years ago, you were of huge confidence that silver would work outside Asia, and it didn't. So what have you learned about the research process as well to make better decisions going forward?

Yeah, so Heineken Silver started in APAC and it was a very big success in Vietnam. And to your point, when we started scaling it outside APAC, we did a lot of research and the research was extremely promising. I think we scaled it too big in Europe from the start. But what it has learned us, that we do much more in-market testing. Because as you see on the penetration stories, the say-do gaps, if you ask consumers something, it's not that they always give you the right answer. So that's what we have learned a lot also in innovation. So therefore you see... We have now a Heineken studio where we experiment straight with consumers face-to-face. And then we do in-market pilots to really be sure we can craft our proposition, make sure it's 100% successful before we go out and scale things. So that's, I think, one of the biggest learnings and what we have adjusted internally.

Can I just follow up, though? What was it about the proposition that has resonated so well in Asia but hasn't outside Asia?

Well, if you look, and you were there in APEC, but basically in Asia, the biggest barrier that Heineken had was the bitterness. And it was a very big barrier in the market that a lot of consumers were drinking more sessionable beers. So you can imagine the market was already there. There was a big sessionable market, and we premiumized it through Heineken Silver. If you look at Europe, there isn't a big sessionable market. We wanted to create the sessionable market. So I think that is the biggest difference between APEC, where you're playing in a place where the market is there, versus in Europe, where you needed to create the market. And there we didn't take that much time to do it. We maybe went a little bit too fast. But those are the biggest difference from a consumer perspective between APEC and Europe.

Yeah. But we were basically too impatient, where we took it very cautiously, deep consumer insights in Ho Chi Minh City, and then we launched, and then we took it to Vietnam, and then two years later to China. Then we thought, hey, we have the formula, tested well in consumer research, because actually a lot of consumers like more sessionable, But mentally, it didn't exist in Europe. And then in the middle of COVID, we did too much of a one-size-fits-all launch. Yeah. And the rest is history. And so the beauty is what you tasted last night, Heineken Fusion, Heineken Ultimate, it's not just offline testing with consumers. We're doing real-life pilots in markets to see if it works. Yeah. Okay. Maybe Sanjit up front here.

Sorry. Maybe afterwards, Ed.

Hi, it's Sanjeev from UBS. Dolph, you acknowledged the BA category has gone through a period of taking pricing ahead of inflation. As you think of Outer Evergreen 2030, do you need to go through a process of pricing below inflation? and then relying on levers like RMG to make up to CPI? Is that how we should think about it? Or is the intention still to price in line with inflation and RMG gives you an additional benefit above inflation on top? That's my first question. And the second one, maybe for Bram, is around the mainstream brands in the developed markets. I think this has been the Achilles heel of the beer category for a long time. What are you doing differently now to make sure mainstream is really healthy? Again, specifically on mainstream, do you need to ensure better affordability and price below inflation for that segment?

Thanks for the question. It's important to be very nuanced in the answering. First of all, let me repeat the situation that we had the last couple of years was extraordinary in historical perspective that our input cost was sometimes a multiple of the consumer inflation. And that really created a pickle. where we decided as an industry in the end for euro for euro pricing. So our gross margins were still under pressure, but you ended up with taking pricing above inflation. That's not sustainable. So we do need to moderate pricing. Mid-long term, the sweet spot is to take pricing at or above your input cost inflation. Through all your work you are doing, making sure on procurement, on value engineering, etc., make sure that your input inflation returns to structurally below consumer inflation and take pricing up to consumer inflation. And in some markets, that might be a little bit below. In some markets, it might be at inflation. You really need to look at that by market archetype, by local competitive conditions, what have you. But the sweet spot is above your input cost up to consumer inflation. That's where we want to be. there's always two equations. We call it the brand value equation. It's price-value. So you have your price on one side, but it's also the brand power that you have. And we really see, you know, and this is something that we take pride in at Heineken, it's continuously investing through creativity, through strategy, boosting... the value part of the brand value equation to avoid that you become too dependent on the relative price. We see brands like Savannah and other brands with very high brand power having significantly lower elasticities. Now, there's no shortcuts there. That takes a lot of the tools, a lot of the approaches that Bram was sharing. So above input, below consumer, but also actively investing in strengthening brand power because that ends up being less price elastic, giving us a little bit more room to maneuver.

Yeah, and then on your second question. Mainstream, I think one of the biggest shifts we're doing, we were spreading ourselves too thin. We were supporting too many brands, also within mainstream. And in mainstream, it's a skill game and it's a focus game. So the number one thing is we are really focusing in the developed markets, what is our mainstream brand that we want to win with, that it starts with, and then we fund it and invest in it in the right way. So we were scattered too much and we're focusing. That's the first thing. And we also really use the brand value equation again to really understand it because we know which part of equity correlates the most with price now, as we have gone later. And you see that mainstream brands also need more innovation. And we haven't been innovating enough on the mainstream brands to create enough value. And therefore, you see the repeatable solutions I shared with you over. And this is our way also to create more value through innovation. And sometimes, like within the UK, it is really by reimagining mainstream, by adding a new brand like Cuscompo. But it starts really with focus.

Maybe Ed, please. Ed Mundy from Jefferies. So one question for Dolph and one for Brian. Both are on the same theme, which is sharpening your resource allocation. If we take the 17 focus markets, I think that you've highlighted, I think that's about 70% of your global volumes. I think perhaps just a clarification around that. But how do you ensure that the other 50 opcos, the remaining 30%, don't get overly starved and don't end up dropping the ball, given it's still a sizable part of your business? That's the first sort of question. And then the second, very interesting statistics around 25% fewer invested brands. By 2030, as you address that tail, can you perhaps talk about in the round does that mean that you've got 80% of the money is going to go behind your big focus but in the whole do you think the pie for marketing and selling still needs to grow or does this just free up a reallocation of resource behind your biggest bets yeah

Thanks, Ed, for the question. So on the first one, on strengthen. Indeed, those strengthen markets are really key. And they're beautiful, powerful operating companies like Austria, like Portugal, like Ireland. And we have it across the globe. Deliberately we call it strengthen. So we still have bold ambitions in those markets. But in the resource allocation, the bulk of the incremental capital will go to lead and challenge markets. Because typically those strengthen markets are in lower growth, more mature markets. But some of our best marketeers, some of our best commercial people are actually in those strengthened markets because there's still a lot of value creation by smarter, more effective commercial strategies in those markets. So the differentiator there is really on capital allocation, cash flow generation, but by no means it is a lower ambition on the kind of commercial strategies. Resolve, of course, is very different. That, indeed, we are much more... discerning in terms of, okay, there are some radical implications potentially for those markets.

Yeah. Was there the follow-up question? So if you look at resource allocation in strengthened markets, I mean, like Dolph said, commercially, it is not about that we are not investing there. But what we want, by creating much more focus, you know which brands you are feeding. By our brand stage model, we know exactly which brands... need how much funding, because how much stronger are they versus the competitor. And with the repeatable solutions and the efficiency that Freddie AI will give us, the 20%, that will help for sure in that area. That will mean in the 25% that we are investing less in, there will be brands declining. But if you look at the way you do that, we call that sunsetting. You don't do that overnight and you don't want to lose market share and you don't want to lose shelf share while you do that. But we have successful cases in how we do that.

You're basically asking, does the marketing part still need to grow? Absolutely. to repeat the question.

So we are quite deliberate about the above 10%. And I think, Harald, you were also speaking about that later on. Pre-COVID, we were about 10.8%. UBL India and Distel are actually dilutive because of the wine portfolio in South Africa and India being a dark market. So that dilutes by around 30-40 basis points. So we're still about 40-50 basis points below pre-COVID. We believe by two things. First, we want to make sure that we keep increasing also the relative investment as a percentage of revenue to above 10%, and we are not yet there. So that is a clear direction. We believe that we are and can still focus much more because we were again diluting our investment by spreading it over too many brands and doing it in too much one-size-fits-all way. So there's a big opportunity there which we are already harvesting. And I dare say on the core strategic brands in the leads and challenge markets, we're significantly spending more now than before. So it's not just that ballpark number, it's really how we spend it. And then the whole efficiency, effectiveness, improvement driven by Freddie AI is still to come. And that's why deliberately we kept it a bit open-ended above 10, because we need to see how many efficiencies are we going to get, how much effectiveness, etc. I still would expect the absolute investment to continuously go up.

Maybe Simon Hales here in the front. Other side, Simon. There we go.

Yeah, thank you. Simon Hales from Citi. Dolph, could you just sort of follow up a little bit more on the resolve markets? Clearly, you've stepped up some exits in recent years that you highlighted. I mean, how many markets are currently in that resolve bucket? I appreciate it could evolve and ebb and flow over time. And how do we think about the financial implications of those exits over the next few years in the context of the metrics you've laid out this morning? I'd imagine you'd see some acceleration probably in organic markets. Growth as you exit some of those underperforming markets, but probably could see some EPS dilution as you go through that journey I'm just trying to sort of square the circle given your commitment to EPS growth ahead of or at least with profit growth Also for competitive reasons because if we would advertise which are those markets that would become a self-filling prophecy if you like and let me start by saying and

I personally sent a personal message to each of the GMs of those markets to kind of inform them, we are kind of classifying you as this. And that means three things. Either you fix it, or you partner, or you exit. So it is not per se an exit. We give those markets, you know, notice, like current momentum is unacceptable. Let's be clear. But still, if there's a credible path to fix it, by all means, let's go for it and let's have that conversation. But if the odds are just so stacked against us because of whatever reason, too small market position, macroeconomics too brutal, whatever it may be, let's then have the honest, open conversation. Interestingly enough, every single GM answered me with a thank you note. And why? Because they always felt awkward like them. When you're a GM running one of these places, you know you're not where you need to be. So just by the honesty, the transparency of, hey, let's call a spade a spade this way. But by having the opportunity to potentially fix it and come with a plan to deliver that, to be invited for that was super well received. But then also the candor and transparency, it's not working. Let's really, in a coordinated way, either find a partner or find an exit. It's nuanced. It doesn't mean per se exit, but by putting that on the table, you create a very different operational intensity dynamic, which is also part of what we feel was needed and maybe historically was not really happening in Heineken. Some of these places have been burning cash for two decades. That really needs to stop. I'm not going to answer the question on how this will specifically change our overall numbers, but typically these places are still consuming capital because you have compliance or safety, maintenance to do. they are basically in the aggregate. There's no cash generation, and the majority is cash negative. So by resolving them, it will have a favorable financial outcome. And we still hope that there's a number of them who will make it to fix and start moving up to a challenge market where we say, hey, okay, they're back in the game.

Thank you. Maybe Robert?

Robert Ottenstein, Evercore ISI. Two related questions, and I know this first one's a tough one, but, you know, any thoughts or any visibility on, you know, when you'll be able to get, you know, to the more normalized mid-single-digit growth that the category should be able to do but, you know, obviously isn't there right now, and we don't have a lot of visibility on that. And then related to that, I think you made a very good case that affordability is an issue, given the higher price increases above inflation. What can you do on the affordability side that still protects brand equity, price pack architecture, revenue growth management, maybe more granular pricing, so pricing more in areas that are more affluent and not pricing in others? Maybe talk about those different levers. Thanks. Thanks.

Yeah, thank you. Look, on your first question, it's the $1 million question. And I hope in what I shared that our confidence that the category will return to that mid-single... No, let me say that the category returns to that around 1% volume growth and that with our commercial strategy, we should be outgrowing the overall category and we should be able to deliver that mid-single... That's what we are planning for. That's what we're designing for. That's informing the decisions that we're making. But I don't know whether that's next year or the year after next. And we learned a bit our lessons to be more brutal in terms of planning conservatively, putting a lot of pressure on the P&L, making sure there's enough self-help in productivity, what have you. And hopefully the category starts improving ahead of the budget that we have set for the year. So, yeah. I wish I could make this more definite, but that's why we're quite explicit in calling it a midterm ambition. Over the next three to five years, that's where we need to be, and we believe that we will be there. Short, short term, next six, 12, 18 months, to be honest, you guys read the news even more than I do probably, you know that there's still kind of things happening in the global footprint. But we're really trying to do both. Be clear on the strategy, the choices that we're making, the investments that we're making, and at the same time being cautiously in the short term in how we budget to make sure that we don't get ahead of things because then halfway the year you start reacting and it just saps a lot of internal energy that we rather spend on innovating, investing, what have you. On the RMG, do you want to speak to it? It's a little bit what you shared in your presentation, I think.

Yeah, so it's again, now that we have the brand value equation, we really can see easy in each market, how are we doing on that value proposition compared to competitors? And are we off or are we on? and then you have two options you can lower the price to restore it or you can create a more value and there it starts with and if you if you you don't want to lower prices but you also want to manage your affordability and then the other levers become really important and I mean, the good point of needing to step up RMG is that we still have a lot of headroom to use all the other levers much more intentionally. Price pack, we are now really accelerating and seeing the successes. But you have mixed management, you have trade terms, you have a lot of others that we can accelerate. But also their focus really helps. If you know what brand has which role, which SKU has which role. Some SKUs, they have the role of being affordable because it's managing the out-of-pocket. So the focus also really helps on that element.

to give credit where credit is due. Historically, we were way too blunt in our RMG. We took price increases across brands and SQs until a couple of years ago. So fine-tuning our RMG capability, making it much more granular, on segments, on brands, on pack types, on pack types by channel, making sure we have the data process system infrastructure in place. All of that is being put together as we speak to avoid that you need some very blunt things on pricing that would be really impactful on your P&L and we really don't want to go there. Thank you, Robert.

