To basically drive delivery digital product with speed, with efficiency, and of course with capabilities. We are seeing already some great momentum now that we have basically our GCC set up in two locations in India. One in Gurgaon, which is a little bit south of Delhi, serving as our primary operation innovation hub. The other center is basically serving as our business continuity in Hyderabad, the middle part of India. We are seeing great momentum in terms of efficiency because now we are able to right size our IT delivery model. As we set up our GCC, we are able to take a more zero-based approach in terms of estimating and sizing our resources need, our capabilities need, and thereby allowing us to right size our delivery model. Of course, at the same time, be able to optimize and drive down significant cost increase on the vendor side. Because as phase one of our GCC, we are basically insourcing our IT service management, our IT operations of our, what we call AMS, application management services. This is our phase one of our GCC scope, and we are already able to avoid significant vendor cost increase starting this year. This is a real upside for us. Secondly, we are also seeing great momentum in capabilities built because now we have the right access to the right talent at the right location. Now we already have onboarded around 250 talent employees, cultural employees within our innovation hub and ready to hit the ground running to drive basically digital delivery and innovation across the board. At the same time, we are also allowing us more strategic flexibilities. With GCC, with our Global Capability Centre, we are actually providing ourselves a more blueprint for us to integrate faster, better, and more effectively in the future in case of new business units or new operations. Our GCC, our Global Capability Centre, is not just a cost decision, it was more for us a growth decision. Now with GCC, we are having the agility and the scalability for us to be able to accelerate our digital transformation, for us to continue to strengthen our digital foundations, and of course for us to create and establish even more relevant and smarter digital capabilities across the world. Again, think of GCC basically as our talent engine for growth, as how we are able to convert talent into competitive advantages. It's where efficiency meets innovations, is how we are enabling culture to continue to grow and continue to move faster, deliver more, and of course being able to innovate more agile with speed and at scale. Now, with our Global Capability Centre giving us the talent engine for growth, the next question is how do we basically connect the business end to end? Because one of the key components of being digital is being able to connect all of our core systems seamlessly for operations. That's where the real impact, the real value comes in. That's where our digital backbone comes in. Basically, our digital backbone is a modernized integration platform. We call it iPaaS, integration platform as a service. It's a service layer that we have now established with three core engine core components. The first one is basically powered by Microsoft Azure, which is handling all of our cloud native connectivity for the day-to-day operations to ensure security and resilience. The second engine is powered by SAP BTP, which is a modern integration layer that now we are embedded with our SAP implementation, handling all of the ERP SAP solutions in terms of connectivities. The third engine, which is a more powerful one that we need for more real time instant insight, it's powered by Solace, which is basically the event driven layer that we are allowing more real time connectivities for operations such as supply chain and manufacturing, where we are able to drive more real time analytics and visibilities into the operations. These three components basically create and that's what's making up our digital backbone. Again, digital backbone, think of it as our housewar's digital highway. It's how we are connecting all of our core systems, how we are connecting all of our core data flows in a coherent, secured, and governed environment. With digital backbone now starting to replace the legacy one of connectivity, we are seeing great momentum in terms of allowing us to drive even faster and more real time insight across the operations in terms of, for example, as I mentioned before, predictive maintenance, even more basically consumer insights from a marketing perspective. We are also testing and piloting a lot of the AI use cases thanks to digital backbone with higher quality data and more standardized unified data foundation and structure. Of course, digital backbone also allows us to enhance the resilience because now we have a secured and centralized layer that we are able to embed all of our connectivity into instead of, in the old times, having to do point-to-point connections. Also, very importantly, we are able to make the most out of our ERP investments. As you know, we are now running our SAP S/4 implementation in Western Europe. We are also driving our Smart Core Dynamics 365 implementation in Asia and CEE. Having an integrated layer is allowing us to maximize the connectivity and the interoperability between the core ERP backbone and thereby allowing us to fully utilize the capabilities that are coming with this ERP investment. At the end, we're able to drive even more coherent global process standardization, optimizations, and also more resilience in terms of agility and in terms of more capabilities being enabled across our ERP backbone. Last but not least, we are able to, of course, optimize our cost of ownership because now we will be starting to replace all of our one-off connectivity that we have built in the past by using this more reusable and centralized integration layer. Again, digital backbone is basically serving as a glue, a digital highway where we're able to ensure that we are keeping things connected, that we are keeping things fast moving and future ready. Having a digital backbone, a composable integration layer, is super important for us to connect all of our capabilities end to end, cross-functional. Next question is, what about the data? How are we unlocking the value of data? That's what we are right now building in terms of our unified data foundation. All of these are very important in order to drive more advanced analytics, in order to drive scalability of our AI solutions, so that we don't have to build data models market by market and operation by operation. That's what we are doing with OneLake Data Marketplace, which is basically a data marketplace that we are enabling to ensure that we're able to democratize data within Carlsberg Group. That means that we're able to enable trusted access for data and insights for all of our users, of course, based on their functions, based on their access, for them to be able to have access to the data that they need, the information that they need to do their job and to drive better performance across the operations. OneLake is basically how we are consolidating all of our Carlsberg data assets and data tools and data products into a more cohesive, consolidated depository. That's what's enabled us to drive more single version of the truth, thereby allowing more agility and end-to-end visibility into our overall operational performance. We are already starting to migrate some of our data assets from some of the existing capabilities. For example, one plan, we are right now continuing on the implementation of our connected planning platforms in five markets next year, and we are migrating some of these data assets that we are creating with these capabilities into OneLake Data Marketplace, thereby allowing us to drive smarter, faster, and more profitable decisions. Basically, we have actually a video that we have created to make it more tangible for all of you. Let's take a look. Imagine walking into a world-class library. Everything is organized, searchable, and trusted. You know exactly where to find what you need and how to use it. That's the vision behind Carlsberg Group's Data Marketplace. Powered by OneLake Data Marketplace, a central governed space where our people can easily discover and access the data they need. Just like a library catalog, every dataset is clearly labeled with purpose, ownership, and quality indicators, so users can trust their data. It empowers data users, from data analysts. To data engineers, to find the right data faster. No more digging through silos or duplicating effort. Because it's built on Microsoft Purview, governance, compliance, and security are built in, ensuring responsible data use across the board. The Data Marketplace is more than a platform, it's a strategic enabler. It helps us unlock insights, reduce risk, and drive smarter decisions. Your access to quality, assured, and trusted data is just a click away. We're building a culture where data is accessible, trusted, and valued. Welcome to Carlsberg's Data Marketplace. With OneLake, we are Data Marketplace because it's such a critical component of our transformation. We have a very clear roadmap to deliver that. We are starting to migrate a lot of data assets and the data component into OneLake, our data marketplace. The goal is to basically start to replace and deduplicate how and where we are hosting data and thereby optimize the cost of ownership. Also, in terms of data governance, in terms of Data Marketplace, this is how we are driving some of these analytics across and with digital backbone. With OneLake, we are actually able to create a more cohesive way for connecting our business end to end and thereby driving more integrated business planning at the end. Think of OneLake as how we are transforming data from a cost factor into a growth driver. It is how we're able to enable a more single version of the truth across and how we're able to enable smarter, faster, and more profitable decision making. What I just covered are the key components of our digital transformation. I've covered the overall vision of the digital transformation and I've also covered some of the key enablers, what we call digital accelerators, or why it is so important for us to continue to build on this digital core so that we have a very solid foundation for us to build on to continue to drive our growth journey and of course to continue to accelerate it through a sustainable digital transformation. I will hand it over to Anders, who will actually share more of how these digital accelerators are enabling and strengthening our commercial capabilities, especially around digital commerce, around sales execution, and value management. Thank you, Esther. Good morning all. It's great to see you. I will continue to build on some of the updates that Esther just shared with us for an additional 20 minutes. I think, Peter, afterwards we will have time for some Q&A. In the beginning of last year, we launched AccelerateSell. As part of the launch of AccelerateSell, we also defined three key core commercial capabilities. All are supported by the digital accelerators just presented by Esther. All are also defined to support the growth algorithm that you saw this morning and that you're going to see several times this afternoon, and also to support the overall target of growing 4%- 6% our top line year on year. The three core commercial capabilities that we're building and heavily investing in are: one, digital commerce, which I think this morning you saw in one of the slides that Eve presented is growing massively; the second one, very close to our heart in Carlsberg Group, is field sales execution, winning at the point of purchase, and then based on a concept that I think at least some of you have seen quite a few times before, FIT, that was launched actually now 11 years ago and is still running and performing very well; and the third one being value management, as some of you call revenue growth management, we call it value management powered by this new tool that we call VMX. That's the three core machines that we have when it comes down to commercial capabilities. I will spend a little bit of time going into each of the three of them over the next 10- 20 minutes, starting with digital commerce, which is key for us because we know that when we really digitize, we also grow. This has two angles to it. It has an E B2C angle to it and an E B2B angle to it, both growing. On the E B2B side, we had a growth in 2024 versus 2023 of roughly 20%, and it's continuing to grow double digit this year. On the E B2C part, we did have a growth in 2024 of 25%. This is from a relatively low base, but still growing massively. Just year to date, it is growing 40%. Starting with the E B2C part, for us, this is really about winning together with strong partners, which we do across regions, across countries. I'd like to highlight three that I would say are really core partners for us. We do take a lot of learnings in the partnerships that we have with these three, that's with Meituan in China, with Grab in Southeast Asia, and with Delivery Hero, which are having concepts of brands like Foodora and Foodpanda and also quite a few more. Together with these three, we co-develop promotions, the ideal assortment, playing with different SKUs to really optimize the proposition that they offer versus their customers. There is a lot of learnings in this simply because they have such an immense and granular database, which makes them understand consumer behavior in a very, very impressive way. We are going to continue to invest in these partnerships, not only with these three but also other ones across countries. I know also that Joao a little bit later today will refer to some of these partnerships, especially the one that we have with Meituan, but also the one that we have with Grab, giving you actually some practical examples on how we work together. Moving on to the other side of this overview, done with the EB2B part, which are these platforms where customers and our customers can buy products from us directly. This represents today roughly 10% of our revenue and growing again, as I mentioned, and rapidly. It's been based until now on a platform called Carlshop that we launched back in 2017, and it's now being replaced by a new, much more technically advanced platform that we call Served. Served is offering additional features versus the current one that we have. We invest heavily in this platform, an app-based platform which is fully seamless in service. It's offering new features in terms of how you as a customer can detect, customize your invoices, your promotions, specific offerings on innovations or new SKUs that would fit ideally your assortment as a customer. Just a short video to show you how this works and what it looks like. Introducing Served, your new digital ordering platform. Helping you serve your customers better. Discover smarter benefits designed for better service. An effortless experience available anytime, anywhere, on any device. Seamless self-service from reordering and planning ahead to managing invoices in seconds. Thoughtful personalization with offers, product picks, and rewards tailored to you. Your B2B growth partner, built to make your business easier to run. Served, serving your customers together. This is Served, our new B2B platform. It will gradually be replacing Call Shop that we've had since 2017. It's currently being rolled out as we speak in one of our stronghold countries and is going to be further rolled out in some of the other strongholds across regions in the months and in the years to come. The second pillar in this first overview that I showed is how to really continue to excel in sales execution. This is already, and it's going to continue to be, based on the FIT platform. FIT stands for focus, implement, and track. When it was launched back in 2014, 2015, it was a pretty kind of manual overview, but still we used it in a very systematic way and we still use FIT basically in all operations where we're present today. We've had a very, very consistent use of FIT and it's really powering the Carlsberg culture in terms of being so focused. And. Execution than in all parts of the business. With all strong concepts they need to be further developed and hence there's a need also then to digitize FIT. We do that based on three core priorities. They are, one, renewing these classic Salesforce automation tools, these legacy tools, we've had them for years. Now we're transforming them gradually more into gen AI based modules, which is making it much easier for the sales rep to have a stronger interaction with the central office, providing much more data online directly for them to better plan their operation, the daily exercises, etc., and how they have to manage that. I'll show you an example on how this is done with a tool that we quite recently launched in Vietnam back in March called Sales Coach. I'll get back to that in a sec. Second pillar here is linked to how we manage image recognition. Taking pictures in each and every store when you're a sales rep or in each and every outlet in a systematic way. We do collect this now in 92,000 stores around the world. It's getting to be a very, very efficient tool to monitor planogram compliance, pricing share or promo on shelf and on floor space, etc. That as well also represents a lot of data and all these data, also the ones that come from the Salesforce automation systems, have to be collected ideally into one database. That's the third point here, that we collect this now into a one metric portal where we then have the availability of all the data where you can basically go from global and zoom in from region to market and all the way down to a zip code point, basically into one specific outlet, and have the full overview of the FIT score and the picture of success for each and every outlet, all in one place fully automatic. I'll show an overview of this in a sec. First, just refer to this overview that we then recently launched in Vietnam called Sales Coach. This is a, call it a sales assistant if you want, it's an app based solution on your phone helping them, the reps, basically to have a full overview of which customers should I visit today, what's the share of volume that they represent or of value, how should I plan my day? Ideally in terms of how I prioritize the different customers, there's a chat function to it and also then guiding the guys that you then have in the field in terms of the ideal assortment, the right pricing for SKU and so on and so forth. Here as well, a quick video. With so much data and so many customers and actually also then with so many field sales reps that are visiting on average maybe 10 to 15 outlets per day, there's just a strong need to have the full overview of actually happening and assembling, collecting this data and have it then in one place. That's why we've recently then launched a one metric portal where you then have the ability to actually then really zoom in on each and every outlet. I'll show you an example on how this works. To have this as a tool, it can be a tool even for Jacob Aarup-Andersen who has then the ability to zoom into a specific store wherever in the world, but maybe even more useful than for a local field sales manager to really have the full overview of what's happening then in his or her region. When zooming in here then first basically you can have a full global overview, zooming in further down into a region. For Western Europe and further down moving into here as an example being Finland and further down into Helsinki where you can then see the overall FIT score also then for the region and then moving into one specific store, a City Market in Helsinki, and then even closer further down into the actual performance in this store. The FIT score per store, if there's any deviations, what are they? Also then supported obviously also then with the image recognition photos so that you can see as a sales leader, you know what's lacking here, are we for some reason out of stock. Are. We being outperformed by competition, is the pricing wrong or what needs to be done? Again, it's just all about then really, really tracking performance, supporting a strong performance culture. When we see that we're off track, rapidly taking action, adjusting it, and getting then on the right course to be able then to deliver. That was the three sales execution kind of new key levers that we're currently working on. This is not science fiction. This is all launched, it's in market. Same thing also then for the last topic that I wanted to bring up. This was the third of the three sales or the commercial capabilities that we then heavily invest in, being then value management. Value management is not new to Carlsberg Group. We've been working with value management for many, many years. We've taken a big step further now, investing heavily into new capabilities and a new tool that we call VMX. It's really transforming the way that we then do revenue growth management basically. There's two parts of this shown in this brain because there's a tech part of this. Based on a very advanced machine learning tool, being able to crunch multiple data sources very, very fast. There's also a human factor to this, and I think sometimes at least we tend to forget how important it is to have the right people to support these high technology tools. This is a little bit like, you know, if you buy a racing car, then you actually need to have the people to drive it as well, the right people to drive it as well. That's also why there's an operating model aspect to this, to attract the right talents to be working on this together with the commercial people and also organizing this in the right way in the different countries where we currently then also then operate with the VMX model currently operational now in five of our stronghold countries and also then being piloted in an additional sixth one. The plan is then to roll it out further as we move quite soon then into 2026. You could say that this is not rocket science. Haven't we done this for many, many years? To some extent, yes. When you are then into one single system, plug in point of sale data, also all consumer data that you might have, internal data obviously then P&L related for example, so all the financial data and also then promotional data that you get from customers into one single database, it starts to be pretty complex and it's very, very heavy to manage. We've done some of these exercises before, but then on a much more simplistic level. Now with these new machine learning gen AI tech tools, suddenly you're able to see this much, much faster than before. Typically, a simulation that before took maybe three weeks, now you can actually do it in three hours. You can do it even shorter if you want, but you save a lot of time, you get much quicker to decisions, and you can do much more simulations versus what we could do before. It's very useful doing simulations on pricing and very useful also on simulations for promotions. Just a couple of examples of that. One here using VMX to optimize price. It's a bit simplified for obvious reasons, but it's actually an example from real life with one specific brand where on the left side, typically with two different pack sizes. If we simulate that we're actually going to take down price a little bit for tactical reasons, choosing among two different SKUs, typically from a standard point of addressing this, you would just look at the gross elasticities. You would then choose the SKU that has the highest elasticity, and that one would deliver the highest volume. By using the VMX tool, which is based also on three years of data, you can suddenly see that maybe it's wiser to go for pack number two because this one versus the other one is actually sourcing a major part of the volume from competition. Helping a lot on pricing decisions, either prices are taken down, which doesn't happen that often, but the same mechanic also when you obviously price up. A second example to do promotions connect, so VMX linked into promotions. An example again is the same brand in the same category, a choice of which SKU you would promotize. You could typically, as we've done for many, many years, go for number three, but without the insight that this is mainly being cannibalized. If you promotize this SKU, hunting volume from other Carlsberg SKUs, either within the same brand or from other Carlsberg brands. This overview shows that pack number two is sourcing them to a much larger extent from competition, and also actually with quite a lot of pantry loading, which can make sense sometimes. If you are then to run a promotion just before a big holiday, for example, and the first one, there are 35% sourcing them from competition and on top of that 11% is actually growing the category. Hence, you have a brilliant story also then to tell to your customers. Here the choice for sure is pack number one. These are just examples of insights that you get now with the granularity that we never had before, and you get it much, much faster. Really a very strong tool that we are then rolling out in more and more countries, so far up and running in five of our strongholds. Key takeaways then from Esther's and my presentation, I think point number one here, and you saw it on the overviews that Esther shared, that we are really modernizing and almost kind of rebuilding our digital backbone, giving them a lot of opportunities, for example, for building commercial capabilities in a completely different way versus before. It's very focused on scaling AI and also machine learning and advanced analytics, which helps a lot in how we work, for example, with heavy tools like the VMX tool, then on VM, then again when we digitize, we grow and with high double-digit numbers, growth both on EB2B and EB2C. This really helps us to step change our performance when it comes down to digital growth. Last but not least, really powering value through transforming how we work with value management through the VMX tool. For everything that I say, but also same thing for Esther, we should never forget the human factor in all this because it's not only about technology, it's really also about having the right people to attract them, to retain them, and to organize accordingly also so that we get the synergies with two plus two being five and really excel on the commercial capabilities as well. I think that's it from my side. Thank you. Thank you, Anders and Esther. We have a Q&A section now. We want to start. Let's start from the right-hand side here. Nothing. Mitch had something down there. Yep. Thank you, Peter. It's Mitch Collett from Deutsche Bank here. Thank you for the presentation, Esther and Anders. On Sales Coach, you talked a lot about the benefits. Is there a way of, sort of, Quantifying what that means? Does it ultimately allow you to achieve the same level of service with fewer people, or is it targeting just a better level of service? On VMX, and I think it's a question for Anders, but happy to hear Esther's view as well. How do you get the data for traditional trade? How do you know what is pantry loading? That's notoriously difficult to track. Ultimately, when you've done all of that, what does it tell you about the depth and frequency of your promotion? Is there an opportunity to have less promo? Do you need to promote more? Is there a sort of overall conclusion that you're getting from the data? Thank you. You want to do Sales Coach. I can do so for Sales Coach. Excellent questions. Basically, we are giving our sales teams in Vietnam Gen AI powered sales assistant. Basically, we are empowering with more intelligence and converting them into more sales strategists because they no longer have to spend time to identify where the leads are. Now we're able to provide insights for them to generate and identify those opportunities, and thereby they can spend more time orchestrating their sales process and personalizing how they should approach their customers. That's what you see on the video, right? We have also a lot of insight built based on historical data on our sales performance, thereby empowering our sales teams with more intelligence, with more relevant insights on how they can serve their customers better. It's in a way elevating our capabilities. It's allowing our salespeople to be more relevant when they interact and be able to provide more personalized and providing us our sales advisors to the sales, and at the same time allowing them to serve better. In a way, we are transforming and elevating the capabilities of our salespeople, and we are seeing real performance. We saw in Vietnam, actually we collect the data, now it's being deployed to around 950 or across 1,000 depending on what months you're looking at. We actually collected data for the last six months since we launched where salespeople that actually are more active in using Sales Coach versus those that are not. We are actually seeing some good performance in terms of share of shelves, in terms of sales volume, and even in terms of FIT score. We are very positive about the performance, the contribution, the value creation that will be created by Sales Coach. To the second question regarding VMX and how it fits with traditional trade, that's a very good question because there's no doubt that the VMX tool works best where you have these vast, consistent, high-quality data sources, which is more of a struggle in some of the countries where you have 80%, 90%, 95% traditional trade. That's also why we roll this out in the countries first where the data source quality is the highest. We are actually doing one pilot in a country where there is a much higher share of traditional trade to see if we can get some of the same gains also in traditional trade-dominated countries. And. Whether it leads them to a complete change in terms of ways of working with promotions, I would say not necessarily leading into a lower usage of promotion, but a different type of promotion using different packs sometimes. I think what we've discovered in some of the countries where we've done VMX now is that, wow, maybe this is the right SKU to really run on promo because it's sourcing so much more versus competition versus the standard ones that we might have been using for years. It's giving us a lot of new insights of high value, I would say. Yeah, thank you. Richard Towner, Eden or Christina. Yes, Richard Tilhaag from Kepler. Anders, you talked about the three commercial. Bets, which one would you choose? That will contribute the most to the. Top line growth ambition of Carlsberg? The second question I have is. On your commercial, your digital commerce specifically. Saying it's 10% of revenues, what's the potential there? How do you convince customers to use your system? I think your competitors are having similar systems. Right, yeah, good questions. Also a difficult one. Among the three because they're so different, I think maybe in isolation, maybe the step change in how we do value management, net revenue growth management is probably number one in terms of really supporting again the growth algorithm and the growth of the plus 4 to 6%. If I were to have to pick one of them, I would say that one. At the same time, you cannot really excel in VM without also having the strong execution muscle. It's very interlinked, I would have to say. VM is probably among these topics that we currently work with and presented here, the one which is supporting the most the growth algorithm, I would. I think to add on what Anders mentioned in terms of Served. I think the question is how do we make it relevant. We're actually looking to continue to enhance Served with more relevant user interfaces in different markets. What you see now is a web app, but of course we're not stopping there. We need to make sure we are relevant in different markets with different market realities such as Vietnam or Switzerland. Now we are going as the next lighthouse market. We are not fixed in terms of how we will be interacting. Of course, the back end will be fixed in terms of our DAM, our PIM, our architecture, but the front end we are making sure that we are very agile and flexible. If you look at some of the competitors' products, we don't want to build websites that people just order from. Who would order from a website today? We will stay relevant, we will make sure that we are being agile and flexible in some markets that are more, for example, now going to social commerce or conversational commerce where you're ordering via WhatsApp, for example. These are more still actually very open options for us to embed into Served, of course under the same branding, under the same architecture, under the same back end. The front end we are keeping it very, what we call, headless, basically making sure that we are relevant in different markets to drive adoptions. It's a good point that Esther is having here that this is also done very market dependent. LinkedIn to Served and the role that I've served. For some of the countries that will be getting this now pretty fast and the one which is spearheading the race, the share of business, the share of its total net revenue on this platform is 80, 90%. It's pretty critical that it works and that it has features to further develop the sales relationship with the customer. Very different, the three key commercial capabilities in terms of impact per region and per country. I would say that they're all super critical for us to win. Sara? Yeah. Sarah Simon from Mongusani. Two questions. First one, if you think about the journey you're on in terms of digitization of the business, which I think we had the impression it was not that digitized before. Where are you in terms of 10 is fully done and where you are now relative to where you were. The second question, you obviously there's a lot of centralization going on. One of your competitors, I mean not necessarily direct one, has been hacked and is being impacted. Obviously we've all heard about Jaguar, Land Rover, and M&S. How much resilience is built into the system if you get a hacker. Thanks. I think I'll answer the first part of your question. I think in the past couple years we actually have a very strong foundation in terms of infrastructure. We've been focusing a lot on investing, on making sure we are cloud native. We're going more modernizing how we host applications so we no longer have physical data center. Basically now it's cloud. Now we're in the next phase, next chapter of our digital transformation, now focusing on building the front end, the customer facing, the back office, that we are able to continue to enable and drive the next chapter of growth. That's where we are now in terms of the focuses of digital transformation. We have basically now the layer of cloud strategy in terms of our overall service management server, how we are able to deliver more product oriented delivery rather than project before because when we deliver just project it was more on, off we go live and we forgot about adoption. Now we are pivoting to product delivery where we continue to build incrementally and make sure that we are also connecting end to end. In terms of security, that has been one of the bigger focus also in the past couple years. We have a well known program called Protected because basically making sure that we are enabling and securing all of our solutions end to end. Of course you can never prevent something that you're not aware of. As you know, this cybersecurity getting more and more complex, especially with third party risk that we are seeing with some of the company that's out there. Right. That's also something that we are strengthening now and making sure that for example, as we drive digital, as we drive AI, we are enforcing a responsible policy, especially around AI. We have just released a responsible AI policy, ensuring that our employees are given the guardrails and aware that there is responsibility within the users and the builder as we go into the AI journey. Overall, we have a clear framework in terms of how we are securing our business, how we make sure that we are well protected, in terms of how we are detecting cyber threats, how we are tapping into what we call cyber intelligence, how we are preventing, how we are actually able to prevent some of these solutions and make sure that the embedded capabilities are already secure and governed. We mentioned centralized a lot. When we say centralized, it doesn't mean we are physically centralizing things in one place. It means that we are creating something that's reusable and something that is repeatable. In a digital world, nothing is physical these days, right. Everything is basically cloud based and online. When we say centralized, it doesn't mean that it's all top down or all based in Copenhagen. It is more about reusability and repeatability to drive down the cost and optimizing how we operate. Cool. We have Jen, final question for this session. Thank you again, Cross BNP Paribas. My question's a bit of a kind of conceptual one, but in some staples categories I think we've seen some fairly clear evidence that there are small local. Players that are taking quite a lot of share. I guess one theory is that digital has kind of democratized access to some tools like AI and possibly the marketing barriers come down a little bit as well. Of course, the smaller players don't have access to some of the digital tools that you've talked about building today. I just wondered if you could. Kind of put those two things into beverages context. Do you think that the access that you guys and the other large players have to these tools outweighs possibly smaller players also having access to new AI tools? Yeah, happy to start. Maybe you can add to it, Esther. I think if you look at our industry and over then a decade or so, based on this overview that Jacob also showed this morning, we've been through a bit of a transformation in terms of the smaller player also then versus the big ones and especially the smaller ones. Definitely capitalizing a lot on the craft movement that you had from 2015 until Covid approximately. I think now with the high focus then on technology, which is basically entering the agenda of all the big CPG companies and especially also then within beverage, requires some very, very investment-heavy investments. I don't think what we've just presented now, there are definitely heavy investments done for us as a group, but we know that if we are then to grow in the future and again to deliver on our targets, we need to invest heavily in marketing and we need to invest heavily also in sales capabilities. We try to keep that focused on these three and there's no doubt with the price tag that comes with some of this. For example, on building a new B2B portal or a new value management tool, that is probably easier for some of the bigger players versus the small ones. Is it impossible for them or not? I don't know. I think it requires some muscles to be able to actually do these type of investments for sure. I think to build on, as we talk about digital and technology, it's easy for us to focus on the tools, the software. I think it's important to remind ourselves that at the end the complexity doesn't come with having this system and that system. The complexity comes with disconnected processes and broken data flows. That's why I spend some time on explaining what we are doing in terms of connectivity and in terms of how we unify our data foundation because if we can crack connections, connectivity, and data quality, I think as we modernize our digital foundation, that's basically the formula of winning. You have a modernized platform, you have basically a connectivity where it acts, like I said, as a digital highway where you keep things seamlessly connected end to end, and thereby you are connecting capabilities that's being built in supply chain in terms of demand, supply planning, and at the same time VMX as we drive a more integrated approach. Yes, it's easy for us to continue to focus on investing in platforms, software, modernizing core enterprise solutions. We constantly make sure that we are reminding ourselves that it's the process at the end that's really solving the problem and helping us to simplify. It's the data quality that's really helping us to understand more of consumers and help us to win. That's also for us super important to focus on. All right, thank you to Anders and Esther, and then we will jump directly into Western Europe. Soren. All right, excited to be back on stage talking about Western Europe. Lots of things going on in Western Europe and as you also know, we're investing quite heavily in the region, both inorganically but absolutely also organically. Five key points that I'll talk to you about today. We have a very strong starting point in Western Europe. We have a very strong business, good performance track record and also a multi-beverage business where we do recognize that we have some margin improvement opportunities. We remain confident on the market outlook. I answered it briefly on the question from Sanjeet before, but we will come back to that or I will come back to that. We are remaining confident around both the beer outlook, but certainly also soft drinks outlook. For us, the value levers in beer, they are very similar to what we've said for a few years now, which is keep driving value up in core mainstream beer and then go for the growth pockets in premium, in AFB and in beyond beer. In soft drinks it is really carbonates, that's the biggest growth lever. We still have energy and hydration and functional as exciting growth space. I will also talk a bit about that. What you just heard from Anders, Esther, now is very much the case in Western Europe. We are investing heavily in modernizing the business because we know that in order to achieve what we need to do, we need to be the best. We set the bar very high. We want to be the best of all the beverage players. We're no longer looking only at beer, we're looking at all the beverage players. We want to be the best. In order to be the best, we need to invest in capabilities and also in renewing our foundation. A bit on performance in Western Europe. We've actually had good performance track record. If you look at recently, I think to Jacob's point, we've been coming in a bit short on net revenue, but we have kept the promise to keep compounding growth from a profit perspective and this is what we will continue to do. When you look at the margin opportunity, then it is quite evident that our operating margin also in the first half this year is down. It is also driven by the fact that again we have lost the San Miguel brand, which was of course a big also profit blow for the business and we are in the process of rebuilding it and we are also investing quite heavily in renewing the foundation and building capabilities in the business. This is exciting because it means that we have a good, good margin growth opportunity ahead of us. Paul will come back because I mentioned the five points. Of course, the most important priority for Western Europe is that we deliver on the business case and also the strategic rationale for acquiring Britvic, especially in the UK. Paul will talk to that. Of course, also Britvic, once we get the business properly integrated, unlock the synergies and get the growth to the levels that we want it to be, that will also help us to drive up operating margin. What's also exciting about Western Europe is it is, and you'll see that from the category split, we are really a multi-beverage business. We are 50/50 now following the Britvic acquisition. We are basically equally exposed to the structural growth in soft drinks, but also some of the challenges on the volume side, but not so much on the value side in beer. I will come back to that again later. We have basically number one or number two positions in eight markets within beer, in six markets within soft drinks, and in all but two countries we actually operate soft drinks operations. Only Poland and Germany do not have a soft drinks exposure in our business. We have good share growth momentum. We are growing share in close to 80% of our beer footprint and we're growing closer to 90% in the soft drinks footprint. Pretty good performance momentum in these strong market positions. If we then talk a bit to the market outlook, and this is just basically coming back to the points that we've been circling around, which is beer, where is beer actually going as a category? If we leave the short-term cyclicality aside, we still believe that there is a robust value growth outlook for beer. We absolutely recognize that the core beer, core mainstream beer is challenged from a volume perspective. It really does differ between markets. The Nordics is less challenged, whereas when you get into some of the larger countries in Europe, you see bigger challenges, but then you also see some markets or some countries where that part of the market is still growing, for instance, in France. It really will differ between different countries. What we do see is a low single-digit structural decline in volume. What we are then doing, and I'll come back to that, is that we are working with premiumizing line extensions and we are working very actively with value management, including pricing, to make sure that we still get back into positive territory in core mainstream beer in terms of value growth. We invest behind the growth pockets, which are alcohol free beer. I'll show you some numbers on that later. Also premium beer, where you still have growth. I'll also talk later about that. We also have a fair share gap in premium beer and then also beyond beer, which is still also an exciting growth opportunity. Soft drinks are already covered. Soft drinks are in a better place because actually soft drinks still have structural growth in all the categories. Dilutables might be the one exception that's a little bit closer to where we are with core mainstream beer. We have a quite sizable business in that area now also following the Britvic acquisition. Three overarching priorities for Western Europe. Nothing new really. On the beer side, it remains the four: keep strengthening our core mainstream beer business, close the fair share gap in premium, capture all the new opportunities that alcohol free beer offers to us, and grow in beyond beer. These are still the four. Soft drinks were covered earlier, but it's really carbonated soft drinks as the main growth levers, flavor, and then it's energy and hydration. Also on the dilutables, we have the same ambition as we do for core mainstream beer, which is, if we're seeing some headwinds volume wise, we need to find ways to premiumize and offset it also with value management. The last one is where we are stepping up quite a bit because our ambition is really to become the best beverage business in Europe. We are investing very heavily in all the programs you just heard about. Marketing for growth that Eve talked about. We were one of the pilots and we're really mobilizing the whole marketing community here with Eve and his team to really get going on that transformation journey on go to market excellence. We have one of the global pilots in Switzerland on B2B digital commerce. We also have five markets in Western Europe that are live on VMX. In Western Europe, we basically have the potential to roll it out everywhere because we have that high quality data available that Anders was talking about. This is exciting for us because this gives us a completely different capability in terms of driving value into the categories and also having much more fact-based discussions with all of our retailers around how we actually drive category growth together with them. We also are investing quite a lot on the supply chain side. I mean we're still putting capacity in because we're still growing in a number of countries. We are also looking at how we put in new capabilities so there can be new pack formats that we need to make sure that we can deliver. We're investing in what we call one OT, so new operating technology, again also to be able to digitalize and use that to drive down waste in our supply chain by having a very rigorous approach to identifying where the losses are in supply chain and driving that out. Ulrike will come back to that quite a bit more later today. A very important thing for us, back to growth culture, is that we are really rigorously working on deploying the best talent in the business, and if we have gaps in our talent base, then attracting new talent to get behind the big priorities. Really finding the crucial, the critical roles and making sure that we have the right quality of people, the right talents in those is for us an enormous enabler of all of this. We are also renewing our foundation. It's one of these little bit boring things that are difficult to talk about because it requires an enormous investment and a lot of work. We're in the middle of that. We are going to go live in a couple of years, in a year and a half actually, with S4 across Western Europe. Europe. That is of course also a major transformation, also an exciting transformation because it will unlock a completely different way of working with automation and efficiency within our ERP and therefore also back office landscape. That leads directly into the last point we have in Western Europe. Ulrike will come back to that. We have a big commitment to continuously work on funding our journey and we have big ambitions for both the supply chain side and for everything within SG&A to continuously maintain cost discipline and actually reduce waste in the system. That is the only way we can afford to fund the modernization of the business and to rebuild the margins that we need to rebuild in the business. An example of what we're doing in core mainstream beer: this is an example from Sweden where the biggest local power brand that we have is Falcon. We've had a pretty abysmal volume development for a number of years. You see we have a -5% CAGR actually, and as part of working with what Eve was talking about, also really a new way of looking at the brand, sharpening the brand position and completely rethinking the creative platform, also modernizing the visual expression of the brand. We have managed to actually make a significant turnaround in the performance of the brand in Sweden. This is part of what gives us confidence that if we do the right things on these great local brands, there still is growth to be had within core mainstream. It also does require investment. We have stepped up marketing investments in Falcon as an example also quite considerably. We are also premiumizing and working actively with value management. One of the line extensions that you see here are then launched at price index 110, 115 typically, and they are of course also helping to drive value up within the brand. This is just one example of what programs we're working on for every single local power brand that we have. This is what will help us to mitigate the underlying negative development in core beer and keep driving up value. I think we have a movie on this, it was very short but very efficient. A second big priority for us within beer is that we need to continue to close the fair share gap. Today we still have a fair share gap within premium and we define premium as everything that's 120/index versus the average of the category. We still have a fair share gap in six out of 10 markets in Western Europe in the last three years. We've been closing gaps in seven of them. We've actually grown share within premium in seven of 10 markets and in two of those, the markets that we've not been growing share, we are back to share growth this year also. We're quite happy generally with the progress we're making. Two big levers within international within premium to grow with the category and also close the fair share gap. One is continuously driving our international brands. One of the things that we're becoming better at is also saying things that are working, let's scale it fast to all countries. Kronenbourg 1664 Blanc is a good example of that. At the beginning of this period, we were in three markets with Kronenbourg 1664 Blanc. We're now actually in 10 markets. We have expanded it and we are investing patiently. We are also getting learnings on Kronenbourg 1664 in some countries. We see that the model that we started with needs some tweaking. Generally, we're very happy with the progress we're making on Kronenbourg 1664 Blanc and it's just one example of international brands that we are scaling. We're also continuously testing out new ideas. Poretti, as an example, looks very promising in the UK. It could also be an opportunity for further scaling in the future. The other big growth leg within premium is local premium brands. We have tasked all of our countries to come up with local premium brand propositions also because local premium brands can do things that international premium brands typically can't do and therefore they sit very well in the portfolio together. Here are three examples: Valaisanne in Switzerland, where we've also just invested in more capacity in the valley; for Eriksberg in Sweden; and also Jacobsen in Denmark. We could also mention Frydenlund in Norway with very good growth rates and so on. We have several of these examples of local premium brands that are doing very well and that remains the second growth leg. Again, one of the big priorities for us has been to also make sure that there's sufficient funding to grow in international premium. We have scaled up investments over the last five years quite significantly in our premium brands. On the AFB side, you see here, there's no shortage of growth. We have actually grown 11% in volume if you take a longer time period. Of course, one of the things they do typically would say, yes, that's fine, it's all nice for double digit growth, but on a small number it doesn't matter so much. What we are starting to see is that it is becoming sizable parts of the market. We now have four markets that are at 10% at least of the beer category in terms of volume. This, just like premium beer, is margin accretive for the business. This is definitely something that has us very excited. Also, with some of the plans that Esther spoke about earlier, this is an area that we really believe can help us to drive value growth in the category going forward. They will come from different things. It will come from, of course, what you tried yesterday, which were more beer-like propositions. It will also come from fruity flavored AFB propositions like we are seeing very successfully in France with Total, but also very successfully in Poland on the Okocin brand. To sum it all up, we are very confident in the business that we have in Western Europe. We have a very strong starting point. We have a good performance track record. We're seeing good financial performance, good relative performance in terms of market share. We are also very happy with the way that the business is exposed now with a 50/50 exposure between beer and soft drinks, and we recognize that we have still a margin opportunity but a very strong starting point. The categories, we remain super confident on them. We see that beer will still deliver value growth. We think that the beer category will still see value growth year on year. There's a short-term cyclical impact that will make it more challenging. If you take a midterm, we still are very confident in the value growth outlook for beer. We are then, on top of that, very excited about the added opportunities for us in capturing further share in that category. Then soft drinks structural growth, we have half of our business exposed to that. That's also super exciting. Therefore, also with the growth plans that we have for both beer and soft drinks, we remain very confident on our beer, on our growth outlook. Finally, we are investing very heavily in basically modernizing further also our business and strengthening our capabilities. Of the programs that Anders and Esther spoke about, we are definitely taking the lead on quite a lot of it. That also means heavy investment, but it also means a much stronger reason to believe that we can actually deliver on these growth plans going forward. With that, I will hand over to Paul because he's going to take you through now the very exciting journey of building a multi-beverage powerhouse in the UK and delivering very confidently on the business case. Oh yeah. I'd bring some free advertising as well. I'm incredibly proud to be here today to talk you through, on behalf of 4,000 energized colleagues in the UK, the story of creating a multi-beverage powerhouse in the UK. At the end of this session, I want to leave you with three things. First of all, what are we doing with your money? Over the last eight months, what has actually been going on within the UK? The second aspect is to give you a sense of the opportunity. We are incredibly excited about that opportunity, and I'm going to give you a number of pointers to where we see the revenue opportunities in this business. The third thing I'm going to touch on at the end is our programmatic approach to integration. Integrations are difficult, and they need the right kind of approach to succeed. Also, I will talk to you around synergies. To start, I'm going to show you a quick video. This was the video, and a number of you asked me this question last night, that in our very strong preparation for day one, which is way back on January 20, 2024, we showed our new colleagues across the business. We gave them a taster of what this new business is going to feel like, what it's going to be. This is the kind of mood video that we gave to our organization. She's got to feel she's walking through. The street's thinking everything I want from. Me, but I have to go. SA. The critical thing about our new business in the UK, and many of you followed our UK developments for a long time, is that it just transforms our scale. We move from being a smaller beer provider into now being the second largest beverage provider in the UK. No matter how you cut the data, be it on revenue or on volume, that gives us a different level of conversation with customers, it makes us much more attractive to talent, and it gives us real scale in conversations and a different point of view. We've definitely seen that as a number of our critical customers have been in the room that you were in last night already to talk to us about growth potential and the future, something that wasn't open to us just nine to ten months ago. Our business in terms of scale isn't just about revenue and volume. It's also the supply chain that we now have in the UK. Some of the highlights around the scale of this incredible new business are that we have the biggest soft drinks site in the whole of Europe. In Rugby, that production center of excellence produces 11 million hectoliters of soft drinks a year. To put that into some perspective, the total beer market in the UK is about 33 million hectoliters. That one location, it's a bit of an embarrassment to call it a factory because it's almost a village, but it's a huge site, highly invested, and delivers real scale in the marketplace. We also have, and many of you may or may not know this, we are one of the largest wholesalers in the UK. If you think of the likes