Maybe Andrea in the back. Andrea Pistacchi, Bank of America. So two questions also for me. The first one on Europe, please. So net of the headwinds that the industry has faced in the last few years, I mean, your market share momentum, which has been very strong in the UK and in some other markets, it doesn't seem quite as strong as a few years ago when you were, for example, consistently outperforming the market and by quite a bit in Italy and France. Now, clearly, you've led on price, which probably has had an impact, and you've talked about needing to improve mainstream. And you've said some of the things in the various answers now, but what do you think it will take to really get back to more positive share momentum? Can you consistently grow share in Europe? And ultimately, do you think, with a difficult industry, can you grow volume in Europe going forward? Thanks, André. And then, sorry, should I just say the second one quickly? It's on the US, actually. I mean, the US is one of your focus markets, 17 markets. It's been quite consistently difficult for you. So what can you do to improve the trajectory there? Very good.

Thanks, Andrea. So on Europe. So it's important, again, to be specific. Last year, our volume was positive in Europe. It was positive in all four regions, including in Europe. We were very kind of cautious on the pricing as we are restoring the brand value equations. But last year, we were growing in Europe, and we had very strong market share results in Europe last year across key markets. This year, we're struggling, partly really driven by three markets, France, Germany, Netherlands, driven by those retail negotiations that, you know, we have been... in a way lucky that we had not suffered that for many years, but this was really our turn a year before some of our competitors. We saw that through this having a big impact. It's taking longer than expected to come back because we resolved them halfway the summer, far away from spring or autumn resets. So it's taking a bit longer, but we will resolve them. And for next year, that will be a net positive in a kind of cynical way. Then there are a couple of markets that we worry about. We worry about Poland, where you're in a weak market, we're struggling. A market like Italy, we had led the premiumization wave and done a phenomenal job on Ignusa, Messina, and to some extent, Brent Heineken. If there's one market where the brand values equation, you know, is not in the right place, it's Italy. So you see a rebalancing in the market. We are having good momentum with Moretti, our mainstream beer, which is actually very healthy. But indeed, we are kind of trying to find the right rebalance between our premium portfolio and... The essence of what I'm saying is you really need to look at it market by market. But I'm pushing back against the notion you're losing share in Europe. No, we were growing in volume, we were growing in share across the board last year. This year is a tough year. It is specific market by market, and I'm very confident that under the leadership of Glenn and the GMs, we're addressing them, and that will turn around as it should. On the US... I think the US is kind of the most extreme market right now in terms of softness, mid-single-digit declines across the market, whereby premium was always leading the category until about a year ago. But in particular, what's happening with immigration, the ICE rates, etc., that core Hispanic consumer, where imported premium brands are really over-skewing with that core Hispanic consumer, is highly disrupted. So indeed, we are very unsatisfied with our in-year performance. We are very clear on our strategy. We have two incredible brand assets, brand Heineken and brand Dos Equis. On 00, we continue, even six years into the launch, we're still growing the brand, 24 consecutive quarters of growth. As a single flavor, we are still the number one 00 proposition in the market. But on your kind of legacy business, Heineken original Dos Equis, There's really work to do. Part is the market and part is us. I'm very happy we hired Bill Renspe, the former chief commerce officer of Constellation. He joined us as of 1st of October as our chief sales officer. So really providing, you know, fresh pair of eyes, somebody with a very high standard. He led to a large extent the growth trajectory of Constellation over the last decade. So excited to have Bill join the team. So those are a couple of thoughts on the US. Thank you. Maybe one last question before we go to lunch.

James Edwards-Jones. Thanks, Tristan. James Edwards-Jones from RBC. A couple of questions quickly. You said 80%, I think, of the investment will go behind the five global brands. What is it at the moment? And... Can you give us any sort of insight into the profitability of those global brands? I guess we can sort of work out Heineken, but anything you can say about the rest would be really interesting.

So 80% is about five global brands and the 25 power brands. So it is for that. We will not reveal what it was because we don't want to indicate the shift. And what was the second part of the... Profitability. The profitability, it's higher, significantly higher than the average. But I cannot indicate.

We'll leave it at that then. I think we'll just wrap up the Q&A session for now because we're going to go to lunch.

And I'm sure people know where to find us during lunch. Because everybody has a lot of questions. So feel free to approach any of us during the breaks to continue with your questions.

The conversation. Before you get up, let me do two things. One, let me shut down the webcast for now. We're going to be back at 2 o'clock. So we hope to see you at 2 o'clock again. Is that good? Then second.

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So welcome back, everybody. I hope you had a good lunch. I hope everybody got a chance to drink some Heineken Ultimate. Welcome back to the webcast. Unfortunately, I missed this. Fantastic. I think it's my third one at the moment. Without much further ado, our next speaker is our Chief Financial Officer, Harald van den Boek. Harald.

Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Tristan, for the introduction. Happy to have you all back, including on camera. So the next 45 minutes is me talking about productivity. And it won't only be me. There is plenty of videos to keep you entertained after your lunch session. You probably are going to need it. Before I get into the content, let me just remind you about the journey that we're on, the Heineken productivity journey. Before 2019, many, many years, 10 years. And when the need arose, there were specific targeted cost interventions that were taking place. It delivered the goods, about 2 billion of gross savings during that 10-year interval. But when Dolf became CEO, he said one of the things that must change for us as a company is that we don't think about short-term interventions, but that we really are starting to build productivity and cost consciousness in the culture of this organization. How do we think about longer-term initiatives that drive productivity on a more ongoing basis? That's what we've been achieving and building over the past five years. And going forward, we want to continue and even accelerate that. And you're going to hear all of this in the next 44 minutes. But importantly, we want to move to the next stage of continuous productivity and add cash on top. We've built a muscle and it's now ready to expand. And the deliverables that we're targeting for is 4 to 500 million of gross savings per annum and a higher than 90% cash conversion rate going forward. So what I'm going to talk about today is first, the productivity journey up to here, up to Evergreen 2025. And one of the components that I know is out there is where did all of these growth savings go? I'm going to speak a little bit about that. The second part is box two, three, and four, which are the systematic shifts that we're now making as we transition from Evergreen 2025 to Evergreen 2030. how we leverage Heineken's global scale and skill, the importance and productivity and effectiveness that comes with accelerating the digital journey, and how we boost cash for further value creation optionality. At the end, I'll wrap it up together, bring all of these component parts together, and show you how that materializes over the next couple of years and what the cost to achieve is to do that. So let's start with our journey to date. You know this, but how nice is it, even after lunch, to look at full glasses of beer? We have had a target in 2020. Dolf became CEO, COVID hit, we set a 2 billion gross savings target, and at that moment in time, our organization thought, that's a big number. Remember, I just showed you, that was the total amount of savings in the previous 10 years. And we said we are going to do that again, but then in four years time. An audacious goal. Obviously, it was COVID and the organization sprang into action. But what is important on this slide is that actually not the savings came in, but how they came in. It's a year-on-year achievement. Year after year, we over-delivered our gross savings number. And as you see on the right-hand side of the slide, this was done across markets because the bubbles show the average over the 21 to 24 time period. Important every year our markets chipped in. Really well done by our teams in the markets. We know that productivity helps navigate macro challenges. We knew that at the time when we announced it, COVID happened. Long forgotten, but a very relevant factor. We spoke about peak inflation, but we also have seen very important and very significant currency challenges. So macro realities had to be addressed. The most important part is on the right-hand side of this slide, and it requires some technical comments from me to explain before I go into the detail. What we're doing in Heineken is that this gross savings number is a very important metric for us. We're paying people's STI short-term incentives on this. We have a specific dedicated team who is looking at what is in the funnel, how it flows through the P&L, and whether we actually recognize these initiatives. That process is validated by internal audit. And even the external auditors, of course, they're not giving reasonable assurance on it, but they're looking at it because it's such an important communication vehicle to you, our investor community. All I'm trying to say is that there is a high degree of confidence that these gross savings are real, but they're gross. Three factors that have played a role. The first is the deleveraging impact. Dolf already alluded to it, but the on-trade in Europe is a very profitable channel for us. And that is still, in our territory, 15% below COVID. That impact had to be absorbed. We also see in Vietnam that the premium versus mainstream market has taken a big bite of the profit pool. That impact needed to be absorbed. And then you had currency fluctuations, which had a significant impact on consumer demand. Take Nigeria as an example. So that first box is what we label deleveraging impact. And that gross savings covered in a meaningful way. The second component, and I'll give you some more perspective on that later this afternoon in the presentation, but because of the peak inflation, we priced for input cost. And we were always very open about that. We're not pricing for total inflation, but only for input cost. So part of these gross savings, we're covering the excess of fixed cost inflation. The third one is the biggest one. And this is all what we said at the start of Evergreen 2025, that we will continue to invest in future-proofing Heineken. This is the biggest bar here. And just to give you some dimensions of it. Over the course of 2019 to 2024, if we calculate what this chart does on organic growth basis in constant currency year after year, and then we stitch the five years together, we have spent over 400, well over 400 million in brand support. More than that went into our digital and technology investments. So about 80% on that light green bar was the continued support through our other brands, through this period of volatility, and funding the digital technology transformation in Heineken. At the end of it, about 900 million flowed through to the operating profit. Again, on an organic, constant currency basis, five years stitched together. We felt it was important to give this point of disclosure because the profit flow through is about 25%, but as you see, with the majority reinvested in our business. That's the financials, but also our operational KPIs kept improving. You see the productivity P&L drivers. You see that the commercial productivity is relatively small. Why? Because we reinvested and more in our brands, as I just indicated. But in the supply chain, we have actually, over those years, have built a connected supply chain network with lower complexity. You see it. There's a 3% increase in volume per FTE, and we have about a 9% increase in average asset utilization. As Bram indicated, commercial productivity already started with 20% fewer brands that get actually investment over time, meaningful investment, structural investment. And he's also showed that the revenue increase per salesperson has gone up dramatically. The organizational productivity is also there. We have a much leaner workforce and more and more activities got centralized and we're now deploying scale capabilities. More on that later. But excluding our digital and technology build, we have 8% fewer people and actually double the amount of people who are working in Heineken business centers. So also, operationally, the organization is changing. And this can work only when we bring the people along. And this is a methodology that we are now really proud of. It's working and want to build upon. It's a concerted, continuous effort to increase efficiency. And just as an example, in September, we had a whole week of productivity, individual sections to learn, share, reapply across the globe. More than 5,000 people on average participated, often in groups, to really look at what can we learn from one another and what can we reapply to build that into our plans for next year. We spoke before, but only a few years ago in 2022, so two years after the event, is Heineken cost-conscious? 13% said yes. Today, 83% says yes. And last, these big numbers don't come because we have only one or two things that we do. This is a sequential, small, project by project list of initiatives. Over 14,000 have been completed during this time in order to deliver these numbers and change these ways of working. This mechanism is making us confident that the productivity mindset will keep on delivering. And what you see here is in our markets, before I go to the next shifts next, there is a healthy pipeline of ideas. Things that we know will work and that we have costed and are ready to implement. You already see that it's a few years out. Some closer by, very much secured. We know what it will do. We know when it happens. We know the impact that it has. A little bit further out, obviously, more time to do that. But also importantly, repeatable models are being cascaded across the globe. From Europe to Brazil is about transport excellence. How do we optimize truck utilization with AI? How do we reframe portfolios with lower complexity through bottle and ingredient harmonization? In the Africa region, how do we get alternative recipes to work to fulfill demand in a hard currency scarcity? or from Mexico to Indonesia, bottle return collection processes. All these ideas are traveling and are starting to build a base of doing things better collectively. So that's the foundation that we build on as we move to 2030. Here are now the three shifts. Number one is how we're going to leverage Heineken global scale and scale. And there are three major initiatives that are falling under this umbrella. The first is how do we get from brewery optimization to agile supply networks? The second is how we pull transactional activities, which is happening, to a more integrated, larger scale Heineken Business Services network. And the third is how we move from a fragmented supplier base to really unlock procurement excellence. I'm going to detail all three. Let's start with the European supply chain. We've already in different forums have talked about it, but this idea in Europe came up because we started to realize that we had a suboptimal supply network, but also caused by much fragmentation in the local markets in Europe. So the team said we cannot only tackle the cost if we don't think bigger and more holistically about how to transform the whole supply network. And the purpose here is how do we delight consumers, improve customer satisfaction whilst reducing complexity and cost, and importantly, lower emissions at the same time. Some of the outcomes you see at the bottom. Fantastic score in customer service. But before I start speaking and explaining, I'd like you to hear from Erwin, who's our supply chain director in Europe, who has been leading the charge on this for a number of years.

In the past four years, we've been transforming the European supply chain from an Opco-focused model to a network customer-centric organization, achieving significant cost savings, higher customer satisfaction, and sustainability milestones. By harmonizing our packaging and recipe portfolio, we've reduced packaging formats reduction by 40% and recipes by 15% across Europe. It allowed us to gain significant procurement benefits and to further streamline our production footprint and optimize transportation costs. This resulted in closing eight breweries and shut down six packaging lines, while enabling opcos to get better access to new products to drive premiumization and innovation in their markets. We've centralized key activities and hubs above Opco in our shared service center in Krakow, including supply planning, transport management, engineering, quality, and maintenance services. We've been moving over 300 FTEs into those hubs. These strategic moves altogether have resulted in a 700 million gross savings and a reduction of 1,600 FTEs. This is showcasing our commitment to operational excellence and cost management. While doing this transformation, we have been delivering on our SNR agenda, achieving a 45% reduction in carbon emission in production and a 12% decrease in specific water consumption since 2018. These achievements were delivered not only through best practices across Europe, but also by installing new technologies such as a thermal solar plant that you can see here today in Seville. And on top of all of this, most importantly, it has helped to increase customer satisfaction scores. In the consumer-packed industry, this is being measured via the advantage group survey, in which our customers are asked to give feedback on the quality of the supply chain services we deliver. With nine out of 13 opcos, we are in the top tier of the consumer-packed industry, and we are at first place in the UK, Ireland, and Poland. Our journey to build a future-fit supply chain is going to continue.