of Matthew Clark or LWC, we're right up there. That gives us also a different opportunity within the hospitality sector. We have 15 secondary logistics depots right across the UK that give us national coverage to deliver products right to the doors of our customers. Actually, we don't talk about this part of our business very much, but we deliver something in the region of 1 in 5 kegs of beer across England and Wales in the UK. In terms of reach, yes, our market share today on beer isn't of that scale, but our ability to unlock cooperation with customers off that logistics platform is phenomenal. This new business turns over about £2.2 billion. It also has somewhere in the region of 25 million hectoliters of various beverages going through it. It's a big business with real scale. What is also exciting now is that we are a true omnichannel business. We are working across all of the critical parts of the sales environment. Be it KFC in one meeting, throughout the way through to wholesalers on another, through to pubs, through to coffee shops, through to supermarkets. Actually, even though it's not on here, embedded in these numbers we have over £0.5 billion worth of e-commerce sales. That's not EDI, that's actually pure sales through various platforms that is being sold at the moment through different digital platforms. What is really exciting for me is I've got 15 amazing colleagues that we brought across from the Britvic business now driving that part of the business. That actual digital platform is growing at something like seven times faster than our actual bricks and mortar business. Another tangible example of where revenue synergies can appear is in the beer business. We weren't really engaged with Amazon at all. In fact, we weren't selling into Amazon, but in the first four months of us connecting with Amazon, where Pepsi Max is actually the biggest selling single SKU in the beverage category on Amazon's platform in the UK, we're immediately able to create a joint business plan. Today, and I hope many of you who live in the UK will do this when you get home, please go and order our wonderful beer brands off that platform. That's immediate revenue growth and that's an immediate example of putting these two businesses together. On the other side, we are now covering, and it's one of the core strengths of the legacy bit of Britvic business. Britvic was never the biggest in the marketplace, but it definitely had the broadest platform. That is exciting for customers, but also in terms of unlocking various category dynamics and growth opportunities, our portfolio is second to none in terms of multi-beverage, and we are now covering giant categories like cola with market leading brands like Pepsi Max throughout the way through to strong brands like Carlsberg. I just want to say an unknown fact, if you look at Carlsberg Danish Pilsner's performance in the off-trade this year. Yes, we're talking about decline in core beer, actually we've grown the business by 15% this year and there's a lot more growth to come for sure on that. Lots of categories are exposed to, some of them are in hyper growth, some of them are growing a little bit slowly. We are creating a unique multi-beverage business in the UK. None of our competitors, and I reiterate this, which gives us a unique position, are going to customers to talk about beverages. In totality, we are doing that. Heineken isn't doing that, ABI isn't doing that, and Coke is doing that. Actually, Carlsberg Britvic is doing that. Why is it relevant? First of all, many of our customers now are actually moving to a combined buying structure where they are buying beverages. Why are they doing that? It's because the entire category is fusing. We are seeing the middle ground blurring, and in particular, many of the trends that we see in the States or even the Far East in this area are coming to the UK and retailers are responding. When we go and talk to our customers now, we don't talk about beer, we don't talk about soft drinks. What we actually do is we talk about need states, we talk about beverage opportunities, we talk about hydration, we talk about fuel, we talk about different benefits that we can bring again to our consumers, and that's the conversation that our customers are looking for. On a multi-horizon level, we are covering full day parts. I hope many of you this morning started your routine with a Plenish shot. I certainly did, although it's not doing me much good. I did. Ultimately, we're covering that occasion. You move through lunchtime and you might grab a Bejime's, you need a pick me up from your boring meeting and you grab a Pepsi Max in the afternoon, and then you get home, certainly working with Jacob exhausted, and you grab a Peretti at the end of the day. We are covering all of those occasions. We're also selling brands to children. We have iconic brands like Fruit Shoot, and we have amazing brands that I think have got great untapped potential. Things like J2O, which are growing in the marketplace. We've got a broad consumer reach, and also we've got increased relevance for our customers. I cannot make that point enough, if I'm pretty blunt. Even though I was Managing Director of Carlsberg UK and I can say this now, many of my customers didn't know who I was until we took over Britvic. I can tell you the engagement, engagement level we now have with customers is on a completely different level. Our combined business has the capabilities to really reshape the total beverage landscape. That's my mission and that's what we are delivering in the eight short months that we've been together. Our Enhanced portfolio gives us a different conversation about category growth, multi beverage. We've got the iconic brands to pull that off. I'll come and talk about that. We also are investing more. Yes, we're in the middle of delivering synergies, but we're also investing more in brand building with our partners, PepsiCo. We've invested in more salespeople since we formed this business. Whilst at the end of the day, delivering synergies is a given, actually this is all about a story of growth. That's what our transformational move in the UK is all about. To give you another small example in the beer business, we didn't call on any convenience stores at all. The scale and the ROI just wasn't there. By April of this year, we had hundreds of sales reps crawling all over the convenience channel in the UK selling a four pack of Peretti, a four pack of Kronenbourg 1664, and a four pack of Carlsberg. It's really simple to execute, actually, and we did it at great speed and you can see it now in our data and our market share performance. That is a great tangible example of revenue synergies. We're also leveraging our logistics and wholesaling business to build and distribute our brands. We sell a lot of wine, we sell a lot of spirits, we actually also sell a lot of soft drinks. We are now doubling down on our soft drinks performance. For those of you who buy CGA data, look at the growth rates we see in share in that segment of pubs. Since we have taken this business on, we are unlocking more and more opportunities. We've also finally got our ability to build brands. We've got real scale, we've got the real opportunity not only to work with Eve's team, but also with our PepsiCo partners looking at new operational models. We're investing more in our combined brands and we're driving things shoulder to shoulder with a real sense of purpose and really together. Overall, I would make a shout out to 4,000 colleagues who've got a real shared purpose and a vision and a growth culture to really outperform the marketplace. It was ingrained within the Britvic business and we are maintaining that. My promise is to over deliver against our growth algorithm because we're very confident as a business that we can, over the midterm, start to drive even stronger growth, because there are fundamentals in the soft drinks market in particular, where we're able to grow. Don't write that promise down. Yeah. Holding it back. The other thing that I want to point out at this stage as well is that when you, of course, and I did, as probably some of you remember, do the Carlsberg Marston's brewing company merger, we focused way too much on synergies in that particular integration. From day one, Soren has been clear to me that we've had to focus on a growth agenda. Over the last eight months, what have we been doing? We've developed what we call Project Brave, which is a growth strategy building off the plan from the group to identify very clearly, if we take a five to ten year view, which are the categories and brands that we think are going to grow and where should we start to invest. Invest in growth, and also we have a very wide salesforce organization covering a huge number of channels. What are we going to prioritize them to do going forward? We will see as of next year Project Brave starting to hit our business in terms of the way we operate and also in our marketing structure. One of the critical things here is our expanding partnership with PepsiCo. We are operating a little bit differently, and this is not to say Britvic, we're operating in the wrong way. Of course, Carlsberg doesn't just work with PepsiCo in one market, it works with PepsiCo in many. Even in my own career, I worked with PepsiCo in the Swedish market and saw what a close cooperation can deliver. We are so excited to be working with Pepsi. We bring them into a lot more of the business and also our challenges as well as the opportunities. Equally, when we have large customer meetings now, which are looking forward over the next three to four years in terms of innovation and category development, we have Pepsi in the room at the table there, shoulder to shoulder with us, and that's the relationship that we will continue to develop and strengthen. Pepsi Max is a huge powerhouse for us again this year. In the latest market data in the off trade, we're growing our share by 1.6 value share points in the marketplace. It's got real momentum. This kind of sugar area and no sugar has got so much more growth to come. We're incredibly proud, and we've also agreed to invest even more to drive that growth. Things like 7UP, 7UP this year is up about 11% year to date, and pink lemonade, one of my favorites. Another sales pitch. Please try that if you're in the UK. It's been a phenomenal success since we launched it again. We haven't innovated for a long time. With our partners, we've done that this year. We've executed it brilliantly. There's so much more to come. Lipton. Lipton, the whole iced tea category has grown this year and yes, in the UK we have had a sunny year, but it's grown around 15%. Even if you look backwards at the CAGR growth rate of iced tea, it is a phenomenal part of the market and it actually appeals to a slightly younger consumer group as well. We have the market leader in Lipton and we are investing heavily to take the fight to our competitors on this brand. I put in our very latest baby here, which only launched last week. You're all aware of Liquid IV, but actually with our partners at PepsiCo, we've just launched a Gatorade hydration powder. This is a real kind of foray into a whole new emerging category. We're getting in very early. We've got a consumer and digital proposition up and running. They're fantastic products. Again, as a sales pitch, you can order them now online and you get 15% discount. I feel a bit boring, but I'm talking about the same messages. We are talking about health in our conversations internally and externally. We're talking about fuel, we're talking about socializing, we're focusing on experience and hydration. These are the things that we will line up our amazing innovation agenda against. If you combine the Carlsberg innovation long term, more Horizon three thinking with the amazing flavor innovation that the Britvic team have given us, we really think that we can do great things together with Eve's team and launch some exciting new products starting next year. The categories and brands that we'll scale up, yes, we'll focus on large lager, we'll focus on CSDs, ready to drink, as I've referred to, and we will accelerate things like RTD coffee. If you look at Jimmy's, Jimmy's is an amazing example where Britvic as a business acquired a small brand and have grown it now into a number three brand in the iced coffee market. Bigger than Costa in the UK, it's growing at over 60% in the marketplace. It also is tapping into functionality health. If you look at the samples you've got here today, you've got 21 grams of protein in a partnership with Myprotein in some of these products, which again talks to functional health. Hugely growing and already delivering millions of pounds to the bottom line of the Britvic business this year and next year. It is not a 50 year bet; it is actually happening here and now. Lots of brands are addressing different portfolio needs, different demographics, and different occasions at every single time of day. I am super excited. What are our customers saying? Is the combination really working? I will give you two proof points now. The first thing is I have not only said that we are having a different level of conversation with our customers, what is extremely exciting and I am super proud of is that there is a survey each year in the UK called the Advantage Survey, where everybody in the industry, that is our customers, comments across all FMCG businesses about how you are doing, where you are ranked versus your competitors in a number of areas from sustainability through to quality of account team, through to their vision and partnership, and of course service. If you look at the recent survey, we are actually number two in the soft drinks area. We are in the middle of an integration, and what is more exciting is that we have actually gone up by 8 points versus last year. That is the really exciting thing. Also, our beer business has gone up by 13 points versus last year. In both categories, we are only 2 points off actually taking a leadership position. That is, for me, testimony that we are driving this integration in the right way. My final selling point to you is that if you look at our ranking in terms of vision—what is our category vision, how do we approach our customers and partnership—we are number one in both categories. We are number one in both categories in our first year in terms of integration. That says to me that we have got our business continuity focus right. That says to me, either by design or a bit of luck, we are in a position where we are talking about multi beverage at precisely the moment the trade wants to talk about multi beverage. In terms of the on trade, we are the only supplier in the marketplace that brings the kind of holy trinity together of being a wholesaler, logistics provider, and a brand owner. That is giving great dividends. We are in a number of critical contractual negotiations at the moment. If you look at some of the early signs again, and you can see it in the market data, we are winning some great contracts by leveraging our beer heritage and our beer relationships. I am doing a different sales pitch now. I was down at St Austell at the weekend down in St Ives. They've opened a fantastic new venture venue. No discount, but we have just switched from Coke to Pepsi in that business, which has got hundreds of pubs and hundreds of L and T pubs. It's a great example where we are working with our beer partnerships to sell in soft drinks, but also in our soft drinks partnerships we can sell in beer and vice versa. The final thing, which is not a small thing and I referred to it around digital capabilities, is that there are loads of examples across the business. We are now sharing best practice, we're moving talent around the business, and we've been able to also retain critical people and actually grow their roles and give them even bigger challenges in the new business, which is incredibly exciting. That's what our customers say about us. Actually, if you look at our market share performance, where are we and how are we performing since we formed the new business? These are year to date numbers. Carlsberg, very difficult marketplace in the on-trade actually with standard lager under pressure, we've grown. Share Peroni, the story is incredible. We're 140% up year on year. 140%. We really have reached a tipping point. For those of you who remember when we bought back Kronenbourg 1664 from Heineken, we are now seeing huge growth. We'll be 25% up year on year and we've got phenomenal share growth in both the on-trade and the off-trade. I haven't referred to Brooklyn on this page, but Brooklyn is up 35% year to date in the on-trade and around 10% in the off-trade. Strong performance. Our mighty soft drinks portfolio, great performance on fruit carbs where we've gained significant share thanks to 7UP. Tango also has had some great innovation. Pepsi Max, phenomenal growth. Consistently we've seen 1.7% and we'll see another 1.6% of value share growth in the off-trade in the latest four weeks. Fantastic performance. It was pointed out to me in the rehearsals yesterday, but I did go away and have a look at it. J2O in the latest 12 weeks is growing, growing by 0.7 share points. We've had to go through quite a difficult period where we have been through EPR. The great news now is that we're gaining share again in adult socializing, which is great. Also, we're seeing 10% growth and we're holding the value. We've got a strong portfolio and it's delivering the marketplace a lot more work to do. Of course, looking forward to keep this momentum going. It's a good start. Start. This is coming from strong marketing execution. This is a combination of working with partners but also working with Group and also driving some local initiatives. We've already seen our infamous Foxes advertising, but we relaunched this year our Kronenbourg 1664 brand again, actually driven by AI. The concept was with a very different way of talking to consumers. A lot of younger consumers on Kronenbourg 1664 don't really know the brand and now they're starting to re-engage with it, which is great and that's delivering strong growth. J2O is constantly innovating and we are in our strategy very excited about the opportunity. J2O is the highest distributed beverage brand in the hospitality sector in the whole of the UK. There probably isn't a pub in the UK that you can find that hasn't got J2O or at least one of the variants in it. It is a massive platform as consumers start to moderate and use the pub in a different way for us to grow and you'll see some great innovation. Treats has been a phenomenal success this year. It's gained 1.1 share points of the total off-trade cola market. Yesterday our new Treats for Christmas variant, which we've done in double quick time with our colleagues at PepsiCo, has hit the shelves of Tesco in partnership with Doritos. I haven't talked about the power of one in this, but we are starting to unlock that. The other thing that I want to talk about is just execution in general. Of course, lots of people will come to you and show you brilliant execution. Probably not many people will show you Foxes in a boat, but that's what we're doing in some of our stores. What is really exciting here is that for us in the first quarter in Waitrose we delivered our first combined gondola end. This gondola end has on it dilutables as you can see here. Robs, it has J2O, it has beer. This is a massive efficiency opportunity. It's efficient for retailers because effectively they're selling the space to us. It's also efficient for us because we can work with retailers to take the whole end and then we can do it against specific occasions. Be it football, big night in, winter, Halloween. We can build a portfolio with our multi-beverage assets to actually unlock this opportunity. That was an exciting opportunity for us and there's more to come. To summarize, how will we win? We are, and we've done this from day one, if you are a finance colleague in our business, if you are a sales colleague in our business, even if you are in production, you are now running Multi Beverage. The leader that runs Rugby also now runs our Northampton brewery. We did that from day one for two reasons: one, we believe in the power of Multi Beverage, and two, we can extract synergies in a much more structured way more quickly by approaching it as a singular unit. We are truly omnichannel, and our ability to learn from one side of the fence to another, trial something in KFC and then roll it out into Tesco, we have this end to end now. We cover all consumer and need states with our moment. We're also focused on executing flawlessly at the point of purchase. Britvic and Carlsberg as a challenger, they are strong businesses executing well, and we'll continue to drive that. We'll create winning innovations for consumers, but we will always maintain a challenger mindset. We are not the biggest soft drinks provider in the UK, I wouldn't lie to you about that, and we're not the biggest brewer in the UK, okay? Combined, we have the scale and the customer conversations to move us forward. We need to maintain that growth mindset and challenger spirit, and that will feed into us being indispensable business partners, focusing on service and listening to the needs of our customers. Finally, two quick slides. Holistic integration is what we are approaching. We have a clear program. We focused on day one, we planned it well, we got some great external experts, and we also used the power of the group in terms of talent. We protected day one business continuity, and I hope from some of the feedback from customers and our share performance, you can see that and not just hear it. We have been building a new visual identity and growth culture across the business. We're not an island. We are actually rolling into the growth culture of Carlsberg. We're driving that out the business, and we've rebranded the business as well, which has been extremely exciting. We have a program-led approach. We have 20 different integration work streams that we are using. We've got a three-year plan to deliver. Some of the IT system integration, one of you asked me last night, will come later. We are rolling out a clear program, we're tracking it every single month, and we're making sure that we're hitting the right milestones and prioritizing. Of course, we are focused on not only unlocking cost synergies, but driving those revenue benefits. To end, probably on the slide that many of you wanted, we are on track and in fact we've called up the synergy numbers today and we will deliver on our business case. We are sensitively managing the changes around people. We have been through a structured process of effectively changing the operating model. Plugging out of the Britvic head office, we did that extremely quickly. We sensitively managed with great colleagues where duplicative roles exist. We are now moving through that period. We are also very focused on ensuring our frontline, our commercial resources are protected to ensure that we're delivering for customers. Customers. We've got strong procurement delivery. We're working hand in glove with our global procurement team, which is enabling us to get scale and you'll start to see that come through next year as we finalize all of the contracts and also simplify our business. Other discretionary costs and duplicative costs, we know what they are. We're using OCM as a principle, which is the way we kind of analyze cost lines in Carlsberg and we're removing those. If we're turning up an event, we both got two tables, we'll only have one going forward as a simple example. We're really not just focused on synergies, we're focused on top line. This is a growth story and we have committed with PepsiCo to fuel that growth together, be it Salesforce or be it investing in higher paced innovation and actually more investment in advertising. Advertising. 7 points. I think that's the most points today. Number one, we are the only truly omnichannel multi beverage business in the UK. We're different from our competitors and I see that as a core strength. We have an unparalleled portfolio covering all consumer needs, all drinking occasions and all demographics. We have a different strategic partnership and almost friendship with PepsiCo where we discuss everything and we do things together shoulder to shoulder. We are an indispensable growth partner with our customers and the Advantage survey sets the bar for me and we need to continue to do that over the coming years. We have accelerating commercial momentum since day one. We have a holistic plan to deliver on all of the integration, not just the synergy bits, but also people, multiple systems, ways of working. Finally, we hope, and it's my ambition to start a new standard for the way the Carlsberg Group can roll out multi beverage portfolio businesses. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Paul. We'll take Q&A now for Western Europe. Ein from Carlsberg Britvic UK. We'll start here in the front. Olivier. Thank you. I got a few. Just first of all, for Soren, perhaps. I'll be very quick. Just for Soren, first of all. In terms of revenue synergies from Britvic, when should we expect a rollout of Jimmy Ice Coffee and perhaps London Essence? Across your markets in Europe. Europe. Just a couple of questions for Paul looking at the UK slide. 