Really great. And we took this European approach and thought about how we can bottle it and export it across the global world. How do we make this approach globally scalable? And what you see here is really how we think about the repeatable model. No longer are individual markets looking at individual capital expenditure needs and saying, how do I optimize my own brewery? But we're moving much more to a strategic resource allocation of capital, but also product flows. We're doing this digitally enabled through foresight in what CapEx needs to be happening, where, and where the biggest risk and return reward is. We are imposing governance. Because as you heard Erwin say, it only happens if we really truly global connect our process with what the market needs are. For example, in product and portfolio harmonization. And importantly, on the bottom parts, it is about how we optimize the asset base through better digital connected breweries, so we understand what kind of productivity we can get out of the breweries and with smarter investments and smarter people. But who am I to speak? Let's hear from Magne.

As we look to the future, our supply chain plays an important role, not just for our operation, but as the backbone supporting all three pillars of our evergreen 2030 strategy, enabling our growth ambitions, driving productivity, and ensuring we are future fit. With our unique global footprint of breweries, we are well positioned to service our customers at scale. And at the same time, we can react quickly and address local needs as we are close to markets everywhere. Our network also brings resilience in times of change in global trade flows or more frequently occurring disruptions. We know that our continued success relies on having agile supply chain networks that adapt to business needs where we operate while at the same time leveraging the scale of a global operation. A learning organization that connects and shares best practices and adapts quickly is at the heart of this. For example, Kilinto Brewery in Ethiopia and Toluca in Mexico. Both these are breweries at high altitudes. Together, they learned and optimized how to increase their tank utilization under low atmospheric pressure, resulting in a 20% increase in brewery output at no extra capex. Through our global TPM program, we accelerate learning between sites with a programmatic approach to benchmarking, cost cutting, increased operational excellence, and brewery output. Digital technologies plays an important enabling role, like our connected breweries and new innovations such as the robotic inspection dog that you might meet here in the brewery. Equally, sustainability remains a priority, and also here our Seville brewery is a great example of how efficiency and sustainability can go hand in hand. Next to making each individual site better, we are also rethinking how we operate the network as a whole, optimizing how we source, produce, and deliver, supported by advanced network modeling tools. In this way, we reduce waste and increase asset utilization, resulting in tangible productivity gains, less capex needed for growth, and improved margins. Our agile supply chain is at the heart of Heineken's ambition to grow, to operate efficiently and to remain future-ready. Together, we are building a resilient foundation for long-term value creation.

Absolutely great to hear. And here is how we think about it. We are therefore really gearing up ready now to move to a more competitive supply chain by leveraging global scale and skill enabled by digital and at a structurally lower cost base. What you see here on the slide is at the top, what are the big levers that Magne was talking about? Operational excellence, network optimization, and organization and CapEx optimization. And I particularly love the energy behind growth without CapEx. This is something that I really like the supply chain community to really start thinking about and acting upon. You see at the bottom bar about the rough split of savings. I'm not going to give you numbers for competitive reasons, of course, but where the biggest contribution sits. And this is a very meaningful part of our productivity agenda, how we leverage global scale and scale across. Let me now move to the second one of those initiatives, and that is how we now start leveraging Heineken business services. What we have done since its origin in 2012, you heard Erwin speak about the Krakow site as well, this is where we started. In 2012, we built one center in Poland, in Krakow, and it more or less grew organically. By operating companies who had good ideas and they wanted to have it executed with people with transactional process excellence or really end-to-end process thinking, it was Poland where you would take your problem to. This over time became more and more across functions and across operating companies. And the same started to happen in Mexico and in Brazil. Multifunctional lots of activities being positioned in a global center. Recently this year, we accelerated and opened up our India center as the capital of the world in the shared services industry. You also see the black dots, because as our company grew, more and more people were starting to pool resources for specific capability, servicing multiple markets. So you could see that there was an organic demand for coordinated, either for cost or for capability, collaboration across the network. You also see, importantly, the outcomes here at the bottom. We have fantastic service levels, 30 on the Net Promoter Score across the service lines. We now have, during that time frame, over the past five, six years, doubled the amount of colleagues that are working in these centers to 3,500 now, and started measuring, already for six, seven years, the productivity gains that we see in these centers, about 5% to 8% per annum. And that's before we put digital on top of it. We have only three function servers, so this all has been put in place. We are now ready for the next step. As an executive team, together with the operating companies who really want this at scale, we have defined a much broader scope across functions and moving from 18 to 15 service lines. Like for example, customer onboarding is a service line or network planning, as you just heard Erwin talk about. All these service lines are designed and proven and benchmarked. We have now four global centers and we want to bring them together at a scaled business service center and a global network so that we can start moving things around depending on capability and cost. We believe that we should double the size of the Heineken Business Service Center colleagues as we start to scale up for capability and cost. And we know that we can unlock 8 to 10% productivity at least when we start to converge data and processes underpinned by digital technologies. But we're not here to build service centers. We're here to win in the market and to grow. And therefore the three bubbles underneath are actually very important. The intention is to liberate operating companies... so that they can focus on winning in the market. To build capabilities at scale, at speed... and to deliver structural cost savings at the bottom line... by doing things more efficiently, faster. One of those components is what we announced last week. Because with the strategic design done... And with business service centers now becoming more mature, we also made a decision to move to a smaller, more strategic head office, supported by Heineken Business Services. So we announced last week that we would really reduce the scope and the size of the Amsterdam head office, with a 35% lower personnel base and about 100 million of run rate savings, bringing head office activities into this HBS network. That's the second shift that we're going to do. The third one, where global skill and skill is really important, is how we think about procurement. And it will be no surprise, Magne referenced it as well, that the world of global procurement has gone through a quite significant change over the last couple of years. So two years ago, we really started to rethink our global procurement model. And we asked for a number of external experts to look at this and say what they found, where we were good and where we were lagging. And in raw and packaging materials, we distinguish between the two. We are actually pretty well set up, but found one important unlock. And that is the close collaboration with markets to make interventions to really look at what is the step down in the cost base that we can achieve by bringing the whole power of the supplier network together. And the famous example that we were talking about is how we no longer import one billion bottles in Brazil, It's the easiest way to say that, but we're actually building a whole ecosystem around that, from packaging to raw materials, through recycling, and through electricity and energy, actually. And all of this ecosystem has led to a 17% reduction in variable cost per hectolitre over the last three years. In commercial and business service, the verdict was very different. We are not good in commercial and business services, not for lack of trying, but the way that we are organized. And rather than me talking about it, let's hear from Justine, the CFO of Europe.

Productivity plays a key role in our Evergreen strategy. A lot of work has been done over the last years, and there's still room for sizable savings opportunities as we head into Evergreen 2030. We identified big opportunities in commercial and business services where we've not yet unlocked our full potential and leveraged our scale, historically having operated at OPCO level in these areas. We've targeted consolidating our supply base, lifting sourcing above OPCO and negotiating better prices. We looked at our policies and our spend discipline, as well as harmonising ways of working between our OPCOs. and we've implemented many tools and technology to allow us to ensure we are getting the best deals we can with our suppliers. A great example is the introduction of a unified policy and streamlined procurement process for all refrigerators across Europe, cutting down from 220 models to just seven. This is not rocket science. It's an example of disciplined, best-in-class execution across our network of opcos, unlocking great value. This shift has greatly reduced complexity and is a repeatable solution that can travel across regions. We continue our productivity path by focusing on fewer high impact initiatives, co-built with our opcos and reinforcing discipline.

So procurement will be rethought and it will change the way that we work between operating companies, suppliers and our procurement organization. We leverage global scale, particularly in the indirect space, the commercial and business services you heard Justine talk about, because there's a huge opportunity to reduce the supplier base. Second, we need to get better insights about what the market really needs to reduce waste and get to more efficient solutions. And therefore, we're forming category teams with deep expertise and potentially supplier partnering to really unlock the value of the new initiatives that we're doing, to build real deep skills into specific categories of spend. And last but not least, also here, technology will play a role through efficiency and effectiveness across the value chain. So including data sharing with our strategic supplier base to look at waste or value unlock opportunities like we've done in Brazil. An indicative of the split of the size of price you will see on your right hand side. The second shift, so global scale and skill on these three levels is the first part. The second shift is how we accelerate digital. And this is, Dolf, how you opened already five years in the making. Ronald and Elsa was appointed in 2020. And during those past five years, we really built a foundation of our digital skills. What you see here is we scaled up and centralized our digital and technology workforce. Part of the big investments that we spoke about are on this page. We wanted to ensure that we were not dependent on external advisors. But we really wanted to bring the right workforce capability in-house because we understand that becoming the best connected brewer and with the power of AI going forward, we had to have a skill base that was setting us up for future success. Secondly, we had to do two things at the same time. Repair the technological debt that we had from the fragmented infrastructure of the past, whilst creating global platforms, future fit, best of breed, best in class, and already start acting on them now. What you see here is we doubled the amount, the double of number of people working in the digital and technology department and the pivot to implement global platforms rather than maintain local platforms has really happened at scale, times three. You see some of the outcomes at the top, at the bottom. You also heard me talk about all these three global scale initiatives, and it will be no surprise that digital is underpinning them all. We're talking about agile supply chain networks where we connect people and breweries digitally. We're talking about Heineken business services that works with harmonized data and processes and advanced AI tools. And for procurement excellence, we are talking about process automation, e-cataloging and AI use cases to make that all happen. So also the digital acceleration is very much integrated in the productivity initiatives that I was just showing. Now, where do we stand? We are ready to scale digital solutions at level cost. The digital backbone that Dolf also explained has been developed, and we have already got 2,100 implementations done to date. This is number of operating companies times number of global platforms. But you also see that we're now starting to gear up for mass deployment. A little bit of a static base in 2025, not because we're not continuing, but because we're preparing for the next rollout. Importantly, at the bottom, you also see that this whole journey of getting ready and building the foundation, including the People Foundation, has led to an accelerated investment on our behalf. Going forward, we can sustain or slightly taper this investment whilst doing this at the same time. Now, of course, we're living in the world of AI, so things may change, and then we'll look at a different picture. But for now, we know what we want to deploy, we know where the value is, and we know that the costs are already included in our P&L, and the step-up has happened, as I just showed you earlier. Now, digital backbone is not only about repairing the back office. It is enabling growth. You heard Bram talk about it. You heard Dolf talk about it. It's enabling productivity. And, of course, AI will really change all of our lives, and we're geared up to do that. How do we unlock enterprise knowledge? How do we get predictive AI in our business processes? And what you see here at the bottom is that throughout the whole value chain, we are starting to use digital platforms or digital applications to really make that all connected. So accelerating digital is very much integrated in the way that we drive productivity at scale through our organization, and we've reached peak cost levels at this moment in time. The third big shift on productivity is that we now start to embrace and boost cash as a next level. We're dialing up the focus on cost and capital discipline, and we have made some progress over the years. So prior to 2014 to 2019 period, we had a cash conversion which was below 80%, and we're very firmly targeting above 90% under Evergreen 2030. How do we do that? I need to build this slide. We have seen structural improvements on each item, and I'm going to show that to you in a minute. But you see the same graph at the top and at the bottom with one important change, and that is the inclusion of Heineken Beverages and UBL India into our portfolio. Because these two companies operate in a very different cash flow model. Heineken Beverages, because they have a very different portfolio. And UBL, because we're very dependent on state-by-state production, when we need to pay the production fee, when the state-owned outlets are actually sending the money over for the beer that has already been delivered. So... Actually, if you see excluding Heineken beverages and India, we have taken main working capital down to about minus 4% by concerted efforts of our operating companies. But because of the inclusion of those two models, it has been recorded as minus 1%. This is not to say country mix doesn't matter. It is just a phasing and a time that we just need to work through in order to make this better. We have line of sight on how to bring further improvements into default. We know how to structurally improve receivables by AI enabled customer collaboration. We've seen this happen in Mexico and Brazil, and we see the potential ahead of us. We can optimize inventory levels, because as Erwin and Magne were talking, we are starting to connect planning, brewery optimization, transport management much more closely together, reducing the need for safety stock by AI-enabled forecasting and procurement. And we can extend average payable terms through value chain optimization and supplier consolidation, and importantly through nearshoring. These are very clear drivers why we think each and every element of the working capital can be improved, and we know that there's a substantial gap to close. We also are trying to replicate The governance model that we put in cost now also to cash. We are strengthening governance by putting in place cash control towers where people are co-creating and creating visibility on cash management. We're incentivizing the team. We're putting systematic deep dives in place where we see the opportunity is biggest. And we have central frameworks to leverage learning and harmonizing the approach. But let's hear from one of the markets, which is Mexico, Ramiro.

I would like to share an important part of our financial journey, one that demonstrates we can truly improve our value creation model. Over the past few years, we faced the challenge to free up resources to drive sustainable growth while improving our return on capital. We knew that doing the same as always would not be enough. We needed to rethink processes and find and adopt the best business practices. We managed to improve our working capital from 15 days in 2022 to minus six days by the end of last year. This cycle of negative working capital ignited a virtual cycle of cash flow, which was only possible covering both sides of the balance sheet, from optimizing receivables and inventories to extending payment terms. generating cash by more than 270 million euros. The journey continues and we are very excited about the future and how we will continue optimizing cash and valuing both our beer business and retail business. Today, more than ever, we can consolidate a culture of learn, share and reply, capitalizing on global best practices internally and externally while adapting them to our local reality.

The second part is that we are moving beyond PCAPEX. Evergreen 2025 funded the journey of making our brewery footprint fit for purpose and generating capacity in growthy markets. What you see here is that before 2019, our average capital expenditure was 9%. We're slowly starting to bring that to 8%, including this year. and going forward we believe that the level of two of seven to eight percent is the right benchmark to look for why because we have a very diversified geographical footprint we also have included now sustainability capital into this and digital capital is also being deployed as we still start scaling out the digital solutions Why are we confident that this can be delivered? Because more and more, as Magne was talking about, we're unlocking capacity with low or no CapEx. Second, we're past beyond peak in the D&D spend. And, as I will speak to you in my next presentation, we are balancing our sustainability and responsibility investments, looking at both technical and financial viability. So we're quite confident that we're on the right path. And just to give you an illustration, obviously we're not going to give the markets for competitive reasons, but the top 16 focus markets outside of the US have sufficient capacity to grow. We still have Mexico to do. There are maybe a few, one or two more, but by and large, we have the capacity to grow going forward. So let me now try to bring it all together in the last five minutes. Hopefully you've heard that we have plenty of ideas in local operating companies, but also above companies, by first of all leveraging global scale and scale, by accelerating digital, and cash will come later in my wrap-up section, but from a P&L point of view, this is how we think about it. The key growth drivers of our growth savings, and note that there is a little bar here because the good work that our operating companies are doing must continue, always to find productivity, but this is how we see it. We have a multi-year program validated, we know where to go, and at the beginning, Agile Supply Networks is more ready to scale and will bring more initial results. Procurement and Heineken Business Services will start scaling, but need transfer time and we need digital solutions to come into the fold. We know when, where and how. And that means that there is a changing mix as we project forward, but all these are validated savings. We know that this will deliver. It also means that the productivity will improve in the outer years as we start to bring technology at greater scale into our footprint. Importantly, the exceptional cost to achieve this is very much in line with the average of what you've seen in the last five years. So I'm not here talking about an additional bite at exceptional cost for what we know now. If things change or AI starts to accelerate or the path changes, we will be back to you with an update. But for now, this is what it is. These growth savings will enable Evergreen 2030. We're generating the gross savings to continue the funding of our brands. And Bram spoke about it. Both global as well as the local 25 brands will have the first access to these savings. But we also believe, and I'm going to detail that more after the break, why there is an increased profit flow through of these gross savings compared to the past. The cash conversion gives us opportunity for inorganic acquisitions, like we've just announced with the FIFCO transaction, or with capital returns, like the share buybacks that we initiated at the start of this year. Now, this would not be possible just by running a series of initiatives. We have confidence that we can deliver this because of three things. The first, we've built an engine in Evergreen 2025 that we will continue to fine-tune and feed and now put cash on top of that. Second, we have a healthy pipeline towards 2030. We know what to do. We know what it delivers. We know what it costs. And we know when it hits the markets by when. And last but not least, our people are very much behind us. So there is a continuous journey of productivity and an embracing of the shifts that we're making. So hopefully, just to summarize what you've heard. First, we have delivered on our productivity targets in 2025 and built a cost performance culture. We're now ready to go the next step under Evergreen 2030 by leveraging global scale and skill Efficiency gains as we accelerate digital. Dialing up the focus to boost cash. And all in all, we believe that productivity in Evergreen 2030 enables both the reinvestments that we need, but also profitable growth opportunities. And we add cash on top for more opportunity. And we see this as just a simple way of working repeatedly year after year. With that, thank you very much.

A break. Oh, sorry. We just have a 45-minute break coming up now. So we will shut down the webcast until 2.30. So grab yourself a coffee and please be back here in the room at 2.30. Be great. And we finish the session with value creation. Here we go down again. There's no coffee up here. There's also some other Heineken 00 brands downstairs, as well as some other of the local portfolios, if you want to give that a try. Thank you.

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All righty. Last session of the day. We are going to talk about value creation with our next speaker, Harald van den Broek. Thank you.

Thank you and pleased to see you all back after my productivity session. Let's now go into how we bring this all together to drive value creation for attractive shareholder returns. Before I get again in the chapters of the story, Just a small reminder that Evergreen 2025 really put the basis in place, and I think you heard that across from Dolf, from Bram, from myself, to now get into a sharpened Evergreen 2030 strategy by three strategic priorities. Number one, growth. Number two, productivity. And then three, how we future fit Heineken. That's what we focus on, and we measure the outcome in all the parts of the Green Diamond with the return on invested capital as a new element, and I'll speak to that in a minute. That's how we intend to drive attractive shareholder returns. So what you will hear is I'm going to take a few moments and a few slides to look back in what happened under Evergreen 2025 before we then pivot into Evergreen 2030. And we're going to take all four sides of the quadrant to articulate how Heineken is positioned for structural growth, why we believe there are clear drivers of how we can get profit growth ahead of revenue growth, Why the stronger cash focus gives optionality within a strict capital framework for additional value creation. And last but not least, how we are calibrating sustainability and responsibility for both technical and financial viability. And bring that together in targeting attractive shareholder returns. It's an intentionally blank page because I wanted to stop. It would be remiss of me not to just spend only a few seconds on the quarter three results announcement that we gave yesterday before I start speaking about the potential of value creation going forward. And this is clearly not what we had ambitioned at the start of this year. I'm not going to do a whole speech. You heard that yesterday. But our revenue growth year to date is up 1.5% and our volume is down 2%. That's the picture. The scene is what happened over the last couple of years. And over the last couple of years, you see the trend line is the net revenue in absolute in euros have gone up since 2020. And our earnings per share over the last few years on a bi-year basis has been relatively static. That's the scene. I'm going to take a few slides to explain what has happened in the past four or five years in that scene part of the film. But we are here to build the long-term success of Heineken. And the film is really, over the past 20 years, we've seen growth compounding, and we've also seen earnings per share accruing over time. We still believe that we're not in the picture, but we're in the film. And we're going to close with that, hopefully at the end, to make that a convincing narrative as well. This is an important slide because one of the biggest things that we were talking about today is Heineken has static growth over the past years. And it's true. And we're definitely not satisfied with that. But it's important to somehow unveil what have been the key drivers of that consolidated volume from 2019 to 2024. And we thought it was helpful for the investor community to look at the numbers in each of the boxes. We've had intentional, and because of macroeconomic factors, divestments. Russia was clearly... No, not really our own choice, but there was Brazil economy soft drinks that were clearly unprofitable business, and we made a decision to use that capacity for higher value businesses. Vrumona Kronenburg fits there as well. We have seen once-in-a-lifetime market disruptions, either Europe on trade or Nigeria or Vietnam, as we already spoke about. Those are the negative detractors, but we've also seen market boosts, adding 13 million in Brazil Premium, Mexico, Ethiopia and Myanmar, for example, also referenced by Bram and Dolf. We had fantastic acquisitions that come with a lot of volume. You will hear me later talk about that this is still jewels in the making for next generations. And importantly, and also there we already called out, China and our partnership in licenses has really provided us a lot of opportunity for growth. And also that is still nascent with more opportunities to come. So between static volume, a lot of moving parts have actually happened. And that's relevant because ultimately we really are trying to stay in the film. Heineken is a long-term oriented company. And we are patiently building the future. And what you see here across different timeframes, but from 2020 to 2024, we have been patiently building scale businesses in highly populated markets. Let me just help you navigate on the slide. The box at the top is clearly the country, but also the population that it covers and the population projection in 2030. The bar is the net revenue, and of course, on a different axis, the line is the operating profit line. Now, I'm not going to talk to you market by market, but what this slide is meant to convey is that it takes time to build businesses, but in the space of between eight to 12 years, we know how to do this, and we have done that repeatedly. We've done it in Mexico, Vietnam, Brazil, Ethiopia, and we are seeding the seeds to accelerating that in South Africa, India, and China, where we believe that there's a lot of potential ahead of us. Obviously, in the case of South Africa and the case of Brazil, helped by acquisitions. We thought it was important to put that into the context. We also want to just spend a second on what worked and what didn't work in Evergreen 2025. I'm not going to go through all of these components on the aspects of the green diamond, but there is a lot of progress that we should be proud of. We have consistently gained, for example, over that period, over 50% of our markets have gained market share consistently. We had fantastic revenue growth, but not good enough static volume growth, even though I explained. We've had fantastic growth savings previous presentation, but our margins are still lagging. But you also see that in capital efficiency, we have taken steps down in terms of capex and made progress on working capital. And in net zero, as you will see later, and in water and in diversity in senior management, we have made significant progress. So on many aspects. We can be proud on very relevant aspects. No excuses. We must do better. And those are the shifts that we're making in Evergreen 2030. So good foundation, sharper for better outcomes. We are targeting attractive shareholder returns by the following four shifts that you heard. And I'm going to go into them summarizing all of the different parts. Let me start with growth. We are growing through sharper differentiation and focus across footprint, segment and brands. It's the biggest shift that we're making. But the starting point is that we believe that the beer category is a full pint of potential. And Dolf made the case earlier, convincingly in my view, this morning. Demographics, including a growing population in Gen Z... Income growth, urbanization, beer as the number one category, gaining share of throat are some of the reasons why we believe that there is structural growth in the beer category, in volume and in value. You heard from Bram how we intend to outperform. We will reinvigorate growth by sharpening differentiation and focus across footprint, brands and segments. We also do that in a balanced way. The ambition is really sustainable, balanced volume and value growth, serving more consumers at the right price points. Actually, this has been part of our success formula for the past years, except in the last four or five years. Dolf made the point, Bram made the point, I will make the point again. These were unusual times. COVID, peak inflation, we prized for it. We will bring that balance back as we project forward to 2030. The foundations are in place to grow through value and volume in combination. Our key thing, our key leading shift is that we are differentiating to grow. We have an advantaged footprint. Over 50% of our operating companies is in value and advancing markets. And just to bring back your memory from this morning, those are the markets with the highest opportunity headspace for the beer category to grow, either because it has a high degree of share of total alcohol and because of demographics, income growth, and population is conducive to that. That's where our footprint sits, 50% of the markets. We also have 53 number one and number two positions across the world. And strength matters in the markets. We're also leading in selected segments. We're the number one in premium. Bram convincingly showed that across the archetypes. We have number one position in 00 globally. And we're the number one in Beyond Beer outside of the US. So we are leading in selected segments. And we've introduced, now under Evergreen 2030, a much more differentiated strategy with the Opco value rolls. 17 focus markets getting over 90% of the growth and getting over 80% in focus brands of the incremental advertising, which is actually my next slide. We're also focusing. We are continuing to invest in our portfolio and we will invest over 10% of our net revenue in marketing and selling expenses. We do that with more focus. And already in focused markets, we have increased our total investment by 44% in the past 10 year period. But we're going to continue to do that... with 80% of the marketing investment and selling investment... behind the focus brands. It also means that there will be 25% of the brands... where we will reduce investment over time. In an intelligent way, as Bram called out... not to lose more than we gain, but we will focus nonetheless. And all of this, I hope you will agree... is giving us the evergreen 2030 medium-term guidance on growth, amid single-digit growth revenue, and the reasons to believe the beer category has structural value, a volume growth opportunity, roughly 1%. We will leverage and build further on our advantage footprint and our segment leadership to grow ahead of the market, differentiate and focus. We will step up revenue margin growth to not only do the volume, but also the value side of the equation, and we'll continue to invest, but more efficiently and more effectively over time. That is the first side and probably the most important side of the quadrant. Let me now take a moment to move to profitability, which is different than productivity. So I'm going to take you through all of the components of how we think about profitability drivers, not only productivity. The way that we're looking at this is on the left hand side. We see the profitability drivers as what is our pricing and portfolio strategy? What is the input cost development that we see and how do we think about that in the context of pricing and affordability? What is our favorable footprint and is it conducive to growth, but also what does it do for our profit generation? And then summarizing it, what is the more efficient way of working? That's where productivity and net investments are coming together. So this is how we were thinking about it. And of course, this varies over time. We've seen, too, at the top, that over the earlier part of the journey that I've been showing, 2014 to 2024, we systematically and structurally, in a low inflationary environment, priced below the consumer price index. That massively changed in the period 2020 to 2024, and we had currency devaluations on top of that. Going forward, we believe that we will cover input cost inflation, but that the input cost inflation will be below CPI. That is the data that I'm going to show you. The input cost is going to moderate. Again, I'm going to show you some data on it. Our favorable footprint, we had margin accretion in the early part. We had margin dilutive new acquisitions with UBL in South Africa. And we still have a little bit of leeway to go. These markets will be with us for some more years, but we're trying to compensate that, for example, with a very margin-enhancing acquisition that we hope to welcome in the first part of next year. So this is some of these dimensions, and I just wanted to indicate that some of these things are shifting over time. Let me now give you a little bit more detail and a bit more context. So what you see here on the graph, just to navigate is the dark line is the consumer price index. The green line is our revenue per hectolitre and the blue line is natural gas. Why we chose natural gas? It is a very significant input cost driver for our breweries because we're energy intensive, but also for our packaging material and even for the production of barley and raw materials. So it mattered to us what the energy crisis did. And what you see here is that we've been consistently pricing below CPI, making beer affordable in the total product mix of the household basket. In 2020, what you see is we significantly dipped below. That's not first, we couldn't price. Secondly, we lost the on-trade completely, which is a much more higher revenue per hectolitre in our part of the portfolio. So that was just an external factor that did this. We then decided, like the whole industry, but we were leading that in Europe, to price for peak inflation. So that is really the upset in the balance that Dolf already spoke about earlier in the Q&A. We believe that based on the projections going forward, this will normalize. This is really a one-off event, both COVID as well as the energy crisis. Now, to give you some context on commodity cost, on how we see it, and both gas, so energy, aluminium and barley, for those of you who are following our industry already for longer, is a very significant part of our cost base, which is why I put these on the slide. Natural gas, as you will know, has spiked times 20 in Europe and has come back, but will not revert to the pre-Russia-Ukraine war. It will still be there at elevated levels. And we're using external data sources to give you these forward-looking projections. These are not our assumptions. This is what we've picked up from the... from the external data sources in aluminium because it is energy heavy and because there's a lot of demand for other industry as wells we actually see moderate inflation as we see in barley not at present it's good but going forward we believe that that will balance out So the first message here is we believe that moderate commodity cost pressure will be there. We are not going to see going forward a deflationary environment. And this is all based on our view of the forward curves using external data. Important message. The second part that we want to talk about, and also how we think about pricing and mix management, is foreign exchange volatility. We were pleasingly talking about the growthy footprint that we have, but many people, at least to me as a CFO, remind me that that growthy footprint also comes with a downside, which is currency devaluations that you need to take into account. And the reason that I want to talk about it is exactly because of that. We wanted to unpack because you see 24. And for those of you who have seen the quarter three results and also the half year, 2025 is going to be pretty brutal in terms of currency impact. But over a longer period of time, this 10 year period, we had on average a 2% currency devaluation. Now we said, okay, how are we going to think about that on the future? There are two more messages on this slide. The first, we want to start building this in our planning and in our performance management cycle. We want to own the average impact of our footprint. Not the outliers, but over time, we should be thinking about that. And that's why we try to correlate using the Fisher model of saying, hey, interest rates equal currency devaluations. What is your projection going forward? And if we do that exercise to 2030 using external data like the IMF and the World Bank, we come to an average 3%-ish currency impact weighted by our footprint. We then retrospectively said, does this make sense? And is that true for the 2014 to 2024 period? And you see that the 2% and the 2% actually correlate. So we can't give you more guidance than that, but based on our homework, on our footprint, on our forward projections, we are baking in about a 3% currency devaluation up to 2030. The implications of that is that we need to plan for it, manage it, and really start to think about how we generate hard currency returns for our investor base. Either in dividend yield in the hard currency or, for example, share by BRAX, our acquisition strategy. We need to take these currency impacts into account. Operationally, it's also important that we start changing the system. We were talking about volume growth, market share, and operating profit organic growth outside of currency impact, but we're going to change that because some of the volatile markets need to start thinking hard currency, health of balance sheet, health of P&L. Let's hear from Nigeria.