5, I think it was in your. Presentation at the manufacturing footprint that you. How much rationalization could happen in? The future, and are the cost savings of $110 million include any site closure? Just lastly, very briefly, Peter, how. Much of your sales are going through Amazon today? Is there any margin differential between? Selling through Amazon or Britvic, which. Are you allowed to answer? Of course, I start on the Jimmy's one. Yeah, it's probably so. Yeah, that's the easier question. On the Britvic brands, I mean, we're super excited about some of the brands. What we always need to remember is that a number of the countries where we operate multi-beverage, the markets are fairly small. Some of these niches are very big in the UK, but they're not necessarily of the same size in other countries. On the one hand, we need to understand the market opportunity, and on the other hand, we are still also learning the brand. I mean, some of these brands are not that old in the Britvic system also. We have no concrete plans right now to roll out the brands and we're still assessing basically. Let me answer the more difficult question first around, you know, the network question. Broadly speaking, if you look at the supply chain network work, we are, as you know, in the process of closing down Banks's brewery. We've been right sizing our beer brewery network for a considerable period of time to ensure that we basically run as efficiently as we possibly can, so we are able to take those decisions in the medium term. When you look at the sheer scale of the three bottling sites that we've got, it is not likely that we will move to a greenfield site in the short term. Also, I think Ulrike would not like the CapEx associated with that, I would say. What I can say on a more positive side is if you look at procurement synergies, they're not just about the format that we've got, they're also about the equipment we buy. We've just bought a new canning line. That canning line is part of a group contract and I can certainly say we're getting, you know, economies of scale from that because we're buying other canning lines for another Kajuk Stander, I believe at this point. There's luck there. On the logistics side, there are definitely synergies that will start to come through over the next year or so. What was the other question? Sorry, Amazon. Amazon's a very still small part of our business. It's not going to register significantly. Of course, the bigger part of the business is through Tesco also. Aggregators is quite a big part of the business now, but it's a very fast growing part of the business that we're starting to learn and optimize. I think in the future when you ask that question, it will be more meaningful in the business. Hi, sorry, I'm just coming back to Western Europe. I think everybody underestimated the elasticity impact from all the pricing that was taken over the last three years. How are you thinking about pricing in Western Europe over the next one, two, three years? Do you think you need to price below inflation to stimulate volumes? Secondly, one for Paul, two for Paul actually on the UK, what's driving the strong growth in the Carlsberg brand specifically? I get the premium portfolio, but Carlsberg, what's working and what gives you the confidence you can sustain strong growth going forward there? Just putting everything together, it seems like you're spinning a lot of plates in the UK. You've got a lot of focus areas, a lot of brands. What gives you the confidence that you can execute everything well in order to deliver those revenue synergies? All right, I'll go first on the pricing point. We have one very clear target in Western Europe, which is we need to price to inflation. We still have inflation in the business, we still have salaries going up, we have lots of inputs that are going up. We will always have an ambition to price to inflation. We recognize that short term there has definitely been a squeeze on consumer disposable income. When we look at it market by market, we definitely see also now that the salary increases are in general catching up with CPI. We do believe that we are seeing a restoration of disposable income if we don't include interest rates and other things and Social Security in some countries and so on. Generally, we have a very clear target price to inflation. We believe that consumers are getting to a better place. What we see also now is that a lot of the reasons why. The. cyclical downturn is having so much impact also because consumers are more worried. The savings rates are going up everywhere, so the disposable income is actually there. They're just putting it into the bank instead of actually spending it. We still remain fully focused on pricing to inflation, also using regular price increases, but also value management. I think the question you asked around, are we confident we'll deliver? That just comes down to people. It isn't me delivering. There are 4,000 colleagues, and in our planning before day one, we spent a lot of time profiling and identifying the management team to ensure that we have the right people in the right roles. I've got a really heavyweight management team, I think we'd all agree. Very talented, very experienced. There's a lot of weight on my shoulders. I shouldn't say there isn't. Equally, I'm very confident that each of them will deliver. We're also taking a programmatic approach to everything we do, be it synergy delivery, revenue delivery. We're tracking everything in a rigorous way one day a month, every month, with a rhythm. It's a delightful meeting, but we are, you know, I'm very confident we will deliver. Cosmo brand is basically, I think I said this last night, the triple win. Effectively, we were the first to move on the 3.4% opportunity that enabled us to ensure that pricing was pretty affordable for consumers. We haven't discounted aggressive of trade. I think there's a lot more growth potential. You can just see the gaps. Andrew, I have a question here. Thank you. Yeah. First, a question on Britvic in France. What is the potential for that business? Is it correctly understood that. Carlsberg Britvic should grow beyond 4- 6%? I think when Britvic was acquired, it was 4 to 6, just for Britvic. Is all that beyond 4- 6%? Is that just synergies? Thank you. I'll take the synergy. Yeah, let's do that. Our plan is to grow at 4- 6%. My ambition is very clear to grow beyond that, and that will be about aligning our portfolio against the growth levers. You know that if you look at the soft drinks market today, it's growing in the UK in terms of revenue at about 7% and volumes about 4%. You can see that is a driver of price mix, but it's also a premiumization. Our key strategic plan is to make sure that our portfolio, as it looks forward, aligns against those growth levers. That's the kind of ambition level that we've set in our strategy. My job is to try and now deliver against that over the coming year. On Britvic France, the tea business, as you've also heard, is going through a difficult year this year because the business has actually had not the greatest performance momentum, and we've lost a sizable private label contract. We're struggling with some overhead cost recovery in the business, and therefore the big focus for us right now is to stabilize the business and also get it back to a clear path to be profitable on its own. You also know that our own business in France also had a difficult year last year. When the businesses are then stabilized, we will then assess the next steps essentially. Thank you. Paul. Just one question. Remarkably upbeat presentation. You have a new career as a motivational speaker ahead of you. What are the big challenges out there? Is it maintaining business continuity whilst you eliminate the duplicated roles? Is it pressure on pricing from the big grocers? What's the dark spots out there at the moment? I think first of all we have a regulatory environment that is a bit unstable. We all wait with bated breath as to what will the government do in November of this year in their budget? I'm not foreseeing anything directly impacting Carlsberg Britvic, but the unintended consequences I think we discussed last night, the price of an average pint in the UK is up 6.7% in the latest data. Why is that? That's because national insurance went up so dramatically and in very labor intensive businesses that has to be passed through. In the midterm I think we've got some cyclical challenges with the government and with taxation, with consumer confidence at the moment that is hitting the hospitality sector a little bit harder. I very much echo Eve's points around the cyclical nature of that. We've just got to look ahead and plan for the future. The soft drinks category, if you were to do a piece of analysis of share in the UK, is broadly flat in terms of growth, but we're seeing 7% growth in the off trade in terms of soft drinks. We're taking a significantly larger share of disposable income. That gives me great confidence that there's more growth to be had in the future. I think regulatory environment and the consumer, but we'll get through that. That's cyclical and that's not disturbing our plans at present. Okay, Chris? Yes, for example. We break for lunch after. A couple of questions. Firstly for Soren in Western Europe, you. Gave us the example of Falcon, where. You repackaged it, redelivered the brand. You sort of slipped in as a footnote. You increased marketing as part of the. Issue in Europe, that the industry had just been focused more on premium. You need to redeploy resource there. Does that mean overall marketing in Europe need to go up? Paul, in the UK you highlight energy as one of the key. Areas, but Rockstar hasn't been a great performer. Is that an area where you can? Hope for a turnaround? What's your strategy to capture energy? If we go back to marketing first, of course you can look at the ratios as% of revenue. The best way to look at it is really to do proper sufficiency analysis and also MMM modeling. That's actually what we're doing with Yves and his team now across all of our focus brands in Western Europe to make sure that we actually have them properly invested for what it is that we want to achieve with them. This is also why I feel that we will see marketing investments going slightly up in Western Europe over time. We are actually fairly well invested on our brands. We have stepped up the investments quite significantly, if you take it over the last five years. We don't have any obvious gaping holes in terms of investment. We still have areas where we need to do more, but we also have that built into our three-year plans in terms of how we are gradually stepping that up. I don't see that as being a dramatic development versus today, but we'll continuously reassess, make sure that we invest according to what it is that we need to do and therefore we will still need, you know, to inch it up a little bit every year. On the point around energy, what we've been doing, and it was happening in the partnership between PepsiCo and Britvic and now it's continuing, is that we are upweighting certain parts of the marketing mix and the sales mix in certain areas of the country on Rockstar to see how it performs. More sales coverage, higher density of advertising, communication, these kinds of examples, different pricing analysis, and we're looking at where those pockets are and what that model is. We're still committed to growth in this particular area. We will continue to innovate on Rockstar with our partners at PepsiCo, but we're also working very closely with PepsiCo and I think Eve referred to it before, not only in the UK, but actually across Europe, on what is the next phase of performance in energy. What brands can we bring to the UK market to grow? We must win together in energy. At the moment, we are subscale in that category. You're right. Great. We will now break for lunch. Lunch will be served just outside here and we'll give you 40 minutes. Please be back at 1:55 P.M. Everybody, we will continue. Good, good. All right. I hope you enjoyed the lunch. It was definitely better than the dinner last night. There you go. We will continue with Asia. Joao, the voice is yours. Thank you. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm the entertainment after lunch, I must say. I've lived in Denmark for three years, and being Southern European, although Peter said this is an upgrade from last night. Night. We still have a lot of catching up to do, even with lunch today, I must say. Apologies for all those civilized people attending today. Welcome to Asia. I'll do a brief session on the rest of Asia and then I'll hand over to CK so that he covers China. I'll be back on stage together with CK and we will be available for Q and A with all of you. For those of you that were in the next door building in 2022, you will eventually recognize this chart. In that sense, the reality that we are serving in Asia across eight markets has not changed. It's still a very heterogeneous region in many respects, not least in terms of GDP per capita. More important, what that means in terms of beer affordability. We have markets where we're serving consumers that need to work four hours to earn one beer, and in other markets where it takes 10 minutes to earn one beer. It doesn't mean that the markets where it takes 10 minutes to earn one beer have more positive consumer sentiment, but it's fundamentally a very, very different reality. That means two things. That's one of the things we've been doing over the past three years, which is balancing at the time the ability to price. As we have continuously improved our gross margins, we've continuously transformed the portfolio to more premium. The fact is that we've always had in mind affordability. Keep gaining scale over time whilst keeping resilience and scale even in the short term. That is fundamental balancing between affordability and premiumization. The second thing is that we are serving very different channel realities across the region. From high off trades very much more similar to Western Europe, like Hong Kong, with modern trade being a large part of the channel, to high on trade, which is the case of Malaysia, to traditional trade, which is also the case even in China. Don't think of China just as online to offline and the realm of E commerce because many times that is actually served from dining outlets or from independent small grocery stores. Having that ability to have realities across the region where we serve those different channels and although many of the consumption still happens sitting in low stools, for instance in Vietnam or growing into traditional off trade stores. You saw one earlier with Soren about Laos. More and more those stores are being digitally enabled, whether it is the consumer directly and I'll talk briefly about that later on, whether it is with our business to business platform, which is the case of Laos. The way we serve those future opportunities and we remain agile as we adapt is fundamental in such a heterogeneous region. It's a region that in the short term has seen a lot of volatility, a lot of softer consumer sentiments, tougher macroeconomics and not across all the markets, but across many of the markets. Still, in that region we remain resilient overall in terms of the overall size of the business. As importantly, continuously growing our gross margins and our operating margins. We didn't go back in gross margins during the period of inflation and we've kept improving our gross margins. A lot of great cross-functional work, namely with supply chain colleagues. Also, whilst we remained in a position to price where we needed to price. A good example is Laos, a good example is Myanmar and where we had less ability to price. We remain very focused on portfolio transformation and premiumizing via mix. It's a region where of the eight markets we lead or are close, number two in five of the markets in western China. China clearly a very leading position in Laos. Number two strong positions in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and then challenger positions and growing from challenger positions namely in Vietnam that I will cover later. What I would like to leave with you is the following because sometimes we look at the last six months but I would like to see what we've done over the pre-Covid and the post-Covid period compared to the markets where we operate. From 2018 until 2024 we grew 36% our volume scale in the region and that has been across the portfolio. Whilst we look to balance the relevance both of local brands and international brands. Carlsberg was a brand that in the previous cycle was not growing in Asia. It's now grown 21% over the period. Tuborg already a bigger base has grown 39% over the period. Also in Laos, where we already had a very strong market share, the brand has grown 22% in the period. As we embarked in our journey to change our position in Vietnam, the Huda brand, which is the main brand in Vietnam, has grown almost 60% over the period. That has been the same with the strong focus on the local power brands we have across the business units in China, whether it is Wuzu, Chongqing Dali, or Windflower. That means that fundamentally the scale at which we operate today is bigger, but it's also more profitable than it was prior or post to Covid. That has been achieved via three key elements. The first one was really this one about being as passionate for the international brands as passionate for each one of those local power brands. To be quite frank, I think it can only improve now that we are working with EVE in terms of how do we really distill the essence of both the international brands, but also the essence of each one of these local power brands. You've seen that in the portfolio, the growth was broad based. It was not one or the other. In the case mostly of the local brands, it came many times together with very strong, steep price increases. That is the first one. The second one echoes Anders and Esther's presentation earlier. Although when Esther and Anders sit here and they gave great examples, you'll say, is this the Copenhagen headquarters fluffy stuff, or does this really get traction into the business? Especially when you look at the B2B platform in LA, and LA is leading the way, LA has in that sense of headquarters. When I cover Laos, you'll see the success of LBC Online and the early success of moving from LBC Online, much more laptop based, to a more device app based tool. That's one example. The second example, and Anders alluded to it, is the level of collaboration we have with the likes of Matewan Food Packaging and Grab across the region, which is really making a difference in terms not just of consumer insights, but actually on accelerated growth on the online to offline channel, or what we usually call in jargon, O2O. Finally, one of you asked me this question earlier on, what keeps you awake at night? I think that one of the biggest challenges we've lived through in the region is balancing every price too much. It's not a question of have we priced enough, because clearly you can see our gross margins. It's have we priced too much? On the balance of things, considering the fact that we are defending the larger scale we have nowadays compared to the scale we had before, I do believe we had to price what we had to price in high inflation, currency devaluation markets. In the markets where we could not price, we really worked on transforming the mix. That is leveraging those success pillars to drive growth. Growing market share and value in China, I'll leave in the very good hands of CK. What I'll cover over the next two slides is both Vietnam, for which I got a lot of questions over the past 12 hours, and the same to cover Lao in one slide. They are very different stories, one and the other. Vietnam remains an extremely attractive market in terms of growth potential. It's the positive demographics with the young, growing population. It's the continuous increased affluence. Just don't expect that increased affluence to be a continuous line because we see GDP growth, but what many of us don't see is that in pockets of industries, depending on tariffs, depending on dynamics, some consumer cohorts suffer from time to time. You've seen that the growth in Vietnam is attractive over time, but sometimes it stagnates, it comes down, it gets back up, but still an extremely attractive market. Secondly, why would we get excited about getting into new markets where we don't have a right to operate, when in the south of Vietnam we are still very small? Just like in many cities in China to the east, we are still very small. We have a much higher right to operate in these markets than in markets where we've never operated and we wouldn't know how to operate. To the point of the CAGR of 9% in the period of 2018 to 2024, which was particularly accelerated after 2022, we've been able to establish two things. Our position in central Vietnam is much stronger and much wider than it was prior to 2021. It's no longer just, but it's overall leadership in central Vietnam, whether you're going north of Hue, whether you're coming south of Hue to Da Nang and in the Quang Nam province. That has been really achieved via the HUDA brand. At the same time, we've had very good early success, namely with Tuborg and namely with Kronenbourg 1664 in expanding south into Ho Chi Minh City. What you have bottom right here is that you have the level of awareness that the brands now have. Fast forwarding from where we started, that journey Carlsberg was already relatively established has multiplied by 1.5 times. It's increased 50%. Its brand awareness. Tuborg has multiplied by 7. Its brand awareness no one knew 1664 has now a level of brand awareness of 38%. What is true is that we are facing two things in Vietnam. One external. One internal. External, the market has rebounded this year, but it's been extremely competed, not with ourselves, but between two big players. Internally, where after very successful early expansion, what we're having to do now is revisit the distributor network. Network. Because a lot of new distributors want to carry our products, we really need to build the future of our distributor network in the market. Secondly, outlet coverage has spread very, very fast. What we're now having to work on is the quality of that outlet coverage, so that it is not just new outlets asking for our products, but then there's no repurchase. It is to really focus on the good quality outlets, Chi Minh, where our brands are known and where consumers are getting more into the habit of consuming our brand. Very early promising results, very attractive market. Now really rejigging our operation to be successful over the long run and not just in the short term. Laos is a very different journey. Laos, which is a very small economy full of economic challenges, is a beautiful long-term journey. How many markets do you know where a company sells 100 liters per capita of beverages to its consumers? It's 100 liters per capita of beverages sold to consumers in Laos in 2024, but it was 80 liters in 2018. Actually, if you go back 10 years, it was 65 liters. If you take this as a glass half empty, you say you already sell 100 liters per capita. If you do the math that Eve and Jacob were doing earlier, that means 27 centiliters per capita per day. It's only one of those eight units, so it's one in eight units. If you look at the per capita consumption of soft drinks, it is much, much lower than any of the neighboring countries. I'm not comparing with the U.S., which has skyrocket high numbers, or Western Europe, talking about the bordering nations in Southeast Asia. It has really been a journey of growing a local powerhouse and a stronghold that carries more and more categories to the point, and that one is public. We usually don't talk about this, that PepsiCo celebrated the fact that they've signed with us a 15-year extension to the agreement they have with us with Laos. You won't think of Laos as the first place where you talk about digitalizing the route to market. 70% of our net revenue in Laos is driven through the LBC online platform, now being moved to Served, and that's where we're piloting the new app-based solution. That is also the region where Laos will probably remain an exception as the only place where we also represent PepsiCo in terms of snacks, because it just goes on top of a very strong route to market and a very strong B2B. Recapping, it has been about continuously supporting the full portfolio of brands, not just local brands, not just international brands. Secondly, continuing to highlight, amplify, and accelerate our digital capabilities, namely in terms of e-commerce, whilst at the same time being completely obsessed about defending the financial health and the financial performance of the business. Always paying attention to that ratio of how much are we pricing and how much are we premiumizing to avoid the collapse that we've had from some other players that were too focused just on premium or too focused just on on-trade. Because of that, we've been highly resilient and actually changed the scale of the region. We've also been highly collaborative with our partners, and sometimes Paul had a great example of how we're partnering with some of the retailers in the UK. We're actually partnering with Meituan, with Foodpanda, with Grab, to the point that both these players awarded us as Partner of the Year. As investors, you'll say that's nice to have on the wall, right, I'll put a little picture over there. Actually, that also means that year to date our growth with Meituan is over 50%. We are above fair share in China in terms of e-commerce. We are above fair share in Meituan in China, but we continue to drive ahead of the category growth. Engaging consumers in Asia is not just about partnering with digital integrators, it's actually about all the great consumer marketing that we do. With no further ado, I would like to let you watch a little video about how we activate the brands. Why need to brand press a button. SA. It. Very briefly, you just taken a tour of six of the eight markets that we have in the region. To conclude before I hand over to CK, a very heterogeneous reality of markets we are seeing, Served that is now playing at a much bigger scale. Continuing to offer long-term growth opportunities regardless of the short-term cyclical challenges we face today with a portfolio of brands that is better established than it was in 2018, in 2020, or in 2022 at much bigger scale, but really having to drive tailored approaches, namely on both serving general trade and fast-growing e-commerce. That's what's making the region continuously attractive for the future. It's really being now powered via digital acceleration. Thank you very much and over to CK to cover China. Thank you. Hello everyone, good afternoon. It is my pleasure to meet you face to face this time. I was doing this like three years ago online. Hopefully today I can give you a bit more excitement about China as to how the market is doing so far and how we have been performing and what we are doing and also moving forward. Where do we put our effort behind right now? Without ado, the next slide, if you can see on my right hand side, is the market volume. I don't think it's a surprise for you. The market in China has been declining in the past many years, right? It's negative 1.2%. However, you look at my left hand side, when they ranked the market by many countries, you can see it's still by far the biggest country in beer market and almost 2/3 higher than us. If you look at it, the value is almost only 1/3 of that. I think when we look at it and saying is that it is a big market, it's declining but the value is still not there yet. Hopefully, of course, it may not catch up to the level of the U.S. but it seems to be there's still room for growth in that sense. You look at by channel and by segment, if you look at this slide, this is by price segment, the green line pretty much is the mainstream and the blue line is pretty much the premium. You look at the premium line, it is still outperforming the mainstream, right? The premiumization has been going on for a long time, doesn't matter pre Covid or after Covid or the current period. It seems to be to say it is still premising overall. However, you look at the left hand side, the channel has shifted, the on-trade has been pressured and therefore the shift has been more to the off-trade right now. The off-trade has been growing and the premium brands, the premium volumes, has been growing in the off-trade. The net sales speculator in a way that you look at many has been softened, have been weakening a little bit more. That's because of the channel impact overall. It is still a promising market overall. It's just that the occasion has changed, right? When you look at the overall longer term in terms of the household structure and also disposable income in China, you can see in the past 10 years or so it has been rising in terms of the middle class and above, right. We do foresee it's going to make up to about 6% in 2030. It has been estimated as such. By looking at this, we will say that longer term it is still a very promising market to be in because it's a big market, it's premiumizing and still with a household income that's improving over time. I think it presents a very good opportunity for us to really, in this business, you have to in a way have a share in China. Now we have talked about the market. Let's zoom in a little bit about ourselves, who we are, where we are right now. If you look at these trajectories that we have been through, we've been there for 30 years and we have been in a way acquiring the company throughout the West. Therefore, we have been so-called the number one in the West and in many strongholds where we have 80% or more than 80% market share. We have a very good asset of our portfolio, which I'll share with you a bit more later on, and with a very good team. Now you look at the number of 27 breweries, bearing in mind 10 years ago, eight years ago, we actually had more than 40 breweries. You look at the employees, we have 6,800; about 6,700 eight years ago, it was more than 7,200. While we're growing the business, we're also becoming very efficient in our business overall over the years. Therefore, our accounts, our breweries, have been very much optimized to a very good shape right now. Many of us actually talk a lot about the big cities. This is about stronghold and our story and a model of growth pretty much also coming from big cities. You look at the big cities on this slide, we have grown from 9 cities in 2017 to right now 99 cities. Many of you ask me why 99, not 199; it is a very good number in China, in Chinese, so it keeps. Now we look at the volume right now, it is already one third of our volume. We have contributed quite a fair bit to our growth overall. We are already in the 21 provinces and cities. The strategy that we have for big cities, we have renewed that. Many of you ask me why you're not adding another 200 big cities. Before that, we go broad and we build our portfolios, we build our channel in the big cities. Right now, we go deep. The reason for us to go deep is one is the macro. The other thing is that we actually want to prioritize our investment in the different archetypes. Because within those archetypes, some of the markets, cities are only about 3%, 5%, but many 10%, and the others, good ones, we have 20% to 30% market share. We want to build that. We actually have many of the city already above 100kg out each in that. It's rather, we better build that rather than stretching ourselves thin to go for more new one, right? That's why we prioritize ourselves saying that we want to go deep, make sure that we are productive and make sure that we get share. That's why it's 99. It doesn't mean that we will not add more. We might in the coming years, maybe who knows, add to 150, then we will upgrade again and then we will sit. We do have some sitting cities right now that we can upgrade. We say wait, let's do this first before we upgrade further. Now apart from the big city, the next one that we have is the portfolio. I think the beauty of us in China right now is that you look at the portfolio here, the premium brands are all the international power brand. However, you look at the mainstream, you look at the economy, you see that a lot more in the local power brands here. It doesn't mean our local power brands are all mainstream. If you look at Chongqing for example, Chongqing has a premium pure draft at ¥12, right? Premium we said is about ¥8 and above and mainstream is about ¥4 to ¥8 and then below ¥4 in economy. What we have done over the years with the local power brand premiumization is that rather than just taking pricing, which we do as well, we want to offer consumer with their better proposition so that we can trade them up from ¥6 to ¥8, right? That's what we've done for example for Chongqing. Chongqing in the past we have the Chongqing classic Guoping that we call but we offer extra and then we said please trade up to the ¥8 because this extra mock is a better tasting. We've successfully converted that into extra mock. This is more for the off trades. On the on trades we do a lot more pure draft. Pure draft is a premium at ¥12 segment. That pure draft in the dining area, hopefully you have been to the Chongqing and you see our pure draft in a dining area that we sell a lot more dining that. If you look at the slide on the left hand side, the premiumization for us in stronghold has been quite good. I mean from the 27 to right now 37. Furthermore, in the big cities we actually have nearly 80% in the premium segment because when we go further away from our breweries, we actually want to drive the premium brand. It's more like Tuborg, it's more like Carlsberg and also Wusu. Big city is just not about Wusu big city. We also