Thank you, Harold. Here's how we navigated extreme uncertainty in Nigeria. In 2023 and 2024, the country faced an unprecedented economic storm. Currency devaluated four times, inflation tripled, and people's cost of living was deeply impacted. Yet our business in Nigeria responded with resilience and precision.

Nigerian breweries took multiple price increases in small steps. In 2024, we took more than 10 price increases, taking 60% of price per hectolitre up in total and restored 30% of margin per hectolitre while ensuring competitiveness. Number two, we restore the balance sheet to keep the business liquid and operations running. And number three, we right-size the operations. Temporarily suspended two breweries and optimized our workforce, so moving allergy exposure from 38% down to 27% of net revenue.

And we emerged stronger, and we are winning in the markets. Our market share gains continue. We continue to believe in the big potential of Nigeria and of our category in Nigeria as the population is growing and the per capita consumption is still very low. So we got out of the crisis even stronger and ready for the next chapter as a profitable growth driver in Africa.

Look, it's super nice to see. And I have to say that the bounce back is more pronounced and faster than I anticipated when the crisis began a year and a half ago. we can bounce back and we're bringing currency balance sheet and profit management in a competitive context much closer to the forefront of our business. The second thing that I want to talk about is our footprint. We have an advantage footprint, but with some initial margin dilution. As Dolf showed, as Bram showed, as I showed a few slides ago, we know how this works. It takes time, 10, 12 years, to build scale and get the margin up through a portfolio mix that really builds sustainable, profitable growth. At the same time, towards 2030, we will still see some markets, particularly India and South Africa, that will drag us down in our margin. Particularly, this is net revenue minus variable cost for us, for you that want to check the numbers on this. But it's also important to note that the dip that you're seeing, 200 basis points of that dip is coming from those two markets. And it will take time. We're investing in the long term. We have no degree of freedom in all states in India to price for the input cost inflation. It takes time, but we're patiently building the future. On the right-hand side, you also see that we can. Whether this is Myanmar or in Panama or Ethiopia, these are all markets that are relatively new to the family, but that we have seen acceleration because of scale, portfolio and efficiency is starting to come in over time. So, so far, you didn't hear a lot of good news from me. It was like, okay, so you're pricing for input cost, then you're talking about commodity cost going up, and then you're talking about the footprint mix. It's all good for the long term, but what about the short term? And this is where productivity, my pre-break session, is really coming in. We have very firm ideas, and I hope you took that away from the previous session, on how we drive productivity at scale over multiple years so that we have the ammunition to do exactly what we were talking about, and that is building profitable businesses over time. You also see on the right-hand side how we see the savings of 400 and 500 million on average going through. Is it in variable cost or is it in fixed cost? This is roughly how we see the breakup and how the phasing over time, just to give you some indication. But that means that the gross savings is there, but as the break, already 20 people asked me, what about the net? Well, the growth is there. The net is what we need for this business to continue on its trajectory to build a business for the future. And what you see here is that marketing and selling investments will continue But Dolph already said, we are actually increasing the absolute levels of investment, but the ratio is impacted not only by the nominator because of pricing, but also because India is a dark market and Heineken beverages is relatively low. So there is a faster recovery than perhaps your reported numbers will show, but simply the country mix has an impact there. We also believe that we've become more effective and efficient in our marketing and selling expenses. And you heard Bram talk about it. And going forward, therefore, we see particularly in the initial phases, some further step up as we fund the growth strategy that Bram was talking about. but we will quite quickly in about two to three years start to see meaningful impact either by focus with fewer investment brands already 20 now and 25 another one towards 2030 And with about 20% proven more efficiency and effectiveness with Freddie AI that Bram said is already there in Heineken and we're ready to scale across more brands in more markets going forward. So this investment will normalize over time. Secondly, we will also be more disciplined in our reinvestments. By restoring operating leverage, moving beyond peak D&T, as I showed you before the break, and by driving efficiency and effectiveness, we believe that we can reduce the reinvestment rate. I'm sure that after this I'm going to be asked about numbers. I tell you now, I will do my best to resist to be precise. But we are going to be differentiating also in terms of the level of investments. We are differentiating according to Opco value rules for a reason. We have challenge operating companies where the reinvestment rate is going to be high and the profit contribution relatively modest. Because the job to be done is win in accretive markets with lots of growth potential. In lead markets where we are already strong, it is a little bit more balanced. And in strengthened markets, we really are stronger. becoming a lot more efficient and effective in our reinvestment rate and drive productivity much faster in these markets. And you actually see that there are 17 focus markets, but 50 markets on the right-hand side. So not only is the step-up lower, we're also making more choices within that step-up. That means lower need for reinvestments. Now let me move to the other parts of the P&L that we usually must be disclosing in order for you to build the whole P&L flow through. The other items, as we usually call them, are either stable or slightly improving. We believe that there is about a 3.5% average interest cost, we did a good placement only a couple of weeks ago, of effective interest rate, in line with the current guidance. The tax rate outlook is between 27% and 28%, also not a lot of change in line with current guidance. And other net finance expenses, particularly because we believe that the currency devaluations that we've seen in Africa are starting to moderate and we see signs of more economic strength in Nigeria and Ethiopia, for instance, are going to be slightly better than the current guidance at 200, 250 million. So all in all... This should give us this equation. We believe that organic growth in the earnings per share should be greater than or equal to the organic growth in operating profit, which will outpace the net revenue organic growth. And the reasons to believe Moderating input cost for which we will price. Pricing and portfolio to be ahead of that input cost below CPI to make that affordability point market by market right. We step up productivity and we are reducing and are being more disciplined in the level of reinvestments that we're making. Those are some of the proof points why we believe that the left-hand side is going to happen. Now then on to capital efficiency, where we really want to build the focus and the structure to improve cash, cash conversion, and return on invested capital. A bit the same narrative, to just look over time what has happened and what is our story. The net profit in the early stages really came up, this is reported net profit, so in the past couple of years this came down significantly, but that was also because of significant impact of non-cost impairments, like for example our CRB venture, which we're still very happy with as a business. going forward we believe that net profit organic growth will be greater or equal than the operating profit organic growth in all of the working capital dimensions we think we have a step up to make and also in the past we've already started to you know make the first initial steps but inventory is is has not been uh in the previous period where it needs to be and the capex to depreciation ratio will normalize over time So these are some of the cash flow drivers that we see. To put it differently, slightly differently visually, we believe that the main working capital will be firmly below 0% over time towards 2030. This is reported. I showed you different numbers on Heineken Beverages and UBL. So this is total group. The capital rate, the capital expenditure, we will optimize between 7% and 8%. And those are the ingredients, together with the operating profit growth, to bring the cash conversion above 90% and on an ongoing basis going forward. Our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged. First, we invest in growth, in organic growth and business expansion. Second, we have a strict financial discipline that works well for us and will be maintained. The famous net debt to EBITDA ratio will be below two and a half times. We value a consistent dividend policy, really do not want to change that. And we are seeking and are always open to explore inorganic expansion as long as they are value enhancing in the medium to long term. Vivco is a really great example of that. And then, of course, we have this year started to unlock other opportunities by bringing further capital returns to shareholders, like, for example, the share buyback. Let me just illustrate one or two slides what we mean with that. First, our net debt to EBITDA ratio. We really believe that this is important to be investable as a company, that we say what we do and we do what we say. And therefore, this 2.5 times ratio is precious to us. You also see that whatever acquisition that we've made, whether it's APB or Punch or Kirin or the CAB acquisition or, okay, let's skip the COVID, UBL, Distel, very quickly we're bringing our net debt to EBITDA ratio back to the two and a half level. We also know that FIFCO is edging this up, but we're quite confident that we can bring that back under two and a half times in a pretty quick time period. We also have a well-distributed bond maturity profile, as you can see on the right-hand slide. So the risk of interest rate shocks is quite well spread and very manageable within the balance sheet. Then on to return on invested capital. We are not happy with where we are. And this graph is a good illustration why we are listening to a lot of input that we got from stakeholders, but also from investors over the last couple of years. Heineken was a growthy company, but the cost of growth was also quite heavy. And you see that here in two different graphs. The stacked bar is the return on invested capital, excluding intangible assets and goodwill. And on the green line and then later on in the grey line, you see that this is including intangible assets or goodwill. And that is the grey line excluding Heineken beverages and UBL. It just gives you an indication about what has happened in the past couple of years. And although if you exclude UBL and India, but I don't want to say that too often anymore in the rest of my presentation, We actually edged up to about 11%, but we also know that this is not good in an environment where the cost of capital is also going up, where interest rate has gone up and risk actually generates a higher demand for return. So this is something that we're very, very conscious about, and we are now starting to build it into this incentive structure of our senior managers. There is a difference. Dolf and myself primarily are responsible for the line. This is the acquisitions that we ultimately decide upon. We get a lot of input, but the ultimate decision sits with us. So we are responsible for the return on invested capital, including Goodwill. But operationally, we also want to incentivize our senior managers to really start to think about cash, the cost of cash, the capital returns, the working capital, the capital expenditure that they have, operating profits for that matter, in order to drive the operational return on invested capital. So I just wanted to emphasize this point. It's a very new dimension that we're bringing in, but we believe in the current context a very relevant one too. Then A few more slides to go. The cash returns to shareholders. We have had a consistent dividend payout policy in the last 20 years. Between 30 to 35 and only in 2014, we upped it from 30 to 40. And you see that line edging up over time. We also have generated quite a significant number of cash returns to shareholders, with only in the two recent years and a one-off dividend, a one-off share buyback. But here, the FEMSA exit, which of course was a one-time event in which we participated to remove the overhang of stock, But secondly, at the start of this year, when we announced our share buyback program. So we're very conscious in that we want to do good and be consistent in driving shareholder returns and making cash returns to the shareholder base. So this is what the third dimension looks like, the capital efficiency dimension. 90% cash conversion rate, improving return on invested capital with the reasons to believe. We've detailed that before and now again on the right-hand side of the slide. Let me be brief about the sustainability and responsibility. We will continue the journey on sustainability and responsibility, but we need to balance somewhat. Let me start first with saying we've made fantastic, I think really strong progress against our sustainability goals. we have compared to the 2022 baseline a 34% reduction of our direct carbon emissions. We have still a goal of net zero towards 2030 in our own scope one and two. On water, we've made significant progress and are at 3.1 hectolitre per hectolitre, well on our way to the goal of 2.6 by 2030. We know what it takes on water. We also have a series of projects on carbon. But on carbon, things are a bit more complicated. We want to get to a much more focused and cost-effective delivery of our carbon and water goals, but let me zoom in on carbon here. Maybe best to start at the right-hand side of this slide to explain the methodology that we used. Over the past years, our sustainability teams, our market teams, have done lots of ideation about how to decarbonize the footprint. And I'm talking here about scope one and two, not scope three, which is really much more in terms of partnership with our external suppliers. We have a list of literally hundreds of projects, step by step, on how to decarbonize every brewery, every transport, in every market, and we have found a way to calculate not only the CO2 offset, but also the cost of doing so. It's called the marginal abatement curve. It's the project cost. but also taking into account the carbon certificates or the carbon tax coming into the equation, and then we could rank the projects on economic feasibility and technical feasibility. Solar panels are very simple. They're also very affordable. In some of the markets, like Ethiopia, where we now have massive hydro capacity, it's easy to see how we can decarbonize our brewery footprint in Ethiopia. So all what you see here is just a snapshot of hundreds of projects that have been ranked. At the same time, the easy ones are net positive. There is a good business case, it's proven technology, so let's go. These are now all in execution, planned or already active. Then there is a middle part, which is this is our acceptable cost range. We know that times two, times three for energy, maybe that is still not nice, but an affordable cost to operate. And we need to also look at that market by market, because not all markets are as receptive from a government perspective, for example. There may be some hurdles of what we can do and what we cannot do. But it's an important fine-tuning that we wanted to do to say, hey, is there proven technical feasibility? Can the operating company carry the cost? And is the environment, whether it's society or government, conducive to actually action this particular project? That we're also doing. Then there is a separate bucket where simply there is no technical solution or there is other things that we need to do first in that market for external or for internal reasons. And that's how we've been calculating our targeted markets, concentrated investment in key countries, a three-year execution roadmap with disciplined capital allocation fitting criteria so that there's no blank checks being written and we know that the technology works, and we've optimized cost and impact. But that's a calibration that we've done. So, to bring sustainability and responsibility to a close, We have real net zero progress and clear outcomes towards 2030. We're moving towards a 2.6 hectolitre per hectolitre water usage. And we have a higher talent pipeline of diverse footprint in our workforce, so that we are actually still continuing to the trajectory to get a more balance in our serial management population. A good representation of our consumer footprint. bringing it all together in the value creation slides. Two more. We are targeting attractive shareholder returns. And bringing all the quadrants of the diamond together, this is what you get. Mid single-digit revenue growth, operating profit ahead of that, EPS ahead of that. Cash conversion and return on invested capital brought in to our performance metrics and with a very clear set of targeted projects delivering sustainability and responsibility progress. There's also a group accountable to deliver that, and they're here on this beautiful picture. There is a great alignment between the incentive structure that will be updated for senior manager according to these particular metrics. Revenue, operating profit, EPS, return on invested capital, including free operating cash flow, I should add, and sustainability and responsibility progress is what we are going to be held accountable for. Now, what you've heard me summarize. From Evergreen 25 to Evergreen 2030, great progress, not on all metrics, static volume operating leverage still to come. Underneath, clear reasons why that has happened, but also much progress made in other areas. Heineken is positioned for structural growth, because we have a growing category, we believe in a structurally growing category, We have a diverse footprint with leading segments. We have got greater differentiation and focus, and we're investing behind that. We are clear drivers for profit to grow ahead of revenue. At the top of the P&L, a little bit more mixed, but input cost moderating for which we price, growth savings coming in, and a lower level of reinvestments needed as the time progresses. cash focus and additional value creation optionality with more cash and more focus on return on invested capital and a calibrated SNR agenda. Now, to return to the theme of my opening, we're in a film. We're in a legendary film of the world's pioneering beer company that has been growing and compounding returns since its listing in 1937 a 10 compound annual growth rate of net income we'd like to invite you on the journey namely to continue this into the future we have a strong belief that evergreen 2030 is a great compounder because we drink in generations thank you very much

Thank you, Harold. You can see my model from Heineken dates back to 1865. 1864 has been used. We're going to have a Q&A now. I've got about an hour for that. On that, let me just wait to get Dolf, Harold, and Bram up here. I'm actually going to grab my Heineken Zero as well. Start in the back this time and then work forward. Sorry, Trevor, you were the first time lost. Chris, we'll start with you, please.

From Rothschild & Co. Redburn. Can I ask a question about the return on invested capital? Because that's obviously very new. And for decades, shareholders have seen eroding return on invested capital as you've built the business, as you used the phrase, I think, generational growth. Just to confirm, the target for the LTIPS, that includes M&A. It's all in. There's no adjustments for that. And then when I think about the non-OPCO brewing assets, so licenses clearly very accretive to returns, but how does this shape your thinking around retail in the Americas or pubs in the UK or, importantly, wholesale in Europe, which used to come up a lot when we talked about margin and returns? Are there some sort of external factors that you can still pull to maybe improve that? return on invested capital number? Thank you.

Probably to me, right? Yes. Let me take that question. So we make a separation. So the communication that I currently have on return on an invested capital is for a senior management population. There is a technicality, and that is that the leadership, Dolf and myself, are not in control of our own LTIP scheme. That is the annual general meeting. So that is something that is currently under discussion from the remuneration committee. But you can see from the importance that we give it that this is a trajectory we expect that it will follow. You want to interject here?

Hypothetically, would you want to align yourself with shareholders by having M&A included in your ROIC target? Because cynically, I would say FIFCO was less dilutive because your return on invested capital is half the rate it was 10 years ago. And so...

So let me answer that question, but I'll give you my personal view, because as I say, I'm not in control of that. I think over time, yes, no demand, right? We are making decision, we should be held accountable for acquisitions as well. So that's an easy answer. The only thing that we are discussing, and in my point of view, legitimately, is that in the shorter term LTIP timeframe, if you want to do dilutive acquisitions that I've just shown, you still need to do them for the longer term good of this organization. But in the period, that is becoming problematic. We don't want to hold ourselves back to invest in the long term. So there's probably a bit of a... in the period exception for the M&A that has just happened. Just that's my view.

And on the other assets, like wholesale, retail, pubs?

Yeah. So I think Dolph already spoke to it earlier today, but we are... really looking at the individual return on invested capital. For example, in Mexico, this has been a fantastic ROIC driver for us as well, the conversion to six stores, because the operating margin is so much bigger and it's a relative asset-light model. In the pubs, we have very clear set of criteria that we're not only looking at the P&L benefit, but actually also look at the return on invested capital. So part of what we're talking about, we really already start to institutionalize in our organization, including asset-light models, of which CRB is a fantastic example.

Given that this, I know it's on many people's minds, so fully echoing what Harold is saying. One of the things that we introduced two, three years ago was economic profit to start building awareness with management teams about the cost of capital. Because pre-COVID, I think a five-year bond that we did in 2019 was like 1.5%. So in a way, capital was seen as free. And I've anecdotally been sharing with some of you during the breaks that if you ran out of capacity, you introduced a fund application and basically it got signed up. A lot of fund applications stay below hurdles on RPM, on returnable packaging materials, on coolers, etc. There was never a ricker of really kicking the tires on it. That we are really in course of dramatically changing. On wholesale, wholesale is actually, it's low operating margin, but it's actually also low capital, because typically we don't own the warehouses and or the trucks. With the pubs, it's the other way around. It's quite capital intensive, but it comes with very high operating margins. The retail in Mexico, we don't own the real estate, but there's some CapEx involved. We have driven a fast-growing awareness in the organization about, you know, the need for margin, but in relation to the cost of capital to make the model work. So it is nuanced. It's not just, okay, it's this or the other. And basically by... you know, bringing return on invested capital into the language, the metrics, the incentive structure of our senior management, we really want to further double-click as we don't see interest rates come down to prehistoric level. And by the way, we felt that whole notion of capital is free, even at 1.5%, it was wrong. This is clearly a big belief system shift that we are already making for the last couple of years and that we really want to see through now.

Thank you. Celine, please.

Thank you. Celine Panutti, JP Morgan. So my first question, if I try to sum up a bit what we've heard today, clearly trying to harness the power of scale with focus on key brands, focus on key markets, global shared services. At the same time, I think Heineken is more of a culture of local management. So Could you explain, you know, how you marry that and how you enforce that locally, you know, people that probably thought that they were managing their own business have now to fall in line with what you are trying to impose upon them. So if you could talk about that. My second question for Harold on... value creation so you started or you finished with a fantastic 10% EPS growth I don't know how many decades that was but you did a lot of thank you for all the details that you provided in terms of top line growth further cost savings coming through the bottom line even an FX projection for the next three years, five years. But what is your level of confidence that you can grow EPS in hard currency? And maybe another layer to that, if I think about the cash conversion target, what prevents you to have a target that's absolute free cash flow? at a time where Heineken, in terms of a free cash-free yield basis, is a bit weaker than some of its peers, since you mentioned a lot of opportunity in terms of working capital and lower capex. Thank you.

Yeah, I'll take the first question. I think it's a very important question. And I've been always working in opcos at Heineken. And we truly believe it starts at the opco. It starts being close to a consumer, it starts being close to a customer. That's where the idea generation happens. That's where the proactivity happens. That's what we want to keep, always want to keep. However, there are things that we can scale much faster across. And we can do that now much faster because we have common frameworks, common languages, and we look at common needs of consumers. And I think one of the best examples that it really works well is the Heineken brand. If you look at Heineken silver in Vietnam, it didn't start in head office. It started in Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh, where our local people said, look, it's too bitter, Heineken, to ride on the big sessional trend that's happening there. So it's really getting the best of both worlds. And that means that we always start with local consumers. But now, because we have the archetypes and because we have much more common languages, we much better understand common needs. But it also means that if you're in a value market, you don't need that many brands. You need about two to three brands that you really focus on. While if you're in a developed market, you need much more brands. But still choosing which brands you are focusing on, you do commonly with the Opco and the region. So it's really getting the balance of best of both worlds and really making sure that everybody in the Opco still feels ownership of the business and wants to win every day in the market.

Let me take question number two and three. The first is maybe just the framing that we tried to get right today. We really didn't want to get pinned down on precise numbers that, frankly, need to be put in a context of a very turbulent world, as we've seen in the last couple of days, and I think you also saw in many of the slides today. So the message that we wanted to convey is the way that we think about it. And that is much better done through thinking about, okay, we want to get operating leverage over time. Earnings per share, we didn't really talk about it so much. We talked previously about operating profit organic growth, which doesn't address currency and it doesn't address earnings per share. So the signal that we wanted to give is how we think about medium-term guidance without being precise on each and every year, this is the number that we're going to shoot for. Because ultimately, we're here to do it right year after year. So that was more the logic behind it. Does it mean that, as you saw from the presentation, that we're now starting to factor in normalized foreign exchange? Yes, as I said, we factor it in into our strategic plans, in our incentive structure, in the way that Thibault and Maria were talking about it. But we don't want to be pinned down on one number and then say, come whatever may, if you don't hit this number, it's a failure. It needs to be put in the relevant context. That's how we think about it. The second point on free operating cash flow is a very relevant one. And I should have pointed it out on the green diamond slide. We do have, maybe good, how we think about the difference between long-term incentive and short-term incentives. We still believe that in the short-term outlook for a year to come, we should probably give you an operating profit by a guidance range. And we will have for our team a free operating cash flow, numeric target, to drive cash flow for what we need at that moment in time. So the cash conversion is just more about how we consistently think about improvement, but the metrics on a shorter time frame will be much more precise.

Thanks. Mr. Le Boy, in the back. Sorry.

Thank you. Thank you. Carlos Laboy, HSBC. What is the low-hanging fruit that you see from digital investments over the next, I don't know, three to five years for revenue growth and ROIC expansion that you need to sensitize your operators on? And should we be thinking more about revenue growth and ROIC expansion than we really do about margin expansion in that framework you have in mind?

Do you want on revenue?

Yeah, so I think what you see, what we have done with the different AI cases, you see in sales, it's about driving sell-in and sell-out and being much more targeted there, which we're now scaling. And if you look on the marketing side, it is really about the effectiveness increase and efficiency. But effectiveness is really making sure you target the right person with the right message at the right moment. So if I know that you like Padel and I'm targeting you because I have the data with that, your effectiveness goes much, much, much more up. So that's what we really believe if you see on the sales agenda and on the marketing agenda that Freddie AI will help us accelerate that.

On the ROIC, do you want to answer that? Sorry, Carlos, can you repeat that question on the ROIC? Yes, sir.

Is RIC accretion more important than operating profit accretion? That's what you're asking, Carlos.

Okay. Yes. That's it. No, we believe that these things need to be put into balance. Operating profit margin increase is important for us Because it says something about the shape of the P&L, right? We need to do it the right way as well, a bit linked to your earlier question about how do we build a more accretive portfolio with more investment space and more effective in our support cost. And if the right drivers are there, then operating margin is a really important part of it. Because ultimately, operating margin is also an important element of the return on invested capital, as you know. So it's not only about taking the capital out, it's also about the productive use in the right quality of how that capital is deployed. So we really see them in balance.

Stay in the back, maybe Mitch, all the way at the end, hiding.

Thank you. It's Mitch Collett from Deutsche. Two questions for Harold, please. So Harold, I think you had a slide showing pricing below CPI. I remember at the last investor seminar in 2022, you showed it was 0.5 times CPI, then 0.7. I think towards the end of that, it was actually one. So I'm interested in why you want to move that back below CPI. I appreciate there's a need to drive affordability, but I'm also interested in how that kind of links in you using AI initiatives for revenue growth management. And then my second question, which is thankfully shorter, is I know you say you don't want to be too precise on the metrics in the medium-term aspiration, but clearly in the EPS component you had equal to or above organic EBIT growth. I guess given that you said tax stable, interest stable, why is equal to a possibility? Shouldn't it always be above organic EBIT growth?

Thank you. That last one is quite a technical question indeed. So I'm not sure I'm going to do full justice to answering that. But on the first point is indeed, I still remember the chart, but more for the audience. In the capital markets event in 2022, we made a very specific point. and I tried to come back to that in my graph earlier, that we structurally draw volume through making beer very affordable, and as a consequence of that, we were not pricing for basically input cost inflation. The consequent effect of that was that our margins were eroding because we were going to a more diverse footprint and we were not getting the pricing to offset that. That was something that we really set out under Evergreen 2025 to stop and improve, to make that much more intentional. So you're right, we came from a quite low point, and we believe that also based on the data that we see today, that for the next couple of years where we have had that pricing this balance that we now need to bring it back to that about 80%. Now, clearly, this is a market-by-market sophisticated calculation. I'm just giving you the aggregate picture. But this is something that we really want to be intentional about, and that is that we believe that the right brand value equation is a mix of price points, RMG, but also investment to make our brand stronger and deliver the pricing power. So on your second question, look, it was just an indication, frankly. It wasn't too mathematical, to be honest. It was more to say earnings per share will be greater than in line of. To just say, look, we have the share buybacks potentially coming in if we have excess cash. And we have a good operating to net profit conversion because the indicators that I've seen. I didn't make it more mathematical than that.

One quick follow-up, if I can. On the price mix side, does that include the benefit of mix? Would it be below CPI including mix or without mix?

No, not mix.

Okay, thank you.