have a portfolio, but there is clearly room for us to build a bigger portfolio in the big cities because as you can see there's opportunity in the mainstream as well for us to tap into. There's still room for us to grow our portfolio. That's why the reason that we are sticking with not only a good number of 99 but also to really focus, focus building the footprint and the portfolio overall. Now let's look at how all this has played up too. If you look at the numbers here, over the years we have been premiumizing the business with a volume of 6% and then with the 10% CAGR on the net revenue. Given the challenge right now in the market because of the macro, we are still outperforming in the market overall. I think the growth is not as high as before, but everyone is so called impacted by the macro sentiments as well. If you look at double click into the more details, you look at the volumes over here, you see the green bar there is our stronghold, and then you have the big city in the black color. The volume over the years, we have added almost 50% growth in the volume. In the revenue, we have almost doubled, but this has not come from the big cities. The stronghold as well added because of premiumization that we're doing, because of some of the adjacency category that we enter into. That helps a lot more. Now you look at the segment here, you see 2019 overall with a big city and a stronghold to add up together is 15%. Right now we are already in the 50% in terms of the mix. Our business in China is very profitable. It's worth investing. Yeah. If you look at our revenue per hectoliter, we are like 1.4 times higher compared to the market leader. Our portfolio, our mix, our assets, everything else that we're doing is paying off nicely. These are what we have done and the results so far. What are we going to focus on going forward? These are the slides that I want to take you through. First of all, if you look at the asset that we have—going too fast to the next slide. Let me go back one. We have a very good portfolio of international brands and also local power brands. None of the players in China will have this portfolio because we have about a dozen brands that we have here. We have the international power brands. That is right now about 30% of business, where local power brands are 70%. Right. Look at both sides of it. We have been able to innovate, innovating the brands quite well and also quite aggressively. Beyond that, we also have been stepping into the beyond beer category that we start building. Apart from so-called premiumization, offering more of the added benefits for consumers, we also venture into the new categories right now, building the pillar of growth for the future. Before I take you to a bit more details on the others, I think the other asset that we look at is the brands that we talk about. I do want to show you some of the brands here, what it stands for. Now, Kronenbourg 1664, we like the I Tower because it's a French lifestyle, right? Consumers want to aspire to this luxury fashion type of thing. We have co-op with the Shanghai Fashion Week with Kronenbourg 1664 to build an image together to drive that lifestyle. Also, with the occasion of blue hours. It's after work, the blue hour occasion that we are building. Every brand that we have anchors on two things. One is what is the distinctive proposition. Secondly, it's about what occasion that you're actually talking about. French lifestyle, blue hours for Kronenbourg 1664. If you look at Carlsberg, Carlsberg is about probably the best, right? At the same time, right now we link it to football, okay. With football, we actually can activate into the Neo, the bar and the pubs, right? Also, Joao talked about Meituan and O2O. We actually activated quite a big program with them during the World Cups that you can get Carlsberg delivered to your doorstep in 30 minutes in chill. Whenever you enjoy a football game, you need to have a Carlsberg 2 box. Two Box is about music. When you think about music, rap, pop, you need to have Two Box. That is about Two Box and that's about the occasion for it. Now these are the international power brands. If you look at the local power brand Wusu, many of you know that Wusu has been like hardcore, right? Now we're building the hardcore from the heart, inner hardcore. One thing is that we talk about passion for Wusu brand right now. In Chinese it's called Nong. Nong means passion. You want to be passionate about your life. This is about that. The other thing that we're building about Wusu is that if you're having a barbecue without Wusu, it's not a barbecue, right? You need to have barbecue together with Wusu. That is automatic authentic barbecue, right? This is what we're building. Chongqing, the same thing. Chongqing is about local pride. That local pride also will anchor hot pot, right? Many of you have been to Chongqing. I believe some of you know the spicy hot pot, you have to go with Chongqing beer. Otherwise it's not a hot pot. Recently we actually have a lot of football matches going on. I'm not sure you have heard one from Guizhou that started. It's like a World Cup right now in China. Every province is organizing their own football matches. It's just like Manchester, it's just like Liverpool in the UK and all that. Within a province, different cities come up with their team and compete with each other. Chongqing right now is happening big time. We are part of that. We want to promote the local pride. Dali again. Dali is about local pride and about local music, right? It's about the local pop music in Yunnan. You see this singer that we have, so he's a very popular singer in Yunnan as well. That is about Dali and Windflower Snowmoon. Apart from that, we're building the new pillars. If you look at the left-hand side here, you have heard the Windflower Snowmoon. This Windflower Snowmoon is about relaxation. You can have it consumed at home with the hearts in the relaxing mode. This is with the ABV of only 1.5%, right? It's a very good fruity alcoholic beverage. You look at this part, this is Battery. In Chinese it's called Tianshi, which is Battery in Chinese. We are still piloting it. We are perfecting it. It's still small, but before we really scale it up, we want to get it right. We're testing it. I think the model that we have is that we will not go to something big and invest a lot up front. I think we always test it, we always pilot it when we see there is traction, then we scale. That's what we're doing with the battery right now. We are into the beverage also, not the poor type, but our own in the fruity beverage. This has been launched in the stronghold, I mean with a good start I would say, and still a lot more to do. We'll be having, you see already on the slide here with the three flavors, we actually launched so far only one and the two are now shipping into the market as we speak. Apart from that, with beyond beer, we're also testing a lot more on RTD, the soda water and also kavas, and all that has been tested right now in the market. We want to see, you know, apart from beer, what can we do, especially in our stronghold to leverage our route to market that we have had. Now apart from that, on this category, we also innovate a lot on the packaging. Many of you have tried the 1 liter and Jacob talked about that. You all have tried with the 1 liter Wusu with tea, the cigarette brew that we have on this slide. You see that we have a dozen, we do have another dozen in the pipeline. We actually have installed line up and running in May and we are looking for two more next year. It is growing on the wine and the 1 liter. You may find it, why is it 1 liter? I think first of all, 1 liter is quite a new news to the market. It looks very crafty, it looks very premium and also it's added with a lot more local ingredients. The red one that you tried last night is with tea, right, and also we have some herbs, we have some other stuff into this crafty 1 liter beer. Imagine about what U.S. has gone through, it's a lot more of the double IPA, a lot more of the western IPA and all the stuff, and there's a smaller crafty format. Here I think it's a Chinesification of the craft beer that is starting to move right now. For that, as I mentioned before, the price point also interesting because if you look at the consumer, they're willing to pay for some value added liquid and many of this are almost at least 1.5 index to the regular beer that we are selling. Who are the users? One thing is that you see a lot more because of the weakening of macro, people are not really going for the high pricey alcoholic beverages, but we source and trade down to this one because this is very affordable. We're talking about DKK 20 to 30, right? I mean almost similar to the RMB DKK, so in that sense it looks good, but you put something new on the table to share with your friends at home because it's different beer that you are talking about and different ingredients that you can sample. This part is growing. If you look by channel, the on-trade is going down as we all know, we have seen before. We are still ahead of the category in that sense, less impacted than the off-trade. We are ahead of the category. We outperform within the off-trade. If you look at the e-commerce, you look at the modern off-trade, we're well ahead in this segment. With the 1 liter, with the innovations that you put into the off-trade, it helps us to mitigate the impact for the on-trade overall. That's why we still in a way outperform the market. If you look at the market share overall, what we have done is that with the innovation that we have in pack, liquid, ingredient, brands, that all doing, that's paid off overall over the years from about 6% market share to right now 9% market share. That leads from Yingnan, I talk about the extra mock for Chongqing. We also copy that extra mock into the Dali brand of V8 Extra mock that we call. Whenever we find a success in certain brand, in certain idea, we copy that to the other brands as well because we do have a dozen of brands that we can work with and that brand stands for unique proposition and unique occasion for the consumer. Overall, if you look at my summary, I'm trying to sell China right now. China is still a very promising long-term opportunity that we're looking at because by far it's the biggest market. It still has room to premiumize given the demographic as well if you look at in terms of the performance of cash. China, we have been in a way outperformed the market. Thirdly, we do have the recipe that's proven overall to grow and gain share in this market. Lastly, we are building on the new pillars, not only the big cities but the new channels, the new one liter pack, then beyond beer and also some of the RTD that we are doing right now, including energy drinks that we are testing. Hopefully that gives you a good update about China and how we are doing and where we are putting our efforts behind. Thank you very much. Thank you, CK. Please, we take a Q and A. Soren, please. Yeah. Thanks for a great presentation on China. You showed the market share development. The natural question is how far. Do you think you can go? Would that higher market share automatically mean higher profitability as well? Thank you for your questions. I think that helps me to supplement some of the information. I think in China our business right now is the market leading in terms of the profitability and the profit margin. Right. The beauty of the business is that we get it to so efficient. Right now what we want to do is to continue to grow the top line. With that we actually have, you know, to see how we best invest into this market that's big, going to premiumize just so that we support overall the brand growth that we have. Therefore, we will. I mean, if we look at a big CTO, it's a very profitable business for us. It's just not the same stronghold. For us to balance, to build the overall in terms of the financial by growing the volume, by growing the portfolios, by investing into the business in the marketing, and also SG&A will help overall to gain the traction further. We have proven in the past the market obviously is challenging right now. I think what we have done, the off-trades in terms of growth has helped to mitigate the impact on the on-trades overall. That part also will invest further and hopefully continue our growth trajectories. I think most importantly is about whether we got the right recipe overall. I think we do by looking at the past seven to eight years and how do we really move that forward and continue to gain share. Bearing in mind, for Carlsberg China we only have 9% market share. Our competitors like 20-30%. We are still tiny, well not that tiny, but 9% so there's still room for us to grow a big city. Also in Song Ho in terms of the adjacencies together with other new products that we're talking about. New product adjacency and all that, we do need some investment to really grow the volume. Yeah. Hi, thank you. Question regarding the record high EBIT margin, Shao, you recorded and I guess CK also in the first half of the year, 26%. Could you help us break down how you achieved such a high margin in terms of supply chain, gross margin, marketing. Investments, sales investments, and how we should think about these elements also going forward. The first thing is a difference between H1 and full year, which is always there. Do not take H1 as full year, first thing. The second thing is that it's a combination of pricing where we needed to price, we've priced in Laos, we're pricing in Malaysia, and continuously driving the most premium part of the portfolio. The second thing is extremely good work. I mentioned that in my presentation, Thomas, with supply chain, and you will see it covered in a deep dive by Ulrike. We really didn't leave any stone unturned. That is particularly true in Asia, but that is absolutely true for the other two regions. That is allowing us for improved gross margins. I would say this year is better helped by efficiency than by the story. We had two years of high inflation in Asia where we really had to price up over the previous two years. This year is more from efficiencies than from pricing. That has actually been reinvested into marketing. The region carries very, very healthy, very healthy marketing. We've kept the same logic that we've had over the years that started with Cees, that has continued with Jacob in terms of funding our journey and operational cost management. It's being very strict. That is allowing that part of the gross margin and part of keeping the SG&A in check has been reinvested into marketing, but mostly in H1 coming into the bottom line. There's no marketing cuts in terms of the numbers coming to operating margin. Sarita. Couple for CK and one for. CK, just on Vietnam, when will you be done with your distributor change? How much of your distributor network are you turning over and when would you hope to see a turning performance there? Secondly, on Laos, I think it's been a tough year for Laos as well. Is that just macro or, you know, when do you think that will turn around? Just one for CK on your off-trade performance. I think you're growing more or less in line with the off-trade channel. You spoke about strong outperformance in modern trade and e-commerce. Why are you not outperforming by a bigger margin in the overall off-trade? What's holding that back, if anything? I'll start with Vietnam and Laos. On Vietnam, what we see is a tougher first half, a better Q3, and a better outlook in Q4 compared to Q3. We will be done by mid next year with the full distributor network review. We will be very well on our way by the end of this year. We're already seeing tracking improvements quarter on quarter this quarter and as we go forward, which means that we probably have 50% too many distributors to what we should have. That's what we're correcting over that period. It's really about concentrating on the true partners and not just on distribution for the sake of distribution. On Laos, the major outflow of labor across the border happened in the second half of last year. We had record performance last year, and that record performance was mainly driven through H1. We see that now stabilizing over the past couple of months. The past couple of months are quite reassuring. That is mainly driven by the macroeconomics. Then you have two very different realities, which is soft drinks and beer. Beer, after many, many years, is a little bit more competed. Don't assume that competition is just on premium. It's actually on the low end of the market too. We are covering that through. Through. Through our portfolio, whilst in soft drinks it's really category driven because our market shares continue to go up. Whilst the market shares continue to go up, the category has really suffered in the first half. We see recovery over the past two months already. Maybe let me answer that. On the off-trade, I think we talk about only the e-commerce and the mock because there are newer things to talk about. Overall, our traditional trade is still gaining share in Asia. I think what we do see is that one of the key indicators is the mix of our can versus bottle because bottle is pretty much for the on-trade and can is for the off-trade. When you look at the off-trade or can, especially for Wusu, for example, for Kronenbourg 1664, for Carlsberg, we are growing double digits, I mean a strong double digit in the off-trade to compensate for the impact in the on-trade. It is growing not only the mock and also in O2O but also in the traditional trade as well. Andre, thank you. Thank you. Only two questions. It will only be two questions. A question around China. Just to be sure, you showed this slide number nine where you showed the volume for Big Cities and Stronghold and others. It looks like Stronghold and others. Volumes are completely flat since 2017. Can you grow volumes there at all? That's my first question. The second question is in terms. Of soft drinks, how much of the portfolio is it now on? If you look 10 years ahead. Now we talk a lot about soft drinks. What could it be? First of all, if you look at the stronghold, it is not really flat. I mean, stronghold is about 1% each in terms of growth over the years in terms of volume. Bearing in mind, in stronghold we already have about 80% market share. So whenever 80% market share in the market total, China is declining by 1.2%. In contrary, we are still growing about 1%. We are outperforming the overall market in there. Having said that, if you look at the value in stronghold, it has been growing very nicely because of premiumization that we talk about, because of the new product that we launched, that we talked about. Right now we are actually building the so-called beyond beer, not only in soft drink, but also in energy that we're trying and also in other RTD that we're trying. What we have seen is that we have a good start with the fruity beverage, that we see a lot of synergy in terms of the trades in the dining and also in the off trades, especially in our stronghold. That's what we are building on right now. We just started this year. We see a very good start that we started to build more flavors, more offerings, and expanding our distributions as well. The only build I would have on that is that what you don't see immediately, even if we do it from a total brand performance, is the transformation of the Chongqing brand within Chongqing and the transformation of the Wusu brand within Xinjiang. Seven years ago Xinjiang was Wusu, Wusu Green. A large portion of that brand nowadays is Wusu Red at a much higher price point. The same in Chongqing from Gui Bin to extra malt, from extra malt to pure draft. Actually, the team in China has done a brilliant job of premiumizing at scale the local power brands with each one of the business units. Andrea. When you took Vusu nationally, it was extremely successful. How successful is the geographic expansion that you're trying now? With Chongqi Dali, these other brands and. How important is the success of these brands for your strategy of going deeper in the cities? Yeah, I think Wusu, you look at it, is that in the past it's only one product that's been traveling all around China and that's the Red Wusu, right. The Red Wusu also has been skewed very on fit in that sense, especially barbecue that we talk about. What we see is that it was a risk with just one SKU that we talked about. Today we have Wusu portfolio already for different price point and also for the 1 liter pack that you have tried last night, many of you. The so-called innovation and also the portfolio build of Wusu as a brand, it has helped in a way to stabilize the volume. We start this year seeing that it's good growth overall already with the line extension with the innovation. The brand itself is very strong with an edge in China because of the distinctive so-called propositions that we are having. Therefore, we are extending the brand, we're stretching the brand a bit more right now, that it seems to work. Sorry, can I just ask on these other brands like Chongqing and that, what sort of penetration do they have across your cities? Is there still headroom for growth? Right now, pretty much it's selected cities that we are tacking on together with the hot pot restaurants. It's still very small. We're still piloting and testing the model, so to speak. We hope that you will travel a lot more to many outlets and many cities. Still, we will not go national. When we say, I mean, China is a big market, it's such a big market. We need to keep focus where we want to compete and where we can compete efficiently. We will adopt again the focus approach to make sure that we scale in a city that's big enough before we go to the next one. Right now, we are doing a few with Chongqing. Ed, thanks for the presentation. Ed Mundy from Jefferies. If you take slide 7 and slide. 9, and I think your strategy is. To try in China, try and increase mainstream within your big cities. If you get a more even balance on mainstream relative to premium and you portion that to the weight of the big cities as your overall China. Volumes, it implies about 10% volume uplift. I think on your business all things being equal. Does that math sort of smell? Right? Number one. Number two, historically I think one of the reasons why premium works so well in the big cities is you're able to distribute the brand over a longer distance. Can you distribute mainstream over that longer distance to feed the big city strategy? Yeah. I think in the business of beer, it is about scale, right? Beer scale is very important. When we branch out to further away from breweries, we go with premium and we go with Kronenbourg 1664, we go to Tuborg and all that sort. If you look at the market size of China, it's like a triangle, right? You have the super premium, you got the premium, sub premium, and also a big chunk of it is in the mainstream and mainstream plus, which is about ¥5 to ¥8, for example. That segment is quite attractive. We are not talking about economy because economy is very small for us. We are not interested to play that. What we're saying is that for us to be more efficient and flex our muscle in the big city, pretty much you need to have a good portfolio, at least on the mainstream plus up to the premium, and therefore you can then have the scale. In the ways that we look at, we have been closing breweries in the past, but now also we are building new breweries. We got a fourth one last year that was up and running, and the fourth one is catered for many parts of our big cities, even though it is in the south. That also helps in a way to reduce the logistic costs as we grow the business in big cities. It's a portfolio. Of course, we want to be able to supply to the big cities that we actually have good chance of promising opportunities, opportunity to grow. Ed, just quick builds. I was afraid you were going to throw a curveball because I stole your taxi last night. For long we have actually been reducing the brewery network, and as CK just said, Foshan is quite the exception to that trend. A new brand spanking efficient brewery down south in the Guangdong province is exactly there to cater for that long distance. That is the first thing. The second thing is that initially we had actually had two Borg-led big cities or Wuzhou-led big cities. What we've also learned with this new approach through the archetypes is that it is very important that you supply your distributor partners with a full portfolio of beverages, else it will be covered by another brewer. It's those two factors. Sarah, I think there was a final question. Is it a brief one? We need a coffee break after this. Yes, it was just notable that you didn't really talk about zero beer in the context of this market. I'm just interested in your perspective on that. Yeah, I think what we started is that in a way, AFB we have been trying for many years, so we have not seen that it has gained traction. Not just us, but also in industry. What we do see right now is there's a trend of going a lower ABV. I mean the ABV in China is quite low already. It's about 3% and now we're launching a 1.5% of windfall. Snowmo is even lower of that. That lower ABV seems to get some traction overall. Having said that, I think when we talk about China, the AFB concept itself may not work so well. If we can position it as different beverages brewed but without alcohol, don't call it beer, it may work. I think many are trying and we are studying that as well. Don't position it as beer per se, but position it as the other beverages. If I would take the question more broadly across Asia, you're absolutely right that Asia is a few years behind. I could word it like that, which is not true across the whole of Asia. If you look at markets like Singapore and Hong Kong, pretty much the same trends that you see in the West. China has a factor of being structurally lower ABV in nature. What we do see across the region is a trend on moderation and a trend on responsible drinking. In some places it will take exactly the same shape as in Europe and in other places in the future, together with Yves, it will take other shapes and formats that will come over time through innovation, not necessarily just an alcohol free beer. All right, thank you. We will take a short coffee break, 15 minutes. The last break for today. Be back at 3:10 P.M. Yeah, let's give a second everybody to come inside. Great, good. Central & Eastern Europe and India, I think the presentation, you were all waiting seven months in the job, extremely excited, grateful and at the same time proud for leading such an amazing region. A region that already, as you heard in the morning from Jacob Aarup-Andersen, is spanning from Canada to India and then from Brazil and we include Central & Eastern Europe, all the way to Australia to Japan and South Korea. A lot of very different markets. When I'm talking about different markets, I'm referring to our position, to market shares, to consumer profiles from per capita of 5 liters per head to 150 liters per head. Extremely, extremely unique. Within this uniqueness, a lot of growth opportunities and a lot of resilience because of the span of the territories and as you will see later on because of the span also of the portfolio, that region is certainly giving a lot of resilience. Resilience to soft markets or to difficult days. We all know that the industry is going through some difficult days. At least some of our territories with geopolitical unrest, with the war in Ukraine, with protests in Serbia, in Balkans, with a lot of soft sentiments from the conflict consumers and still out of combination of hedging to different parts of the world. Also equally important, by having the opportunity to tap into accretive to revenue and to margins segments, we manage not only to protect but in majority of our countries to grow our revenue, to continue winning markets, we shares and coming out with a lot of learnings out of a very, very difficult period that we all go through. You see here also a little bit of the big markets and I will discuss a little bit more about them and certainly the categories. 70% of our business is attributed to local power brands and core portfolio, which is the best of us operating to all those markets. You will see how we are building a second leg, a very strong second leg so that we are managing the two parts of the portfolio. In the summary, we're talking about 14 business units. 14 managing directors, some of them running a single country, some of them running a multi-country cluster. I will say with the exception of export and license, which is a bit of a different type of organization, we are operating on small clusters of countries. While central export and license department is a combination of different business units and countries and markets. Today they are operating in 87 territories, 87 markets and countries. Hopefully within the next 12 to 24 months we will be reaching another 10 or 11 new territories. In majority of our markets we are within either the number one or the number two port position. As I mentioned before, there's completely different dynamics on the portfolio. On our marginality and the demographics we represent roughly one fourth of the volume. Hopefully the next time we meet you will see that we'll represent much more than that. Within this unique and diversified portfolio of countries, there are some strategies that they are holding across. One is related to how we maximize the potential of each one of the markets, how we make sure that we make the most of a very different stage that each one of our markets is today. Within that there are four big priority markets: India, that Nilesh will talk a bit more after me; Kazakhstan and Central Asia, a future diamond that we will spend a bit more time; Ukraine, a stronghold and one of our most profitable markets within the region; and Export and License, which is, as I said, unique. I will call them the door opener type of unit where they are capturing white spaces. We go with initially easy to enter propositions through different business models. Eventually over time we invest more or we decide to stay on a different model. This is the geographical type of prioritization. Then we have the portfolio and as I said, there are two big segments. In reality there are much more, but if we want to simplify, there is the base. This is the core, which is around 70% of the volume and 55% of our revenue, which is still very profitable and still has a lot to give us across all our markets. We try also to premiumize it with extensions and with flavors and with one offs. That also gives not only a freshness to this portfolio, but also gives some accretive marginality to the base. In parallel we're working with international power brands with premium and super premium segments and what we call beyond beer, soft drinks, energy that you will see in some later slides that is growing much faster than the base and certainly is giving us much higher marginality. All that through investing on the right capabilities and commercial capabilities. You heard a lot from the colleagues about execution, about route to market, about digital. Also investing in supply chain and capacity across our territories and certainly on the right people, on the right talents. You see here things like talent to value, but also our diversity and inclusion agenda which some of our territories, some of our markets historically have some touch up to do. Certainly we are coming back to the average, close to the average of the rest of the business and efficient. We are a super efficient organization because of lower than average revenue per liter. We have to make sure that we stay very lean in order to continue competing in such extremely competitive environment while building and creating oxygen so that we can accelerate, accelerate both top line and bottom line. As I said, four markets. I will not talk about India, but I want to start with what I call a future diamond. This is Central Asia, Kazakhstan and at least the three markets, the three core markets of Central Asia we are already operating and we're already having some strong position both in beer, but not only. We're quite strong in energy with flash up and we're already quite complementary with premium and beyond beer and some of our extensions that are growing faster than the core. Very attractive demographics, young population that is growing, very, very low in most of the countries per capita which is also growing GDP which is moving in the right direction. We were as an Excom with Jacob 3 weeks ago visiting Almaty. We were all left super excited about the opportunity with a strong belief about what we can do in this cluster of markets. You know already that we're starting very soon with PepsiCo Portfolio. We are ready to take over and we're taking over very fast in Kazakhstan and in Kyrgyzstan. Just with this move and with the projection of our brands in the next two years, we will be tripling our business in Central Asia. This will become one of the biggest cluster of countries not only for my region, but for Carlsberg Group overall. Now from a future diamond to an existing powerhouse, a stronghold. This is Ukraine. Ukraine is a market, is a territory that we've been investing for many years already. We are winning in Ukraine. Across channels, categories, territories, we've been extremely successful. We have three plants, three breweries that also help us to stay more resilient to the different circumstances. You all know that the war is escalating. This certainly gives a bit extra pressure to the consumer confidence. We remain extremely positive about the future of the country. We are not only waiting for the opportunities when the war is over, but we already, as we did for the past two years, stay extremely supportive to all the opportunities that are coming along the way. Ukraine is a powerhouse when it comes to portfolio. We have extremely very high mix when it comes to premium and super premium and to other subcategories. Some of you might know, I think majority will not know that Ukraine is the second biggest market to Kronenbourg 1664 Blanc after China. There are a lot of similar one-off surprises that showcase how important this market is for us. A few words for export and license. As I said, the opportunity for us to penetrate into new territories with a very agile way, with two main models: export, that usually we are shipping and there are partners on the other side of the border that are taking care of our products; or license, like Turkey, which is one of our biggest markets, that you give it completely to somebody else to run it for you. A great example again, Turkey with 49% market share in the ground of Efes in the country of Efes. So 87 active markets and many more to come, but also within those 87 markets a lot of opportunities to bring news, to bring new portfolio, to bring more opportunities of flavors and extensions within our usually super premium portfolio. This is also a unit that is 90% or more than 90% international power brands. I talk a bit about premiumization. You see the development. This is what we call all mix driving brands and segments, so everything related to the premium, to alcohol-free, you see Garage here, a beautiful brand that is doing extremely well in the region, and certainly energy drinks. All those are accretive both at the revenue per liter, but also in our marginality. As you see, they grow much faster than the corporate portfolio. Somebody told me that we are all in FMCG and especially in the beverage business. We are all good in planning for 10 days a year, but we have to execute 365 days a year. All those plans, all those strategies will not come to reality if we were not extremely focused on how we bring execution to execute excellence. There are two main areas here. One is what I will call in-store execution, so how we present our portfolio and our brands in the eyes of customers, shoppers, and consumers. You heard a lot from our colleagues about FIT, about our route to market excellence, about defining very clear look of success and how we really take in a very segmented and focused approach. What we execute, how we execute, and how we make the most of this opportunity. The second, equally important, is consumer engagement, especially for dark markets where we don't have the opportunity to communicate in different ways. How we use sampling, how we use big events like music assets, like different opportunities with social events to come closer to our consumers, to expose our brands, and of course, very important in emerging markets, to give the opportunity for consumers to try for the first time the liquid itself. Putting everything together, I see I'm 19 seconds over my time. There are four territories, four countries or units that we're over-investing and focusing on. There is a lot of focus behind creating the second pillar, the second leg beyond the core. This is a combination of international power brands, but not only, and certainly staying focused on execution excellence and bringing an algorithm that certainly helps to grow while protecting our marginality. With that, I will ask Nilesh to give a bit more color about India. Thank you. Thank you, Nikos. Thank you. Good afternoon India. We have kept last so that all of you stay awake because it's an exciting market. First of all, I think many of you know India is a very unique alcohol market. So India is a very unique market. What I will do today is take you through how the industry is structured and then I will also take you through how we are structured, what are the choices we have made and what has brought us a lot of success so far and what will continue to bring success for us in the future. First of all, I will take you through the industry. Many of you may know that India is very much a spirits market. 70% of the market is spirits and the spirits are broken into what we are familiar with, which is whiskey and white spirits, which in India is referred to as IMFL, Indian made foreign liquor. Then what we have another half is country liquor. Country liquor is locally made cheap liquor from either rice or sugar and it's really targeting low income households. As you know, this is a large number of people. You can see beer is a relatively small amount of alcohol consumed from beer. On the right hand side, what you see is the sort of pricing tier and what you will see from this chart or takeaways. Beer is relatively expensive in India versus spirits and that's because it's overtaxed. The reasons for that are many and I won't go through that now. What I leave you with is that consumption of beer is very low. What's changing, which I will cover later, is the younger generation, which is almost 70% of the population is under 35, is now gradually gravitating towards beer. I think one of the big changes is that we have now multinational companies that account for 90% of beer and the standards and quality and the buzz around the category has helped gain interest among the younger consumers. With that I will now take you through India's political system. We have a federal government and then we have 36 states. In alcohol it's like running a continent with 36 countries because each state, the alcohol is governed by the state. Each state has its own taxation policy on alcohol. Each state also has its own policies on route to market, its own policies on drinking age and so on and so forth. We're dealing with 36 different countries. In addition to that, each market has its own design of route to market. Around 65% of the market is what we call government market, where brewers and distillers send the product to the government warehouses and then the retailers come and collect it. We've then got another set of 25% of the market which is around what we call auction market, which is basically still sending the goods to the government bonded warehouse and it goes to the retailers. The retailers also have to have license to operate and these licenses are changed every year, so they're auctioned out. There is a churn in the ownership of the retailer. That makes it more interesting, as you can imagine. Finally, about 10-15% of the market is traditional FMCG distributorship. India is so unique that 1.4 billion people, but there are only 100,000 outlets that are given license to sell alcohol. It's a very small number of outlets. You can see the number of outlets when you compare with Laos or Vietnam, it's relatively small. India prefers to regulate its. On the right hand side what you see is different states, the level of consumer pricing, the margins that the entire chain makes. What you see here is the price the consumer pays and what portion of the price goes to the government, what goes to the trade and then what comes to us. It's very important that we make choices around this. In addition to all of that, you've got export import license. States want to make sure they maximize their revenue and in order to avoid infiltration, they've imposed export and import duties between the states. Of course the retailers also have to buy licenses. In some states, at least in one state, the license can cost up to $200,000, up to $3 million. Therefore their margins tend to be higher. Pricing varies, margins vary, and so on and so forth. I'll come to later on on basis of this, how we then structured ourselves. India is also a relatively dark market. Actively promoting alcohol is discouraged in many ways. Consumer led activities are highly restrictive. We can't do TV for example. If you want to do extensions, you can do it, but it has to have a certain amount of revenue and a percentage of that revenue is only allowed to be invested. There are areas which is merchandising and which is around also what you do inside the outlet and some limited outside outlet is allowed. This is where we also play a strong role. As Nikos mentioned, our execution machine is excellent and I'll share with you later on. On the right-hand side, you see some of the executions that are larger than life and that allows us to gain a lot more attraction from our consumers. I will just cover the type of outlets. In India, we have the traditional outlets and the modern outlets. The traditional outlets are counter types and grill types because of safety. Then you've got traditional sitting outlets and we have the modern formats. What is changing in India is this modern format, which is relatively small but is rapidly increasing. This is where we see a lot of younger consumers now gravitating towards in major big cities, but also in some of the smaller cities these outlets are springing up in the meantime. However, 95% of our volume currently goes through, and industry volume more or less goes through, these traditional outlets. We know how to operate in those outlets. We build relationships with the trade and we execute some of our limited assets that we can execute to the best of ability and make them larger in life in the social media. I'll come to the pack formats that exist in India. Predominantly, it's a 650 ml glass and then cans, and the pints are relatively small. As these modern outlets grow, we expect the pints to also, over time, grow. You can see 30% of the market is cans. As beer prices on the glass go up, consumers are gravitating towards the cans. Carlsberg India is over-indexing. We are at about 35% in glass. This is one area that also has allowed us to succeed. Now I'll come to how the market is structured. The taxation, the state is by state. Within this, what are the opportunities that we have? On the left-hand side, what you see is the consumer base. 150 million population still drinks alcohol. A large number, of course, don't for various reasons. 150 every year, 20 million legal drinking age population joins, and a lot of this young population is now gravitating towards beer because quality has improved. There's a lot more buzz in the category and so on and so forth. I will explain to you later on what are the areas that are really driving this. Second is, as you all know, it's one of the bright spots in the world where the economy is growing, disposable incomes are rising, urbanization is increasing, there's a lot more eating out, a lot more concerts. Global artists are coming to India, filling up stadiums. For example, Coldplay came to India recently, 110,000 people filled up the stadium. This is where all the young people are gathering. Of course, now more and more women are participating in beer because they're able to interact in these modern outlets, visit them, interact with the brands, and also be active in the social circle. Beer generally, for multiple reasons, is also increasing in popularity. We see this young population as a key driver for the long-term growth in India. This is a busy chart, but I will take you to the right-hand, the left-hand side here. You see the strong segment here. Strong segment in India is 80% of the beer in India. People liked they came from whiskey to beer. They don't want to go to mild, they want to stick to strong beers. You can see in the strong, in the premium, and the mainstream where we play and we are focused on, we are in a very good position at number two with a reasonably high market share and growing. On the mild side, this is only 20% of the industry and we are in a reasonable place but a lot of opportunity. We have improved our brews since after Covid. We've improved our packaging and look and feel. Therefore, we are now able to also make sure that we invest in this area to grow from a very low base. In January 2025, we launched Kronenbourg 1664. Kronenbourg 1664 is a super premium category. The super premium category is relatively small in India and it's now our responsibility to actually drive the category growth. Early signs that we have launched in three, four states are very, very positive. We expect that this to also accelerate as we invest more in this category. I said we have 36 markets. What we decided in Carlsberg India is that we're not going to go everywhere, anywhere. We're going to bring a lot of focus in where we want to win. What we decided as a company is to stay focused in 22 states. This is almost 80% of the industry volume. This is where 80% of industry volume sits. We also drilled down further out of the 22 and we will focus in nine specific states. Then we further drilled down and said out of the nine states we're going to now form them into clusters. Cluster 1, Cluster 2, Cluster 3, and 4. The basis of this, this is where we have the right to win. Where the largest volume is, two, ease of doing business, and three, profitability and what we get return on our investment in terms of marketing and other investments that we made. These four clusters are where we geographically focus. What we said was wherever there is profitability, we will go with our entire portfolio and focus on driving the entire portfolio. Where we see profitability often is a challenge, which I showed you in the earlier slide by market what the margins were. We will focus on the premium segment, but that doesn't mean that we don't also follow up on the other. All our investment goes into premium. Whatever we earn from the premium segment, we then plow it back to drive the portfolio. The focus remains in the premium segment, and that is cluster 2, 3, and 4. I said we take the states, we broke down to nine, then broke down to clusters. What we do is also take each of the states and break those down, those outlets that are in the state, into platinum, gold, silver, and bronze. Again, size of opportunity, return on investment. To make sure that our brands are also growing in these big outlets where we have the right to win. We have further segmented into cities and then into these smaller, smaller outlets into platinum, gold, silver, and bronze. Here the objective is to determine where we should put more of our rebates and trade investments. We have also invented some of our own innovative trade programs in a very restrictive market. Where should we deploy them? Some of the areas that were talked about earlier in the technology space that we're involved in, consumer promotions also, where do we get the biggest bang for our buck? The FIT that we talked about earlier, we have integrated it and are driving all of that to drive our performance across all our nine states, but also across our 22 states. I took you through how the industry is structured, complex, unique. I showed you how all of that then leads to opportunity for us in terms of population and then how we are structured so that we win in all the markets that we are present in. The outcome of all of this is actually this. We have taken our share from 5% to 22% and steadily growing every year. If I now drill down by state and by categories, segments, you will find in some states we're actually neck and neck with the leader, where in some states we are somewhere in the middle, and in some states we are significantly lower. I will show you an example. Within this, we already have significant opportunity in the first leg. We also have significant opportunity in the middle, where somewhere in the middle we can take it up. We also have significant opportunity where we are significantly lower than we should be. There is plenty of opportunity for us. Within this, there are some significant achievements. We almost increased our volume nine times. Tuborg has become the number two brand in India after Kingfisher. We have a significantly strong position in our cities, some of our cities, and also in some of our states. There is opportunity in the states that we are already present. The outcome of all of that is you can see that our Tuborg performance has been fantastic for a number of years. I think CK, my colleague, showed how Tuborg is positioned around music and young people. Exactly the same is followed in India. On the right-hand side, you can see Carlsberg, which is seen as a premium. As the middle class rises, we see a lot of our consumers also gravitating towards Carlsberg as a premium, premium choice. Our performance in the brands and the portfolio is also demonstrating what we have done is working for us. On the next slide, I will show you where to actually give you more concrete evidence of where the real opportunity lies. If you look at this, this is the premium on the left. On the right-hand side, you can see the premium market and how we've grown our shares. What you see is in one state we have a very, very strong position of 40-45% share. This is the state of Maharashtra, where the capital is Mumbai, so it's a rich state. You look at Karnataka, which is Bangalore, the IT capital of the world, lots of young people. We are still significantly down. This is where we have the opportunity to grow. You may ask, why are you at 15%? We put our brewery up in 2018-2019. Then came Covid, and now after Covid, we're really concentrating on if you have a brewery in the state, you have a greater chance of success because you are logistically and you also get government support in terms of pricing, etc. You can see now I can take you through this example by segment, by state. We have opportunities everywhere which we are going after. This is an area not only of our strength, but also shows the area where we have a lot of opportunity. If I pull it all together, you can see over the last few years significant growth in our revenue growth to double digit. Also, our volume has significantly grown over these years and we've had a phenomenal success. What has come out of all of this is we've grown too fast. As a result of that, capacity has been one of our constraints. We have our own seven breweries. One is currently inactive in Bihar because of prohibition. There's an election coming soon, hopefully we'll see that progress in a different way. In order to make up for the capacity, we decided to partner some of our contract packers. We've added seven, we are likely to add two more. While the constraints were there, we were able to continue supplying through our contract packers. One or two of those contract packers have now become our strategic partners who will invest on behalf of us to our standard of brewery and will be exclusive for us. That also balances out our risk in India. I think it's the right way to go about it. Not only that, going forward, we are already approval for building a new brewery in Maharashtra, which is where the capital is Mumbai and where we have a strong position. We also have a brewery that's going to be built in UP, a population of 240 million. The state Chief Minister has an ambition to take that economy to $1 trillion in the next few years. We want to be there and our strategic partner is going to invest in on our behalf. That de risks us. We have our own breweries, where we have adjacent land, et cetera, where we are now purchasing to expand in our own breweries. The capacity constraints part of it goes away for us going forward. Therefore, we will be able to capture the opportunities that I shared with you. Just to summarize all of this, we have the right portfolio. I think we don't want to complicate our portfolio too much when we are dealing with a complicated world outside. We have plenty of opportunity to grow in the beer segment. Of course, we have opportunity to go after new innovations in beyond beer. In the middle you can see our choice that we made of the states, the clusters, the outlet, segmentation and all our execution that I will share with you in the video that's coming up which will bring to life our brands. It will bring to life our in-store execution and it'll bring to life the events. We have signed a three-year contract with Sunburn. We have big events where these international artists and local artists come. We have all our bars, we own these events. They're larger than life events, and our brands are also larger than life. All of this is then taken to social media and amplified so that we get millions more eyes and faces to see what we're doing on the ground. With that, we can play. I think in that video you also saw some of the technology that Esther and Anders talked about, which is also helping us succeed in the marketplace, and it's also giving us a competitive advantage. With that, I go back to, in summary, India is undoubtedly a complex market, and India is also a market where complexity gives you an opportunity if you know how to operate. First of all, in this market we know how to operate and how to succeed, and I've shown you how we can achieve that. Secondly, the future looks very bright for India. More and more young people are gravitating away from spirits, which have got high alcohol, to gradually to beer. For all the reasons that I explained, a lot of outlets, et cetera. I think that's where we see huge opportunity, demographics, income levels rising, eating out, and all these events that you saw in the video. Thirdly, we have been very successful in the way we've been operating in India in a complex market. We have been very focused with segmentation documented. We've been very surgical in our approach, and we believe that if we continue staying there, we will of course continue to succeed. There are markets that we are not in, and we are continuously reviewing once they become available to us in terms of profitability, ease of doing business, and where we are present. Where we are not present, we have also gone to 2 or 3 markets on a license basis. Overall, this is a great success story for Carlsberg India and many more years to come of success. Thank you all very much. Thank you, Nilesh. Nikos is joining. Questions? We'll start from the back this time. Anyone there? No. Lawrence. Hi, just you mentioned on the regulatory structure in India that the taxation on. Beer is significantly higher than what we. Would expect given the alcohol content of it. Have you had any discussions with the. We're constantly having dialogue with the government on taxation. I think for the government, collecting revenue is the ultimate, ultimate goal. Of course, since spirits are a much bigger category for them, to make sure that beer continues to sell well is the objective. Therefore, they are very cautious in not increasing beer prices. Sorry, spirits prices too high. That doesn't mean that's the same case in all the states. It varies by states. Some states are aware of that. We need to support the beer industry. Beer industry employs a lot more people than spirits industry. Beer industry supports a lot more supporting industries, for example, which have got nothing to do with alcohol, malt making, glass making, can making, paper cartons, all of that. Number three, beer companies are bringing a lot more foreign direct investment into India, like Carlsberg and our competitors. Finally, it's about helping them collect more and more revenue. They can't ignore it. State by state it varies, but the underlying is that they want to collect more revenue and they're very cautious about taking beer series prices too high. Our job is to convince them the benefits of the beer. We continue to engage, not ourselves, but also the beer association works with us and lobbyists to make them aware that they should make it a bit more fairer pricing. Hang on one second. Thank you. Just to follow up on that. think in Russia there was a situation where the government realized that beer was. Lower alcohol and therefore perhaps did less bad for you than spirits. You didn't mention that as a reason for beer potentially. Oh, we are constantly mentioning that, there's no question about it. As I said, the underline for the state is about collecting revenues at the end of the day. Currently, state revenues are under some stress across most of the states. They're very much focused on bringing their books to balance first, I think. It's absolutely also the case from a health point of view, from an addiction point of view, all of those things we continuously mention to the state when we engage. Could you perhaps talk a little bit about some of the benefits since you've had full control of the Indian business? I think CapEx is one of the elements. Can you talk about some of. The other benefits from a strategic standpoint? To be honest, I don't think there was that much disruption. I know it may sound odd, but it wasn't that much disruption from an operational point of view. There were three, four of us in the top management who shielded the rest of the management from any of the disruption, and therefore we were able to continue performing. You saw those results. I mean, this all came to a head in 2016-2017 just when I joined. I think from that point of view it was all okay. Secondly, we did launch Kronenbourg 1664 early on and then it was approved by our JV partners, but in the end there was some dispute over shareholders and we pulled out. Frankly, I think it was good that we did pull out because now that we've gone in, these new modern formats have come about, et cetera. That's only helping. In that way, maybe it was the right thing that happened. Thirdly, on the capacity, in all honesty, we've made up the capacity through co-packers and were able to move forward. If there was one disruption per can making capacity we needed in Mysore in the south in the state of Karnataka, it got delayed probably by about 12 months, but it's online now and it's ready to start production. In the meantime, the co-pack has