So maybe Lawrence on the left here. Thanks so much. It's Lawrence White here at Barclays. There are plenty of slides including population forecasts and what's happened historically. And you talk a lot about legal drinking age population increasing in a number of your emerging markets. There are a number of slides of populations increasing all over the world. But there's the different issue in Europe where you typically got declining populations, particularly alcoholics. of people that consume alcohol. So if you look at, say, the 20- to 60-year-olds within Europe, they're typically declining in a number of markets. And you highlighted markets such as Spain and Italy where that's particularly acute. You've got declines of over a percent per year of that population of 20- to 60-year-olds. And I was just wondering, do you expect to get volume growth with this sort of backdrop? I appreciate there has been a shift towards beer from wine but that would only cover about a quarter of that population change. Do you expect, I think there was an earlier question on whether you expect volume growth in Europe to come. Do you, and how can you overcome that quite large headwind?

Yeah. So in that section I did on the category, I closed it with that 1% volume for the world, but differentiated by region, if you recall. And you would have seen that in what we call the Mediterranean, we do expect volume growth, low on mainstream, a bit higher on premium. In what we call other Europe, which includes a market like Germany, which has been quite dilutive, about a fifth of the European market, we are very small there, but still, from a category basis, it's there. We do expect a modest market decline at mainstream, but with premiums still growing. So we're quite transparent, indeed, that you can't paint with a brush too broad. What is now up to us is to not just suffer the category, but shape the category. whether it is coming with all sorts of new propositions like Heineken Ultimate, finding new locations where beer traditionally could not play, giving alternatives at moments where people are not choosing our brands now or going forward. What we're also seeing is, and again, on the Gen Z, the jury is out whether the trend that we're seeing is a temporary effect because of COVID and it will normalize or not. What we're also seeing is people are living longer and longer healthy so we were doing all our briefings on 25 34 consumer you know even when i was in marketing a long time ago you know that was the target group we really need to rethink it that 50 to 60 to 65 a year consumers actually becoming a very meaningful very with a lot of by the way disposable income So again, yes, there are challenges that are different from your emerging market footprint, but it doesn't mean that we just need to sit on our hands and see wherever it's going to land. We do feel on premiumization, on moderation, low and no elk, starting to target different age groups, there's still a lot of opportunity for us to pursue.

Thank you. If I could have one other, just completely separately to Bram, in terms of the Freddie AI system designing your marketing presentations. There's been more and more written about people being able to recognize when a copy is written by AI, whether that's online or in books or social media. Why are you confident that a marketing piece written by an AI system will be as effective as one that has been traditionally produced? And do you have any evidence that can support that?

So let's be clear. We are not saying that all our creativity will be taken over by AI. We truly believe in the power of people. People have imagination, serendipity, synchronicity. So it starts with the creativity still working with our agency partners based on consumer insights coming with these big ideas. And the big video I showed you on the Heineken brand, these big TV assets will still be shot traditionally for us for the coming short-term future. That will not be AI. So that's not where you use it. You use it after that. So when you make all your digital assets... When you make BTL in the shop floor, historically what we did, we had another agency, another shoot, and that was the BTL shoot, all costing an awful lot of time. Then you need translators to make sure your copy line got translated in the right language, in the right place, times I don't know how many assets. And historically, you didn't need a lot of assets. It was one big TV that I'm talking about 20 years ago. Now with addressable media, digital, but also retail media, you need much more asset development. And that part of the asset development, that will be taken care of AI, and it will also free up an awful lot of time. The interactions between us and partners that we work with take an awful lot of time. Through Freddie AI, that will really accelerate.

Good answer. So back up front here. Trevor, please.

Trevor Sterling Bernstein. Two, please. One for Harold, one for Adolf. Sorry, Brian. Harold, you've guided some medium-term organic revenue growth, but you're also saying you're expecting a 2% to 3% drag from FX. So should we interpret that as 2% to 3% euro growth going forward? Yes. Yep. Okay. And then, Dolf, you've set a very ambitious agenda today. What do you think are the hardest bits that are going to be achieved? And where do you think you're going to be focusing your energy in the next five years?

It's doing these things simultaneously. an organization that historically was very either-or to learn to do end-to-end, to do growth as well as do productivity, to do operational performance and future-proofing by implementing the DBB. integrating new acquisitions and exiting some countries. So it's really about the orchestration. How do you make sure that the system doesn't get overloaded by change? And the differentiation and the focus agenda that we emphasize a lot today is an important element in that. So that at least operational teams are very clear on the one, two, three things that they really need to deliver and that you take some of that complexity away and bring it to our level in terms of orchestrating what happens in one sequence. We have actually put new kind of governance in there. Harald is chairing what we call the program board where all these big transformational programs that take you know, those digital projects, but also other change projects that take people, that take big budgets, that there is one kind of cockpit where that comes together, where we can see interdependencies, where we can see roadblocks to resolve them in order to keep it away from the organization being focused on operating. That is right now. the single most important thing on my mind. Because all the fundamental choices have been made in a way over the last couple of years in footprint, in segment, in brands, etc. We are crystal clear where we want to go. Now the pivot is really to operational intensity and get the organization in that kind of operational rhythm while we take some of that complexity away and keep the orchestration at our level.

Thank you. Robert?

Robert Ottenstein, Evercore ISI. You made a very compelling case that your free cash flow is going to improve significantly over the next five years. I'm wondering if you could just go into a little bit more detail in terms of how we should think about what that can mean. And I know you're going to give a preference to organic growth. You'll look at inorganic, but for instance, would you go back Below two times leverage, you know, how low would you go in terms of M&A? Is this more likely to be geographic white spaces or brands? Any sort of priorities along those lines? Anything else just to give us a sense of thinking about this over the next five years?

Thank you. I'll give you two points, but not much more than that, because some of this I find quite sensitive information. But I can answer your first question about the leverage. The net EBITDA to... The EBITDA to net debt ratio is below 2.5 times, but we also know and have recalculated and are updating this regularly that the sweet spot is between 2 and 2.2 times. And therefore, we will not go below 2 because that is not economically efficient. And in terms of our geographical footprint, I think what you've took out from today is that differentiation and focus and building that footprint in the more growthy markets, but really looking at the quality of the asset in terms of operating profit, cash flow leverage are some of the criteria that we will apply. And that is, for example, why we're so happy with our FIFCO transaction. Because it is a large, very meaningful, but per capita consumption is still very low. Hence the advancing beer market comment that Dolph made. I see that Dolph wants to add something on top.

Yeah, no, and it's complementing what you say. The answer is very simple. First, yes, cash conversion rate needs to go up from, in essence, slightly below 80 to above 90. So this is a step up, but it's not... We also should avoid that we make it sound much more dramatic than it is. That should be at least a 10-point improvement, which is a necessity because the cost of capital has gone up and we feel that we can run a tighter ship on the use of capital within the company. That's one part of the answer. The other one is our capital allocation principles are not changing. Harold had a slide where we're crystal clear in terms of how we think about it.

Yeah, thank you. So I'll do James, because he keeps staring at me.

Yeah, James Edwards-Jones from RBC. Can I come back to Chris's question around ROIC? And I understand it's work in progress, but if I understood your answer right, you're thinking about ignoring the impact of M&A in year one, which almost guarantees in year two you'll get ROIC going up as the synergies come through, but it won't actually address the real problem, which is that your ROIC has been depressed for many, many years because of that M&A.

So, again, and I'll be short on this answer. So, first, it is not at our discretion. This is the remuneration committee that decides it for us. And we're just signaling that for the senior management, ROIC will be there. So, I made that point before. I stand by that point. But it's not our intention to do what you just summarized. Let me be very clear about that. The only caveat that we want to make sure that we don't fall into the trap to... And that is that we don't do good acquisition because it hurts our pay in year one and year two. That would also be not right for you as shareholders. So that's the balance that we're trying to find. And I'm sure that wiser people in the REMCO can come up with a formula to do exactly that. But that's the message.

A different way of saying the same thing. practically you set these targets every time rolling three years so every year you set three years rolling targets now you set those targets not knowing what kind of acquisitions will happen in that period so they're not taken into account if you then a year to do a big acquisition that's dilutive That has not been taken into account at the moment of target setting, and that's what Harold is saying. That is then a thing that you would ask the remuneration committee or derogational. Over time, it needs to work. But again, I propose let's hold it, because after the AGM of next year, we can answer this question definitely, because then this will have been decided, including yourself, because you will have a vote and a say on this in the AGM.

So maybe Ed up front? Second row.

Thanks for taking the question. I think one of the conclusions from today is if volumes come back, everything sort of works, right? You know, the volumes happen, the revenues do what they're supposed to do, the profits do what they're supposed to do, and the whole model essentially works. I think it's quite encouraging that you should be able to take price below CPI going forwards, and that's, you know, as it was in the past relative to the last couple of years. The question is really that you showed a really good slide that the price per serve, I think, was 1.6 times that of inflation. And therefore, the relative price or the cumulative price of beer is still quite expensive in consumers' eyes. I'd love to get your views, Dolph, as you go around the world. Which parts of the world do you feel that the consumers are sort of accepting of that and got used to that price and therefore can grow off that higher level? and which parts of the world people are still complaining about those high prices relative to what they're used to. Where is there still sticker shock and where do you feel like they've absorbed that?

So, again, it's maybe going back to the archetypes. Starting with the developed archetypes. U.S. and Europe is very different because the U.S. basically has been taking pricing at full inflation or a bit below, a bit above for 10, 15, 20 years because the market leaders, you know, have driven the market in that way, which was very different from Europe, which was pricing a little bit below inflation. So already within that archetype, there's two stories. I think the affordability issue in the US has been a long time in the making because it was a long time of taking these pricing at or slightly above inflation. Europe was the other way around. The problem is created in a very short timeframe, but by very extreme pricing driven by those that input cost hyperinflation. Last year, we already moderated our pricing. We're doing this year again. The price is one element. The other part is the value component to make sure that we restore our relative affordability. In the advancing markets, I think it's more moderate because, first of all, we didn't have that historical overpricing like you would have in the US. You didn't have the extreme input cost inflation like we had in Europe. And then in your value markets, some of those markets like for example Nigeria, they're a bit suffering because of the devaluation and how that has been rocking the market and therefore we see a bit of suppressed volumes right now in Nigeria. But in Ethiopia, we were pleasantly surprised how quickly the consumer kind of responded again, and we have high single-digit growth. So again, you need to disaggregate that question into the archetypes and key markets. And I think we are quite clear by archetype and by operating model where we are and what kind of actions are needed.

Yeah. Okay. So Richard up front here.

And maybe Jen after that. Okay. Richard Wittragen, Kepler Chavert. Can you talk a bit about the changes, the strategic changes you're making to the route to market in Europe? And how does that contribute to ROIC improvement? And maybe talk a bit about the relationship with your customers in Europe.

Yeah, so your route to market, so the bulk of the market is modern trade. Yeah. There's no big route to market changes there, but it's all about managing your relationship. And I think I emphasized this at the half-year results. Yes, we had this round of conflict, but actually, if you look to the last 10 years, we have had very constructive partnership with our retail partners. And we're investing a lot in the strategic nature of those relationships. Bram, you shared the advantage score, or somebody else in one of the videos, or actually Mr. CFO shared it, imagine. That actually in Europe, in a couple of markets, we are the number one FMCG partner in the eyes of our customers. In a critical market like, for example, the UK. So, yes, we had a couple of conflicts. We were very principled about it. We could have compromised, but you would have paid the price for years to come. We saw them through. But ultimately, it is about investing in those customer relationships. And we actually start seeing some of our customers... changing tactics, the big retailer that we had to conflict with in the Netherlands, Jumbo, actually a couple of weeks or one or two months after we kind of came to agreement, they announced that they're exiting that European buying group that was creating a lot of this turbulence that we... So they are basically stepping out of it because I have to mention that they concluded that the disruption to their business was greater than whatever value it was bringing. On the on-trade, we have done two, three things. We have right-sized because the on-trade is smaller. I think the organization moved quite quickly in that regard. If you look, for example, at the purpose state in the UK, it's more profitable today in absolute terms than it was in 2019, even though the segment has declined. And we're investing a lot in easel, which is digitizing a lot of the relationship in terms of order taking, servicing of our customers. There's this eternal question about wholesale. Again, it's low margin, which indeed is a thing, but it's very low capital. So in that sense, it's more nuanced than I feel sometimes historically people have been speaking about it. We still judge it quite important in terms of the grip that we have on that fragmented channel, the on-trade, which is actually where disproportionate profitability sits in European markets. Unlike the US, you make much higher margins in the on-trade in Europe than in the off-trade, where in the US that is much more equal. So I would say at this point there's more evolution than revolution.

Thank you. Okay, maybe Jen. Thank you. Again, Gross, BNP Paribas. My first question is just on your digital backbone initiative. I think, Dolph, you mentioned again the ERP system that you have had historically and to some extent still have is very fragmented, but you're now kind of at the point where it feels like you're going to do mass deployment. So my question is, do you think it'd be fair to say, just from that digital environment perspective and that fragmented ERP system, that Heineken's been at a kind of competitive disadvantage versus peers? And now that you mentioned that because of that, in some ways, you can almost skip one or two generations forward. Is there a point at which you see that actually flipping to becoming a competitive advantage and when do you think that might happen for Heineken?

Yes to all the elements that you make. It has been a competitive disadvantage. That's how we feel about it. Yes, we believe we can, in a way, we skip one generation of change because we go immediately to the modular cloud-based version and we skip the phase of one static wall-to-wall harmonized ERP system for the world. Speaking to the competitive disadvantage, if you look to the way a lot of our upgrades are structured as they are having their own local administrations, their local transactional finance, you hardly get any productivity out of it. You get maybe 1% productivity per FTE on a yearly basis. Right now, in our Heineken Business Center in Krakow, we get 5% to 8%. So the minute you transfer it there, you go from 1% to 5% to 8%. And as Harold shared, in a world enhanced by AI, we expect it to go to 8% to 10% productivity. That's huge. And a lot of that has been blocked because it was not just that we didn't have the ERP. Again, that is the service. And the need was we didn't have to harmonize process and data. And that is what we are really putting in place. And that will allow access to that accelerated productivity gain year over year.