covered it. I think having that co-pack balance also helped us, to be honest, to balance the risk out. There was some disruption, but I don't think it impacted the business and the growth in that sense. Chris, can I follow up on the India question? Not on taxes but on the outlets this time? 100,000 I think from memory has expanded over time, but not by very much. Over the last decade, is there any differentiation between beer and liquidity? Are there any particular states where? You think there may be a chance. To open up outlets, or is this. Something that in 10 years' time it'll still be 100,000. First of all, the outlets that sell beer also sell alcohol. We're all in the same basket. There's an exception in Maharashtra where there are beer and wine stores which are separate; they don't sell spirits. We are encouraging all the states to go down that route, but of course each state has its own dynamics and region's season, but that's the benchmark. That's the first thing. Second, spirits and beer, I think. Sorry, what was your second question? The number will change. The number change, yeah. Number in the state of Uttar Pradesh, which is 240 million people, they've just added 6,000 outlets and majority of these grilled outlets are also in that state. There's modernization of that state happening, but also the number of outlets have increased, some outlets have increased in the state of Maharashtra. If you tell me, is it going to be revolution? I don't think so. I think it'll be an evolution in India. Alcohol is a very sensitive topic for the state governments and therefore they are not going to make any big bang changes. It'll just sort of be evolution. I don't have a crystal ball, but when I came to India there were 70,000. Today there are of hundreds. We hope that they understand that increasing outlet doesn't mean more consumption. It actually just means less indecent consumption or responsible consumption. We continue to lobby. Trevor. Two questions, please. Nilesh, when I look at the map. Think about GDP per capita population. Tamil Nadu is blank, and then I guess Kerala to a lesser extent in terms of population. Is that because the regulatory framework in? Those states is so difficult? In Tamil Nadu, actually even most of the beer companies, it's very local, mainly local. The second big challenge is that you have to have a brewery in the state to sell alcohol in that state. We haven't put a brewery because the regulatory environment is quite challenging, and we've stayed out of it. However, we have a licensed business which we are now revisiting because we had some issues with it. Our brands will be available once we resolve the licensing issue. Ourselves, we have not. We're not there for those two particular reasons. I appreciate you may not want to answer this directly, but if I. Look at the market share chart. It's Striking how much share you have gained and how much share the former number two has lost. What do you think you've got right that they haven't got right? I think all the things that I talk about, we are very focused. We are, you know, the number of states, the nine states we focus on, the clusters we have formed. I think that's helped us. Secondly, for our competitors, of course they've decided to focus on the premium segment only, which is only 20% of the industry. They've left a lot of the gaps in the mainstream. I don't know, perhaps they don't have a national brand like we have in Tuborg and therefore, I mean, there's an acquisition through SABMiller which were different brands and maybe that may be the reason why they were able to get the momentum in some of those brands. Maybe the reasons. Andre. Thank you. First question, what is the long-term plan with the co-packers? Could you consider insourcing some of them, or what's the plan? Second, there was a lot of. Articles about a potential IPO in India. A few weeks ago. Any thoughts around that? I'll answer the first question. What about the contract packers? Our job is to stay committed to the co-packers. Our first job is to make sure that all the co-packers that are with us are continuously improving and meeting our standards. That's the first, on quality, on service, etc. We are making good progress. We have one co-packer who really is, he's worked with multinationals and he's a very strategic partner who will invest on our behalf. He will put equipment to our standards. It's almost as good as our brewery. In all these co-packers, we do have our people there, at least three or four of our own people who ensure quality, who ensure service, who ensure planning is done well, so beer is supplied on time. I think in India it's the right thing to do to stay with them. As far as IPO is concerned, I think I will pass it on to the owners. Jacob Aarup-Andersen said that. I don't know if this one is on. It is. It is. Okay, super. We've also noticed the press chatter. It also popped up in our newsfeed. As you know, we didn't have any comments on that news story. What we can say is that we are always focused on creating value for our shareholders. Of course, that means we assess all the opportunities there are in terms of value creation. That also means that India is also, of course, one of the options that we'd always look at, like we would look at other large markets for opportunities to create value for our shareholders. If we have any news on that front, we would definitely announce it in a press release and not in a Q&A session. We've seen the rumors and we're going to keep it at that. If we have something on this topic, we'll be back to. Sanjeet, can we have questions? One of the themes has been the, the strong focus on Central Asia. When I looked at some of the data you presented, I think Kazakhstan beer volumes have been declining in the last four years. I know there's been a lot of pricing, what's the context behind that and what's your growth expectations for beer in Central Asia? I've got one for Nilesh. Yeah, it's true. In terms of volume, the volume is soft. There's a combination of reasons from demographics to also, I will say, part of the territories that are moving more and more into religious that they are completely against alcohol. Still, we have the right balance within the big cities and still a lot of pockets of opportunities. The value, however, is growing as you saw, disproportionately high. You saw in the chart -6% volume, +18% value. This is also about premiumization and about change habits, different habits. When it comes to the total attitude towards beer, we stay very positive that the trend will be stabilized or even correct. I lived for two and a half years in Kazakhstan in my previous life and I certainly understand that there are specific trends that are emerging. I have, and it's not my opinion, it's the team on the ground opinion, that will see beer growing together with the rest of the beverage portfolio. Even when you talk to people who are really analyzing the market or the ground, there is a lot of belief from soft drinks to alcohol to beer to all beverage categories that there will be a moderated growth, even for alcohol. Yes, thank. And. I think the economy segment has been growing very strongly on top of premium, and mainstream seems to be the slowest part of the industry. Do you have any plans to broaden your portfolio in that segment? Why not? Are there any opportunities to go into non-alcoholic beverages? Yeah. First of all, economy actually is only present in two states and only in one state it's growing. It was growing for some period of time and now it's early sign of decline. The only reason was that local players came at a very magic INR 100 pricing, not sustainable. All that has now changed and now it's adjusting itself. I think pricing can only play a role up to a certain point. People go for quality, people go for brands, et cetera. I think it's not a nation India wide issue. From our position we currently are playing in mainstream and premium. We have cans. Cans are decently priced and so we expect that consumers will gravitate toward cans and also doesn't impact volume. Generally, INR 650 glass bottle purchase usually turns into a one liter purchase of two cans and that's what we going to play. However, in the meantime we are certainly exploring if the situation worsens that we could introduce economy segment to just be if the price use of beer just goes out of control. AFB, I think it's very similar to China. In India, AFB is 5,000 liters market. Number of players have tried it. It hasn't taken off in India. If anything takes light beer, it should have some kick in it. That's the philosophy. It'll come, I'm sure, as time goes by. I think we don't want to go too early. We certainly don't want to go too late. We want to pitch it right and hopefully we'll pitch it right just like we probably have done with Kronenbourg 1664. Sorry, can you do soft drinks if you're? That's a separate challenge altogether. You cannot make non-alcoholic products in a brewery. We have to set up a separate manufacturing contract packing, and we have to set up a separate distribution because it has to go to 11 million outlets, not 100,000, and then we have to set up our own infrastructure. It's a complicated way to go, but that can only happen if we see daylight and things moving forward. I don't think there's a problem to set it up. All right, thank you. We will continue with Ulrike and Finance and Supply Chain. Thanks Nick. I think we are on the home stretch, and what better place to finish that off than on supply chain and a bit of a wrap up. Let me start this session with really coming back to where Jakob started earlier on today and bringing together some of the financials behind the growth algorithm that you saw earlier on today. I'll start there. What you have heard throughout today is a lot about what's in to the left here in front of you. You've heard a lot of our growth opportunities. You've heard a lot of our marketing and selling and commercial investments. What you've heard less about is how we're going to fund all of this. I'll talk to you a little bit more about that, and as I deep dive into that, I'll talk to you particularly clearly about how we're looking into our supply chain and procurement and restoring that growth margin that will help us fund these investments that we're talking about and at the same time deliver on that organic operating profit growth ahead of the revenue. I will then finish off by talking to you about how it all comes together and we deliver compounding earnings growth on the back of all of that. That's the home run. Starting with the overall picture, then, this growth algorithm is not something that just lives on a piece of paper. Jakob talked about it earlier on today. It's embedded into every part of our AccelerateSell strategy, and we went through it almost by section today. The growth levers that come from our portfolio choices, the geographical priorities that you've now heard about by being across all of our global universities, you've heard about the enablers of driving growth from Esther and Anders and how we digitally transform to really support this. You'll hear now a little bit more from me about how we're funding that journey. Jakob talked up front about the winning culture that is really supporting that. If you think about the growth algorithm, it really is embedded into each column of this AccelerateSell. How does it come together then financially? That's what we're trying to share with you on this slide. The 4% to 6% organic revenue growth is supported by all of those growth drivers that you just heard. We think about it as this: about a third of this is the volume drivers that you've been hearing about. It is the growth category, so whether that's afb, that's premium, that's beyond beer or soft drinks driving volume growth. It's the benefits that that sir talked about bringing together soft drinks and beer. It is about those geographies where we see growing ahead of the general market, either for us taking share or because the markets are supportive in the beginning. So the 1/3 of this 4 to 6% revenue growth we see coming, about a third coming from volume. The next 2/3 come from improvements in revenue per hectoliter. Where is that coming from? It starts with category mix. If you look at the premium, the alcohol-free, and beyond beer sections, they're all value accretive when it comes to revenue per hectoliter. You've heard today that they're growing ahead of the rest of the portfolio in our strategy that will help us. You've heard also from each of the regions how important price is and taking price and the price discipline that we have. We need to keep and keep in line with inflation to keep on driving value into these categories. You've heard with support of the digital agenda how we're really focusing on value management. We have been doing that before. We're getting more precise, we're getting more educated, and getting more tools to really drive value management. Those pieces together will then drive the two thirds that is left to get to the right level of 4 to 6% organic revenue growth in our medium-term ambition. That on its own will not rebuild the gross margin though. We've said also that the gross margin will come back to pre-COVID levels. That is what will then fund the investments that we've talked about today. The growing revenue per hectoliter will contribute to this, but we need more than that. That's what I will deep dive into in a second, how we get to a COGS per hectoliter that is flattish. What I mean with that is we will try in the next few years to really drive efficiencies and procurement efficiencies to mitigate the headwinds we're seeing in our COGS and help that as well together with the revenue per hectoliter to grow that gross margin back. I'll talk to you a little bit about that later on. That is going to be enough to both fund our marketing and commercial investments. If we then keep SG&A flat as a% of revenue over these periods of time, which we've also said we're going to do, there'll be enough to also lift that operating profit growth on a yearly basis over time ahead of the revenue growth. That's how it all will work together and you will see all of that unchanged. We've talked about this since we launched AccelerateSell strategy and the ambitions and the level of those ambitions are completely unchanged from that. What has changed a little bit though is the shape of our P&L since we acquired Britvic and that is one thing I want to put in front of you right now. The shape of this P&L, as you've heard before and Soren talked about, the soft drink is now doubled, almost doubled, 16% soft drinks in 2024. On a pro forma basis for 2024, it's now 30%. That has an impact on some of these ratios. Mathematically, what you see here in front of you is what will happen to the shape of that P&L as we blend that in. If you look at the gross margin, 45.8% in 2024, if you blend in the Britvic pro forma, gets down to around 45%. We did say we will get back to 48% to 50% gross margin, which is what we call our pre-COVID level that we need to get back to. If you translate that in, it's about 47% to 49% when you blend in the Britvic, and I can't stress enough how the ambition and the 200 plus basis points that we need to get there are the same. We need to get there and more to fund this journey. What also changes a little bit in our P&L is our marketing to revenue ratio. Again, when we look at our organic business, 8.7% is what we've had in 2024, and as you've heard, we're increasing that. We said we were going to drive that up to about 9% in our AccelerateSell strategy. When you blend in a bottling business that's got a little bit less percentage of revenue marketing investment, we have got a brand owner that's contributing here as well. If we blend all of that in, it comes in about half a percent and we have reflected that also. Instead of getting to 9%, we need to get to about 8.5%. I'm saying about some of these because some of the cost measures and cost lines within the Britvic accounts are very different to what we've looked at we have in Carlsberg. What we're saying here is that intentions and ambitions are unchanged. Mathematically, they look a little bit different. CapEx then, same as with their marketing, is a bit less capital intensive in our bottling operations. You can see that in the stock second column. Pro forma for 2024 is about 6% CapEx to revenue. We were about, in organic business, about 6.7%. That pretty much fits in with the range that we said we're going to keep to 6% to 7%. We have said we've been at the top end of that for the next year or so. We will be towards the bottom end of that with blending Britvic going forward. This is of course a very important point in terms of driving cash also going forward. This still sticks within here in the medium term, will be at the bottom end of this range. That's being very clear on ambitions don't change. The concept of how we fund this journey does not change. It looks slightly different when you bring in Britvic and this is not. These growth algorithms and all these metrics that we've just thrown in front of you do not just live on these pages, they actually live in the business. Carlsberg Group is and continues to be a very performance driven and very output driven and organized organization. All of these metrics continue to play a very big role. Something happened on my screen here. Continue to play a very big role in our performance rhythm that you see here on this chart. All of these metrics, all of these ambitions are being translated into what we call nine grid, which is our by region, by function. The priorities for the year, that nine grid turns around. Sorry, there's a little bit of things going on here on the screen in front of me. I'll continue. That nine grid gets translated into priorities by regions and functions. Those priorities get into a drumbeat within the regions, within the functions on a monthly basis. That's where we can see and monitor these ranges and look into the future and say what do we need to do to adjust? When you go back to that growth algorithm and you look to the left hand side versus the right hand side that we talked about before, in times like this that performance management tells us we probably need to lean a bit more on the cost and the resilience side versus the growth side and in other times to the other. This is the process that keeps us on track, that keeps us adjusting as we go through times like this when it's a bit harder to get to the 4 to 6% revenue growth. I said we do this performance process for functions as well. We also do this for programs. One big important program we run through this is funding our Journey program, which is our extended program from just focusing on cost but now focusing on COGS as well through our supply chain and procurement. With that, I'm going to dive into that a little bit in the next few slides. This Funding Our Journey program did start and it's a fairly complex program because driving savings through supply chain and procurement, you don't give that task to supply and procurement, then they go and make it happen. It's very complex and I'll explain that to you. You need very organized programs. It's cross-functional and it's something that we all need to focus on to get the drivers right. The aim of this program I shared with you a little bit earlier on, the aim is to maintain flattish COGS per hectoliter. What I mean with that is that all those headwinds that we're seeing need to be mitigated by savings, as I said, either through supply chain or through procurement. We've been successful in that. In 2024, those headwinds were mitigated. Two thirds of those headwinds were mitigated through supply chain savings and one third through procurement savings. It's working. What is it that we're doing to get that cost inflation that you see here to the left-hand side down? You see also these four pillars here and I'll go through each and every one of them in a little bit more detail. The first thing we need to do is buy less. We call this our VIPEX program. I'll get there in a minute. It's about value engineering your portfolio, your product, your packs. The second thing we do is we want to pay less. This is procurement. This is about putting into practice what we pretty much learned through Covid but also utilizing new tools, new data analytics from digitalization and upskilling our people behind that. That's pay less. The last two follow the same sort of logic, which is loss cost logic, which is a normal lean methodology that we use too. It's about finding out what in our production lines and what in our logistics networks is waste and then going after them and taking that out. Those are the four areas that we're focusing on and I'll tell you a little bit about each and every one of those. What I will say first is that one of the reasons we've been able to be successful here is because of the way we're operating. Carlsberg Group has got a very nice model now in our supply chain and procurement organization where it's got a quite nice balance between global and local. We use the global central teams to develop these big programs to come up and search for best practice, to pull them together to benchmark, to learn from failures when there are some, put them together and digitally actually make that available across our whole system. We've got data across many of these programs at site level for every country across the world. It's also accessible to everyone. I'll tell you about how we go after the opportunities in those in each. That balance helps us because that means that the best practice is delivered through the center and the local breweries and sites can operate and focus on delivery. They can also then take some of the best practice and decide how to deploy them as we go forward. We think that's one of the big advantages and why we've been successful in this. Let's get into each and every one for a quick second. Vipex Buy less. How do we do this? This is about improving product value. What we've done here is that every single SKU has got a financial contribution level attached to it and that's about 7,000 SKUs. A bit less of those we produce ourselves. All of those have been assessed, understood how much financial contribution they make, making sure that we have features on every one of those SKUs that actually add value to the level that similar SKUs add value. It also says here on slide talks about rationalization of the SKU level. We do that as well. It's also about adjusting and making sure that there is enough return on every SKU. How we get to that is complex. We are focusing on both the actual packaging, the liquid. We're talking also about displays. It's a big area. This is a big opportunity between commercial, marketing, and supply chain. To do that you need to get together. What we do is we have set centrally driven market workshops and we've done that in 16 workshops now where you can see that on some of these pictures, how we get together across those functions and talk about what opportunities are there from the data and how they can be implemented and what they are for that particular market. There are huge benefits in this. Every time we do these workshops we come out with thousands of ideas. You can think about these ideas as a funnel. They need to get. These are complex ones and I'll explain one example in a second. They need to go through a funnel. It's almost like a gate process. You feed them into a channel. We have a software and a central place to save them all in, and they move through a gate process. Quality checks every step along the way, and inevitably the ideas, not all of them will come to fruition, but as they move forward, they get more and more attention, more and more resource and CapEx to get through. One of these examples is here, and it's a really simple example. It really explains what's going on. This is from Denmark. This is one of the preforms for a PET bottle. Simple idea. We looked at it somewhere else. It weighed 18.5 grams. Why is it 22.5 grams in Denmark? Working it through, understood that actually there was nothing stopping it to be 18.5 grams. You see the drawing that was there. It was designed, it was tested, it was worked with suppliers. We went out and bought a different preform and set the production up to take. That sounds simple, but that's a pretty big and complicated process. It needed to go through all those gates to be able to get there. This saved tons of plastic in the buying process in Denmark and of course therefore costs as well. This particular one has got both a sustainability as well as a cost improvement. There are many of these. Maybe just to share a little bit, this is not as glossy as the brand videos you've seen before, but I thought I'll share with you a real example of one of these that come up with these ideas. This is in Malaysia. What I was very excited about this video to show is that we've got Stefano, who's the Managing Director in Malaysia, and we got Joy, who is the ISC Head. Together you'll see the two of them driving and really making this workshop happen with the idea style coming out, so please run the video. Apex only happens if we take those decisions together, focused on what our consumer really wants. Welcome to Carlsberg Group's Water Floor workshop. Thank you for choosing Malaysia as the first location in Asia. We are in a crazy situation. We together always manage to give the best of ourselves, think creatively out of the box, and take risks. Walking around and looking at the pre-read, really impressed at how much detail. You guys have pulled out everything. This didn't happen by accident. Very, very well done and very well organized. That makes me excited anyway at the least late afternoon. Very cool. Very cool. You all asked before what is driving some of the improvement in gross margin across Asia and also in China. These are the sort of actions that are being taken and put into action, and savings are being driven in a time when revenue is harder to come by. The second bucket is payless. Here is about really stepping into our procurement world and making sure that we deploy all the intelligence we have, that we upskill our people, that we consolidate our volumes, whether that's internally across all these areas. Actually, just the whole VIPEX program being more standard of course helps us buy bigger quantities of fewer things. They go hand in hand there a little bit. More consolidation also helps us when it comes to less competitive sort of products. We can go outside of the company and compare ourselves with others and actually get together and communicate and also sometimes negotiate with other companies. We need to make sure we drive real clarity in terms of what a minimum quantity is and how we bring it forward. Real basic things, but really holding to this and really driving it hard helps us to get a better value. I wanted to show you this slide as well, which is basically saying how many tools there are now available. I think Esther gets quite excited from a digital point of view how much there is. Procurement is one of these areas that really can digitize and use the data in the right way. We are already doing that on the basis of what we got and there's plenty more to be had. There are tools within the packaging I mentioned in the previous slide, the should cost models, which is all really helpful from a negotiation point of view. There is about how do we reallocate bottles, there's the game theory models, but also if you look at the raw material as the market models, making sure we understand where the market is moving as much as you can and understanding also the logistics and the other costs and networking and scenario planning through these models, understanding external data, marrying it with our internal data and having a little bit longer horizon on what was going on externally and internally to fuel your negotiation position and being maybe a little bit picking up a little bit more risk appetite in terms of making sure that you know that you can turn suppliers around and really challenge every time. That is what's driven our success in this area. There's more to come in this, as I said, there's more digital scale conversation to be had. The last two areas are around waste. Whether that is production or that is in logistics, it follows the same sort of route. It's about intelligence. We're collecting into what we call ISE analytics, all the loss intelligence. This is across a production line. Where is it that the losses are being found? We upload all the data, we analyze the production lines, and then we share that and look at benchmarking across our own universe. We don't even need to go externally. There's quite big variations here, and I'll show you that on a couple of slides. Basically, these variations we need to eradicate. We need to lift the bottom up in terms of the losses that are being incurred in certain areas. We need to put a plan in place to get the loss, take the losses out, and then we need to start working on becoming better generally across the piece so that we can prevent the losses in the first place. I've just included an extension example here. This is a canning line in China, and basically they all have this on every site, on every line, and they have a target and they know where the benchmarks are. The little blue line here is showing what productivity they need to aim for, what heat loss they need to have, and how much they need to maintain and what they need to spend on that. Everyone has that, everyone has a target. It was interesting. Two months ago, I was in Ramlas in one of our sites in the south of Sweden and they had