And Jen, if I just may add two points. The modular setup means that it is fit for purpose and fit for pocket. important, because there's so much technological development, but modular means that if there is a better alternative, it integrates into the design quite quickly. So it's not a static infrastructure that we're building. Very important addition. And the second one, I also say, because everybody says, look, let's go fast, let's go big. Yes, but we are really wanting to balance risk and responsibility together with the opportunity.

Thank you. My second question is completely unrelated to that one, but you made some interesting observations in the morning, Dolph, about consumer survey responses in terms of claimed alcohol penetration versus what you're seeing in some of the different data sets, I think Nielsen data. I just wondered if that's maybe symptomatic of, in some ways, you know, drinking no alcohol, beer, used to be kind of something you tried to hide when you go to the bar. Now it's becoming much more acceptable. Maybe it's even becoming cool and fashionable. So in that context, how you think about whether it would be sensible to have a kind of native... non-alcohol beer brand or whether you're happy to have all of these different brand extensions on your core beer brands?

It's a very good question that we're not going to answer.

So maybe Sanjit over there, the second row.

Thanks, Sanjit from UBS. One for Harold and one for Dolph. Harold, just on working capital, I think you... you highlighted opportunity to be below zero. I think some of your peers are negative double digit. I appreciate there's some geographic nuances, but what's the kind of limit for Heineken? Can you get to negative double digit or is negative mid high single digit more appropriate for your footprint? And then for Dolph, You know, coming back to Europe and the developed market outlook, you know, I appreciate all the kind of, you know, cyclical structural debate, the optimism around Mediterranean. But when you put all of that together, you know, when you look out to 2030, should Europe go back to being a flat volume business, growing volume business with, you know, price mix in line with inflation? Or how do you see the algo for Europe specifically as we come out of this kind of cyclical, you know, weak consumer sentiment? Thanks. Do you want to start?

Yeah, let me be quick on the first one, Sanjit. First, the footprint point that you make, I just want to emphasize that. It's super important because if we do peer-to-peer comparison, footprint really matters. For example, China is not included in our consolidated numbers, and that makes a big difference. So I just want to call that out. The second point, as I showed on the graph, is that Heineken Beverages and UBL India are operating different business models. Otherwise, we would be at minus four. What you will have seen is that there is a significant opportunity, but I'm not going to give you the double digit or not number, because it's at minus one report, minus four if you exclude those two markets. Excluding the China footprint, we believe that there's a sizable bridge sizable. Few percentage points that is already clearly defined benchmark potential that we can do. And the dotted lines that you saw were meant to indicate where we think the opportunity range in the next couple of years are.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a bit of a repeat of the question on Europe, but let me answer it in a slightly different way. First of all, There are sometimes stories like Europe has been in perpetual decline, which is not true. In the period 2015 to 2019, Europe was growing by around 1% volume cacker, about 2-3% value cacker. In what I showed in that slide, we're deliberate a bit cautious where we say we see that happen sooner in the Mediterranean countries and slower in the other markets, particularly a bit more north. That's what we kind of signaled on the markets. then we try to do better and we aim to do better and we plan to do better by accelerating in premium, by doing a better job at mainstream, by bringing scalable innovation to mainstream, by continuing to lead in low and no. And if there's one area where we have the biggest productivity opportunity still is in Europe too. So let's be very clear, our expectations to the leadership of Europe is not to sit on their hands and just stagnate. It is to grow both the top line and to grow the bottom line. And we are quite clear on the priorities and the actions that need to take place there.

Thank you. Simon. And then we'll go to the back.

Thanks. So my first question, I just want to make sure I understand fully. and my takeaway of the growth algorithm of your P&L, as you've sort of outlined today. I suppose my starting point is we've heard a lot about how and why you're going to get back to mid-single-digit organic revenue growth from here, and from that, with the cost savings coming through going forward, maybe dropping through at a greater rate than we've seen historically. Maybe if we say 5% top-line growth going forward is the average of the mid-single-digit, that is six organic EBIT growth. You think of a 3% currency headwind, Harold, as you said, so maybe you've reported... profit grows at three, and then by the time we get down to reported net profit growth and earnings, maybe we're getting three to four compounding EPS growth from here. Is that the right starting point? And then on top of that, if that is correct, I suppose the differentiating factors that accelerate your reported EPS would be share buybacks incrementally from here And would they also be a further kick-up in the contribution of CRB? Because CRB seems to be an area that clearly, to your presentation earlier, Dolph, is growing very rapidly and could be a very big driver incrementally of reported EPS. That's my first question, really.

I think it's a great summary with the numbers that you've put in are your numbers. Just to be clear. But that's how we think about it. Look, it's a bit of a repeat. What we're trying to avoid is really be pinned on arithmetical numbers. But the way that you were talking about the flow through and the currency impact, I was perhaps a little bit too quick to say to Trevor, yep, that's what I just said. Maybe, I don't know whether it's 3% or whether it's 2%, but you get the gist of what we're trying to do and that's where we really want to stay focused on. And we really don't want to be pinned, certainly not in medium-term guidance, on precise numbers that we need to hit year on year. Some years will be better. Some years, you know, we need to work harder to get there.

And sorry, just to be clear, that bottom line guidance, that includes the benefit, i.e. organic net profit growing in line or slightly better than organic EBIT. Does that include an assumption on CRB growth within that? Or is this really just your own full control P&L that you're thinking about?

So we said greater than, greater than. So I think both of your points are true.

And then just secondly, briefly, clearly, an increase in digitization of your business. What are you doing or what can you do to protect from cyber attack, you know, sort of given that increasing backdrop and negativity we've seen there?

Let's have a drink about that because that is an answer that I can bore you with for the next 30 minutes. I feel that we have got an excellent cyber defense center somewhere that is very vigilant. But we always need to be conscious and aware. We've seen what happens to peer group companies and other companies as well. So I say this also with some caution, but I have a high degree and we do understand and we are building by design in that system real, let's call it cyber defense walls so that there is not one thing and then it just spirals out of control. So that's the short answer of it.

Let me build on that because it's a very important point. Let's be clear. I don't think anybody can ever claim to be at zero risk because that doesn't exist. We have a fiduciary duty to do everything possible to minimize that risk. I think it's also important to say that in our audit committee with the supervisory board, this is a standing, repeating topic. So also our key stakeholders, our supervisory board, are really on this and are proactively informing themselves, what are you doing? What can you do more? Are you doing enough? We are benchmarking ourselves across 20, 25 metrics on all parts, components of cybersecurity, how we're doing against others, etc. So it's a continuous improvement process that takes a lot of managerial attention operationally at our level all the way to the supervisory board. But we need to be honest, the risk is not zero. Actually, two weeks ago, we did a whole crisis simulation with the global exec team. What if it happens? How to respond? We did a whole rehearsal on that. So, this is very important. We don't often speak about it, but it's absolutely key.

Javier?

Thank you. I wanted to ask about breweries and productivities. You mentioned hectolitres per FT. When I look at your biggest competitor in the United States, I look at their operations there, and the volume size of that operation is similar to the size of your whole European business. And they operate with a significant lower number of breweries over there. you seem to have a very dense network of breweries, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, and the average size of those breweries are very small. So my question is whether that could be fixed, or there's structural reasons why you can't fix that inefficient structure, and whether we can expect that to be a source of productivity gains and savings going forward.

Yeah. I tried to make that generic point when I was talking about agile supply chains and you heard Erwin speak about it and Magnus speak about it. The reality also is that once you have a brewery footprint, it has an advantage of being very close to customers and very agile. It's fresh product anyway. But it does have a disadvantage that smaller breweries are just simply costing more money in terms of cost and in terms of capital. So what Erwin was really trying to say in collaboration with markets we're really trying to find the optimal balance of that. There is one other element, and that is that agility, transport costs, for example, environmental costs are also different market by market. So in Europe, it's not the same as in the US. We need to be a little bit of a different solution. But you also heard Erwin say that the journey is not over.

But it is a trade-off because you can solve the problem by deploying billions in new capital building larger breweries, which you rather not. So it's not that simple to say we just want bigger breweries. That is the fundamental trade-off. Now, between the two extremes of just taking it as it is versus deploying billions in building bigger breweries, there's a lot that we think we can do and that we're doing right now. Actually, 1st of November, if I recall correctly, the Schiltenheim brewery in France is closing. That's a 1.5 million hectolitre brewery. That's one of the biggest industrial sites that actually is being closed in France, and we all know how hard that is to do that in a kind of responsible way. So we're taking very tough decisions there, but within the boundaries of avoiding having to deploy a lot of incremental capital into Europe, if that makes sense.

Are you okay to close here, Dolph? We've got five minutes left.

Okay.

So there are probably lots more questions this evening. Let's give... Okay, Andrea, you get the last question, so make it good.

Well, one is specific. The other one is slightly more general. So... You've talked a lot about, I mean, what you've said, there's many initiatives which should enhance growth going forward from the focus on key markets, focus on fewer brands, et cetera, the deployment of the IT platform. Can you talk a bit about, I mean, the phasing of the top line benefits that you get from these initiatives from here to 2030? Should we expect some of the benefits to start to kick in early sort of 2026? All else equal, I mean, understand the environment, but we should start to see an enhancement. And the second one is for Harold, a bit more specific. It's about the 1 billion investment on the digital backbone that you've been putting through. Can you tell us or remind us about how much has been spent, how much to go, and the split between CapEx and P&L? Thank you.

Let me be short on the first one. Again, we are deliberately being cautious on making short-term statements because, again, there's still quite some volatility in the global beer market. We don't have a specific view in terms of is it front-loaded or back-loaded. I would say a lot of those differentiation, focus, investment decisions we're making in growth need to happen kind of continuously. So, again, don't fill the spreadsheets by front-loading it or back-loading it. I would expect it to be relatively continuous.

Yeah, and on the second one, the graph that I tried to show with the dotted line about how our operating expenses, so therefore P&L impact in the D&T spend was going up. And the growth to net, what I called out, is far more than 400 million P&L impact. If you do the equalization of that, it's about 500, 600 million that has been a step up in terms of P&L impact in D&D. And the balance is there for capital expenditure, and that will also somehow continue still, but within that corridor. So it just gives you a dimension. I think the step up, both in resources as well as in build, the capital infrastructure, is the big step up has actually happened, and we're trying to normalize that now. So it gives you some indication, but again, as I said earlier as well, AI is evolving every day. So what you hear today is our best view of what we know today.

Very good. I think on that note we're going to end here. But I'm sure the questions and the dialogue will continue in the remainder of the day and in the evening. I'm going to keep it relatively short. I think it was eight hours and ten minutes ago. that I kicked off by saying that we are excited to share our plans how we're going to deliver superior balance growth at attractive shareholder returns while future-proofing Heineken. And I hope that you have seen in what we have shared that we are ready to do so. I fundamentally believe that strategy needs to both consistent and continuously optimized and sharpened. And I hope you felt the consistency with what we shared three, four years ago, as well as that you feel the sharpening. The sharpening of focus on three priorities of accelerating growth, step-up productivity, and future-proofing the organization. That you feel the edge within in terms of where we see new upside, the differentiation and the focus in our growth agenda. They're now really starting to go from opco by opco productivity to leverage scale above opcos. by having been planning, designing and talking about the DBB to now really mass deploying DBB. So I hope that has really kind of started to come to life as we present it today. We are proud to be a people-centric company with high energy levels and passion, and I hope you sense that with us too. I am proud to see, as I shared on that slide, high engagement, high support in the organization, high pride levels. At the same time, let's also be clear, there's deep change happening at Heineken, the last coming years, at this moment, and the next coming years. There are some fundamental belief structures that we have been changing. belief structures around can you grow and do productivity at the same time. I think we're showing that we can do productivity and not just as a one-off but as a continuous thing. We're really changing a very democratic bottom-up organization to differentiate and focus much more with much clearer rules and differentiated expectations and differentiated resource allocation. We are an organization that had a belief about planting flags to now also, still by exception, but deliberately start to take flags down and making tough decisions about exiting markets where there's simply no path to value creation. An organization that never wanted to bite the bullet on investing a billion plus on harmonizing the core of the organization to now really starting to do it at scale. we're still very much focused on investing in the social texture of the company, but we're also bringing edge. We're bringing operational edge. We're bringing performance edge to the company. We're adapting our expectations, our incentive structure to support and enable the strategy. And I hope you see how that is all kind of starting to come together. And in the end, always observe You know, the balance of aspiring to be the best of both worlds, the best of family control and a public company, the best of creativity and growth as well as discipline, productivity, the best of making these long-term bets and have the strategic patience of creating future profit pools, but also the rigor and intensity of short-term performance delivery. I deliberately spent about a third of my presentation this morning making the case for the category, which is absolutely key. And yes, we see short-term challenges, and we have been collectively suffering some of these short-term challenges, but I hope you also agree with us in the structural opportunity that the category still represents. And yes, you need to disaggregate and look at archetypes and markets, but we also believe that with our advantage footprint, and the differentiation of focus and investment and shift in operating model that we're bringing, that we're very well positioned to outperform that category in order to deliver that promise that we have been making today. And we're not satisfied where we are. We're very hungry to deliver against those ambitions as shared today. And let me end the way I ended this morning by again thanking you for your support, for your loyalty, for your interest, for holding our feet to the fire every time that we're in New York or Paris or London, wherever it may be. It helps us be better. I hope some of what you play back to us you see represented in what we shared today. For those on the webcast, I think we're going to leave it at that. Thanks for tuning in. Hopefully, it was not too painful to watch the screen for eight hours in a row. We try to keep it going and keep it moving. For all of you, the fun part starts. We are a beer company, and at the end of the day, And we have been talking about beer and we have been having all these beautiful slides about beer. We're now actually going to taste and experience our beer. So I think it's going to be a fun evening ahead of us. And for sure, let's continue the dialogue and all the questions. Thank you very much.