to stop the conversation with me because I had booked the time with another site in Europe to go and ask them how on earth they'd gotten to their efficiencies on their line on the particular part that this person was working on. We are starting to get people calling each other up, really wondering how they're achieving the efficiencies that they have. That's the same for logistics as well. We do network analysis and we understand where the wastes are. Then again, we share it, benchmark it, and make sure that people understand that there is a better way out there. Go find it and implement it into your targets. We build that in. We build it into an everyday life of working. We call it do it right, do it better, do it differently. The do it Right is really about making sure that we don't make mistakes and being very, very compliant to what is our operating manual, our Carlsberg operating manual. Com do it better. This is when we try to improve it, as I said before, and then do it differently. I'll come back to that. This is how we continue also the digital transformation, particularly in supply chain. Here's a few examples, very short examples in Sweden. Do it Right actually on its own also drove out cost by just making sure we were disciplined. Actually implementing our Carlsberg operating model in the right operating manual in the right way, we were able to release more OEE to the extent that the outsourced volumes that was previously outsourced, we could bring it in. It gave us a 9% OEE improvement that enabled that volume to be brought in. The outsourced volume saved us about €2 million. That was just about doing it right in the first place. Didn't require much investment. It required some adjustments to people, but it was disciplined and being clear about what COM looked like. Do it Better could be a network optimization. France is a good example here where we did a big optimization and exercise across the warehouses, making sure that we in the right place, given the environment we were in. Big savings again, €20 million cost avoidance in this point and then do it differently. This comes back to the digital side. Here we have two big programs and I think Esther referred to them earlier on. One plan is really about making sure our demand planning that sits at the core of so much is digitalized. It also gets all the AI tools and the scenarios built on top of it so that we can get a better inventory management and a better, better service. The second one is OneOT, which helps us with these loss cost trees exercises that I just shared, which basically is that we put little readers across the whole of the production line so we get the data, better data to upload to understand exactly where the losses are so that we can go in after it and find the solutions. This combined to other things like we have also a line coach that helps access all the information that you need at the right time when an operator needs it will help us unlock further future opportunities. That all then comes together in what you can't see on this page because we didn't want to show it all, but you can see the gist of it on the axis here. On the Y axis here it shows this is KPIs, pure KPIs, OE safety and basic equality. There's cost and productivity. Each brewery is ranked on that side. They're also ranked on the X axis here, which is on the COM compliance. What you'll see is that often when your COM score, so you're compliant with the operating manual, is high, that's when you get the best performance. That's where we want to be, up in that right hand corner. This we measure on a monthly basis. The color of these dots is an assessment of the maturity and how resilient each of these sites are. The opportunity here is moving all of those dots up to the right. Therein lays the opportunity in terms of the saving also that we can drop to the bottom line or into the investments through the gross margin improvement. That's how our funding, our journey, and the gross margin journey looks like. As I said, it has been successful in the sense that we have last year mitigated our headwinds. I'll come back to now the P&L and how it wraps up into our overall overall growth algorithm. You can see here on the first chart that shows us the gross margin development between 2024 and 2023, so went from 44.6% to 45.8%. Very much so helped by that COGS per hectolitre being mitigated. What you can also see here is that that then will fund what you've seen already is starting to increase marketing investment. This is for 2025 excluding Britvic. This is the one at 20 talked to you about before. We have gotten up to 8.8% in our organic business so far. This together with keeping SGA flat as a percentage of net revenue is then the middle of the P&L that will fund, one, fund the investments but also leave enough left on the table to deliver the compounding earnings growth and their operating profit that is higher than their revenue. I've had a lot of questions about where do all these, we've talked a lot about investments, where do all of these investments go that we talked about today? They go into this. They sit within these. They're not on top, they're within these numbers. This is about continuing and making sure that we're continuing to grow at the way we have done so. Our organic revenue growth from 2019 has been about 5.4%. If you take the operating profit, it has been growing ahead of that at 9.4% and our EPS growth has grown close to 9%. These come in combination. What you've heard throughout the day, what you've heard about how we're going to manage the rest of the P&L and how we're going to fund it through strict cost discipline and gross margin is how we're going to continue those trends. That's the growth algorithm. I will not stop here because all of that is going to mean nothing and it would be a bit odd to not talk about how this turns into cash. Clearly all of that needs to as much as possible turn into cash and our relentless focus on cash continues. In fact, it's stepped up of course, given where we are from a balance sheet point of view. You can see here to the left that our trade working capital as a percentage of revenue, we have not lost focus on this. Minus 20.7% in 2024. That is where we have been and better than we have been in the past. We will continue to drive the organic business and drive down the trade working capital that we tie up as much as we can down. What we have seen though is that when we look at Britvic that is coming in, we do think that there is potentially an opportunity here. It comes in with a very different trade working capital to revenue ratio. We do, we want to go after that. We need to go after that to really drive more cash and more free cash flow to pay down that debt. We will continue to be stringent, drive CapEx and six to seven. I told you it's a little bit higher now because of the investments we're doing in Kazakhstan. We want to bring that down to the 6% level and we will also be looking at any other opportunities that are out there that can drive that leverage down faster than the end of 2027. We will. I'll come back to that a second. We have mobilized across the whole company any opportunities that people can come up with that helps us, looking also at our asset base and understand if there's anything we can do differently or look at into disposals, etc. Small, many small will help here. Small or big, we will look at them and understand what we can do to drive down the cash down to under 2.5 times, 2.5 times leverage. One way in which we will make sure that this happens is by building this into how we work. Carlsberg, as I said before, is a very performance-oriented, very output-oriented company, which we love. As Jacob said up front, this is what we want to keep and we are using, driving forward and it's very helpful in times like this. We have therefore all the pieces that you've heard about today, whether that's growth, whether that's a growth culture, we built that into our incentives to make this happen. Our incentives are trying to balance the long term with the short term. It's important to deliver in the long term, but of course short term execution is also important. Here you can see our incentives for the leaders on short term, long term, and a couple of additional key priorities that we've added. The change we have introduced in the short term incentive is the revenue growth has upweight, we've upweighted that as a% of the total. The other thing you've done in the bottom last bullet point on the short term incentive, you can see we're doing personal assessment around the growth culture principles that Jacob Aarup-Andersen talked about upfront. The long term incentive had got all the important component parts in it already. That's about the same. It clearly already has revenue growth and EPS growth, ROIC, and also TSR and ESG in it. That stays. We've added two priorities that I've talked to you about just now. One is supply chain saving, recognizing how important it is to get that gross margin back to pre-COVID levels, and deleveraging. With this we believe we haven't just set ourselves up to focus on the here and now and the long term, but also making sure that the situation we're in and driving towards some of the additional metrics that we said we're going to get to. That's the incentives on how it lives in the business and how it will keep on being driven across the company. Also, I shouldn't be standing up here without saying that our capital allocation principles have not changed. In all of this they are the same. We just need to get down below 2.5 times of leverage. Everything else remains the same. We will invest in the business, we will keep that ratio below 2.5 times. We will have an adjusted payout ratio around 50% and we will then, when we get down, distribute excess cash to shareholders in the form of share buyback. When we get there, if any M&A arises that is value accretive, we will of course look at that exactly the same as they've been in the past. If that's how it all comes together, how it lives in the company, how are we going to get the savings to fund the investments that you've heard of during the day. How does it all come together? We tried to summarize this on this slide. The top line, then we have profit growth. How do we get to that? It's through the revenue growth, 4 to 6%, and you've heard about all the growth levers. It's by rebuilding our gross margin back to 47 to 49% with Britvic included, increasing behind these growth opportunities, marketing to revenue to about 8.5%, maintaining at the same time SG&A as a percentage of revenue flat, deliver the Britvic synergies that you heard before from Jacob that we've raised, and that together will deliver that operating profit growth ahead of revenue that should turn into cash flow improvements. We will drive strong trade working capital. On the back of that, we will improve what we can in Britvic. We will keep CapEx stringent around the ratio that we have had before, and we will continue to investigate other opportunities that can help us drive further cash flow improvements, and that all together will then translate into compounding EPS growth. ROIC improvements bring the leverage down below 2.5 times, which allows us to do what we continue to do, 50% adjusted payout, growing dividends from the growing EPS, and resuming the share buybacks when the leverage target has been achieved. That's how it all comes together into the financials. I will pause there, and then we have some Q&A. Thank you, Ulrica. I'll try then. Thank you, Ulrica. We will then take the final Q&A session, and we also have Jacob here as well if there are some additional questions to Jacob. We try to end in 20 minutes so we can get a cold beer. The fewer questions, the earlier. No hints, no pressure. Yeah, yeah. Trevor, exactly. One for you, Ulrike. Just a clarification. You talk about keeping the SGA ratio flat and the gross margins expanding. Also about the Britvic synergies. Clearly, Britvic synergies give you a one-off benefit to your SG&A's revenue line. Is it flat excluding Britvic, or? Including Britvic over time? Including Britvic, including Britvic. That lets say you'll get a one off benefit from Britvic. Yes, exactly. You have the one-off benefit, and then you need to keep on keeping at that point. Understood. Thank you. Andrea. Thanks. Yeah. For Ulrike, a couple of questions on working capital. I think you said that Carlsberg UK working capital is about -7% to sales. Britvic's working capital is +7%. You're going to improve Britvic. Any reason why it should, any structural reason why it shouldn't be at the same level or could be at the same level of Carlsberg? What's the time frame for improving Britvic's working capital? The second one on working capital again is, I mean with China growing less doesn't. Help the group working capital, are you? Still able to keep it at around -20% of sales? Very. Two very good questions. Starting with the UK, I will caveat around this and I've got Paul here in the room as well. Where is he? Various. We are just, we don't know exactly how far we will get it down. We will get it down. We are pretty good at driving good capital cash flow improvements. There should be a significant improvement towards that. Whether it's exactly all the way down to where we were in the beer portfolio will depend on. You know as well as anyone that the UK market is becoming more stringent when it comes to payment terms, etc. There might be some structural opportunities that we will miss by starting now versus having started in the past on that part of the cash flow equation on the minus 20. Yes, it is driven a lot by China. As we've also been hearing today, this is a good growing opportunity for us and will continue to be a big part of cash flow generation. Our aim would absolutely be to keep it, continue to keep it at the levels where it is today at around the minus 20. There are headwinds across the world though when it comes to payment terms in China as well and everywhere. Keeping it where it is, it's going to be a good opportunity and a challenge at the same time. That's what we will aim to do now. Being that close into it and not having full understanding of exactly the big differences and how long it will take to mitigate them. We'll clearly try to drive it as fast as we can to get the deleveraging down. That will be within the same time frame we would hope. Simon. Thank you. You mentioned obviously the focus on potential small or bigger disposals within the business. Jacob, you talked this morning about obviously the strategic review you've got going on in Brazil. How do you think about the broader dilutables category in the context of your multi-beverage offering? Now, particularly, I'm thinking obviously UK, Ireland, and France, given that category doesn't naturally sit necessarily alongside the rest of your categories. There's a bigger private label threat there. You don't see elsewhere in your portfolio. I'm just wondering how important that is, I suppose particularly to the UK business in particular. This one is working. Yes, okay. No, but listen, fair enough, Simon, when you look at its face, look at the category, of course it's not a high growth category, there's no doubt about that. There are two elements to it. The category itself is not particularly growing and then there's the private label element that has increased over the last couple of years. I think as Sharon said, because I'm listening very carefully when people present. Sharon made a good point around the fact that it may not be a volume driver but it is a value driver still. There's still a lot we can do around value in dilutables and I can see Paul is thankfully also nodding his head and this is a high value place still. This is a good margin business. We have a lot of scale in dilutables and the customer portfolio is basically the same. It's the same off trade environment that we're trading into. Yes, there's more private label than you find in beer and in CSD, but still it's a profitable segment. It's quite a profitable segment. We have scale within it. We have great brands and the innovation power that we've seen. If you look at the last 12 months, the stuff we've done around new movie launches, the Wicked launches were amazing and gave a significant boost to Robinson. I know there's more coming now with Wicked 2 and with Star Wars, et cetera, there's a lot of innovation portfolio around it and it is really one of those household brands that people have grown up with and there is a strong affinity around it, strong brand equity and I think we can do a lot with it. If you're fishing for big disposal announcement on dilutables, I think we have a lot of value to create. Sangeet. Sorry, Peter. Ulrike, just coming back to the algorithm and the decomposition of revenue per hectoliter. I think you're talking about two, two thirds of that. How much do you think is mix within that, please? Is the idea to be able to price in line with inflation across all of your markets, particularly given the challenging consumer backdrop that we see? Just coming back to the leverage target, 2.5 times by 2027. Just to clarify, are you able to do that organically or does that require disposals? I'll start with the last one and say we will look at anything to do that faster than that, which means that we will look at everything not just organically but also, as we said, other opportunities. This is a good opportunity. We put a big asset on our balance sheet. We need to look at the rest of the balance sheet and understand if there's any other opportunities within that as well. In terms of the 2/3 of revenue per hectoliter improvement to get to the four to six there, it's hard to say exactly with these sort of growth levels that we're talking about. With premium growing so much faster, we would say about half and half of that. Very, very rough, but it would vary very much so by region. You know, in some countries there is no pricing whatsoever to add because the CPI is zero. Some there has higher pricing, so it will absolutely vary by region. A combination of the two, I guess I can say, and then maybe on average is somehow around 50. 50. Ah, Anders has Thomas. We take Thomas. Anders has already got so many. Thank you. Two questions from my side. The first one, Ulrike. About the. Gross margin rebuilding here, you were talking about the 47% to 49%. When you look at the past. Many CMD presentations, gross margin, supply chain. Has been a theme always. You can see benchmarking internally, externally has been mentioned, lightweighting materials, glass bottles, aluminum cans. When you look at the gross margin development over the past many years, it's sort of been on a negative trajectory. Just wondering why is what didn't. Work previously, and what is different now going forward. A second question for Jacob. With the AccelerateSell strategy, you set. The target for 9% marketing-to-revenue spend. On the conference call, you also mentioned that eventually it could move up to 10%. Is that still the case? Yeah, I'll start with gross margin. I think we are seeing, we're very well aware that this has been mentioned before in the past. What I also mentioned is it was actually working. If you look at our numbers for last year, it did work and we have mitigated those headwinds. What's different is I think there is a whole other level of focus on the COGS per hectoliter than it's ever been because it's been needed to be. Actually, all the way through Covid it started to become something that we all were very, very focused on. I think the importance of actually having that lever has just increased, given that the other levers of the P&L were harder to come by. I do think as a company we work better as a whole. We have a better balance between global and local, and with the need of the expertise from the center in terms of delivering locally and finding the right balance between working together to kind of come up with these solutions and then working together to make them happen is at a different level than it's been before. This is good news because we are needing it now to get back to the levels. I think procurement-wise is also interesting because I think we learned a lot through Covid times that we need to be very, very diligent and a lot more tough, I should say. Holding onto that for now and being a bit more—it's not about increasing risk appetite and not having the right material, but it is about understanding how much it matters. Even a small improvement in procurement actually matters to the bottom line of the P&L, and using the tools and that capability that we develop is also different now versus what it was before. That's why it will succeed. Yeah. Just adding also to what you're saying. I think, Thomas, when you look at that long-term trajectory, I think you're also maybe being a little bit hard because, of course, if you look at the last couple of years, the headwind every single company in the world was hit by. Everyone had gross margins being hit quite hard, and of course we saw the same. I think before that, the journey was an improving gross margin. I think the team did quite well. With the tough headwinds over the last couple of years that everyone suffered from, of course we needed to go again. There is something, because the question is incredibly fair. There's something I often reflect on when you talk about efficiencies. How is it then? I think Sean had a great chart. The second time I give you a shout out, Sean, you owe me one. Sean had a great chart when he showed this, was it a 15-year journey in a particular country around efficiencies? We didn't put a country name on it, but you can constantly drive more efficiency out of your business because you're also constantly pushing stones up a hill, because there's constantly new things coming in, and if you're not attacking them all the time, you will see your margins erode, etc. There's also that mentality, and we have shown over the last two years that we are rebuilding and we'll continue to do that. I know you agree, of course. On the marketing side, listen, yeah, when I came in, I said 9%. At that point, we were in the seventh, and I said that. We as a team came out and said it's going to happen over the next couple of years, and we set that three-year horizon. The reason why we did it was it's incredibly important for me that we keep on investing in a structural, consistent way into our brands because that is, in the end, the value of this business. That's why that messaging has been so consistent all the time. It's about building brand equity. If we don't also send the signal within our organization that you are not going to pull all of your budgets tomorrow if we just have a bad day, they need to know that they can keep on investing in the key levers around it. Of course, with the right return on investment, that's important. I know you're all long-term in this room. We would not be here after 178 years if we were not structurally investing in our business. That's our job to maintain that. In terms of the 10%, I think the more work we've done since that announcement almost two years ago, I think Eve can attest to that. We think when we get to the nine, which of course now on a pro forma basis is 8.5%, when you get to that number which we are close to, we feel we're quite well invested versus our peers. When you look at our mix and the dark markets, we're really etc. etc. because of course a bunch of our markets we cannot even advertise. We don't see an urgency to then go to that the old 10%. If we see opportunities to lift our marketing spend with the right return, we will come back to you. There's no intention of doing that in the short term. Chris, hi there. You reaffirmed your desire to get back to a 50% payout ratio. You've kept the dividend flat for a couple of years, so it's probably going to drop below that. In terms of the dividend, how important is the foundation in the background in maintaining a sustainable cash generation and not getting too much leverage? I saw your foundation or you do say that. No, listen, you said get back to 50. You've kept the dividend flat for two years and your earnings should hopefully grow and therefore you're at around 50%. Theoretically, it'll drop below this year while you delever or are you going. To keep it at 50%? I think our guidance is pretty clear. We will be around 50% payout and that means you should expect around 50% payout, whether it's 49% or 51%, but it's around 50%. We like round numbers. Maybe it's 49% or 51% instead of 50%, but we are not going to see our dividend payout drop to 40% or 30%. It's going to be around 50%. It's not a midterm guidance, it's yearly guidance. You asked about the foundation and leverage. Listen, we have a foundation and I know many of you met the Chair yesterday, who's a brilliant Vice Chair of the Board of Directors as well. We have a very, very supportive foundation and the foundation is in a very strong financial position. We don't feel a specific pressure around certain leverage levels or certain payout ratios from the foundation. We think for our broader shareholder base, the 50% payout is something that is truly appreciated. Our payout ratio means a lot to us and it's something that we protect. The foundation is supportive of that. We are not in any way feeling a specific pressure from the foundation. And. He gets one. Yeah, that does nothing else. Thank you so much. First question is regarding the gross margins. I just wonder which region do you see the biggest potential in? The second, just to be completely. Sure, is the gross margin supposed to be fully restored in end of 2027? There will be big variations between regions. I won't comment on that. As you can see, there will be ups and downs. It depends on how the phasing on all these actions will be, as they are starting and ending at different points. I won't comment on that. I'll just leave it with that. There will be big variations. We haven't actually set an end date on this. The reason is that we need to get all of these. Some of these opportunities are fairly easy to go after. There are some bigger ones longer term and some contractual ones also from a procurement point of view that will take longer to get to. We have said over the years rather than put an end date to it. Of course, we're driving it as hard as we can to make sure that this also saves cash and we can get it down to the bottom line. There's a final one from Sean. Thank you. I'll try. No. I appreciate you will not guide. On the revenue synergies from Britvic, maybe you can comment a little bit. On the incremental margins. I mean, these will filter down on the earnings line, but what will be the mechanics at work here in terms of the profitability on those, specifically on the. Revenue synergies in Carlsberg Britvic UK. If you go back, if we take that and try to dissect that question, because of course there's a complexity in it. If you look at Paul's presentation earlier today, we see those revenue synergies across both on-trade and off-trade, and we have no reason to believe that there's going to be a specific revenue skew that goes into one channel, significant diversity, other channels. First of all, the starting point has to be the revenue synergies in the UK, which is of course the predominant place for revenue synergies for us, will have to come through with roughly the same channel mix as we have today. That's the starting point. You also heard Soren talk to the fact that we see that our profitability in the UK will go up in the coming years as part of the cost synergies coming through and therefore the incremental margins of course should always be higher than the average margin. Therefore, it has to be accretive to the overall group margin in the UK when you drive revenue synergies through. That's a statement, but it's of course into a level of detail where we cannot be precise. I'd rather be fairly right instead of being precisely wrong around that statement. Of course we're super excited about the revenue side. Hopefully you got some meat on the bone. I think Paul did well on that. It is exciting to see the traction that the UK team has been getting, especially we knew there would be early gains in on-trade. Some of the examples you gave on stage here are very exciting, but also the way that the UK off-trade segment has embraced this very, very fast. Also, of course, drawing on the lessons from their colleagues across continental Europe that have seen this model play out in a positive way for them. It's exciting. I think we put two lines today under the fact that you will get your cost synergies, that's for sure. Now it's truly around proving the revenue side of things. Cool. Jacob, you can, then I can round off. You can wrap up then. Let me get a beer. Okay, super. Andrea, I think you won second place last night on the VR, but I think you won the Q&A share. Well done on that. There's no prize, except there's a free beer afterwards. No, but. Thank you very much. It's been eight and a half hours today alone, and a lot of us spent four hours last night as well, so I'm not going to give a long speech, don't worry. Just a massive thank you on behalf of all of Carlsberg Group, and especially, of course, the team here, the ExComm team, and the brilliant Managing Directors of India, UK, and China, for taking the time, showing the interest that you've shown. Hopefully we've managed to crystallize to you that we think we have an absolutely amazing strategic journey in front of us. We think we're already in the middle of it, but in front of us as well. We're super excited about it. Is it the most exciting shareholder journey in the industry? Probably. Thank you very much.