All right. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the UBS Global Consumer and Retail Conference here in New York City. My name is Peter Grom. I'm the U.S. consumer staples analyst here at UBS, and we are very excited to have joining us this morning from Brown-Forman, Lawson Whiting, President and CEO. Brown-Forman is a global leader in the beverage alcohol industry, and over the last several years has been one of the more consistent track records across our U.S. consumer staples coverage. However, more recently, we've observed some pretty big shifts in terms of global alcohol consumption, especially here in the U.S., which has impacted the company's top and bottom-line trajectory. We have a lot of ground to cover today, but in terms of format, I have a number of questions that I plan to ask Lawson. We will also have time for some audience Q&A. If you want, I believe you all have instructions in terms of how to submit questions that will show up here on this nice iPad. If there are questions, I'll be sure to ask them on your behalf. Before we start, I'm required to read a legal disclaimer. As a research analyst, I'm required to provide certain disclosures relating to the nature of my own relationship and that of UBS with any company in which I express a view in this call today. These disclosures are available at www.ubs.com/disclosures. Alternatively, please reach out to me, and I can provide them to you after this webcast. With that, why don't we get started? Lawson, thanks so much for joining. All right. Good morning. All right. I know we're gonna spend a lot of time on the top line at some point, but I maybe wanna start, which has been a pretty big topic of discussion, the last week, and which is margins, right? You mentioned last week some of the headwinds that you're gonna be facing over the next couple of years. Can you maybe just remind those in the room and those listening what you expect to face? I guess maybe more bigger picture, right? You kinda look at your gross margin, where it is today, maybe where it's going versus where it was, you know, five, 10 years ago, would suggest a pretty big opportunity. Can you maybe just walk us through how we should be thinking about the gross margin, maybe looking beyond the challenges of the next couple of years? A little bit of the history to the gross margin story. We were a company that ran gross margin in the low 60% for a long time, decades, really. It didn't move a whole lot. There was a window of time, not sure when it peaked, like 2013, 2014, kind of in that zone, where it popped up, and it was more like the high 60%. It was a situation where sort of everything lined up together at the same time. If you remember back then, whiskey was taking off, and we were the dominant whiskey player, American whiskey player in the world. We still are. At the time, just, you know, everything was in line, where pricing was going up, costs stayed very, very low. We didn't have to invest in all the capacity expansions we did, and essentially it went up. It didn't stay in that high 60% for more than a year or two. I wish quite honestly, it never happened, 'cause we're always compared against that window of time when it peaked. It has come down. Now it's right around 60% today. The news of last week, which shocked, but I mean, shook the market a bit, was, we just said that, you know, we could look out. One thing about the gross margin in the whiskey business, or cost, I should say, in the whiskey business is those costs we laid that stuff down four or five years ago. We know what's coming, and good and bad. In years when you know it's about to go back down again, you can actually forecast that out, and we do think that'll be the case in a couple of years from now. We could see a couple of year window where there were gonna be headwinds from the cost of the whiskey that we laid down really in 2021, 2022, which was the peak, if everyone remembers, post COVID, or well, not post COVID, but in the month after COVID, when everything went crazy in the spirits business. You know, our sales were in double-digit growth mode for a couple of years. Well, along with that growth came this huge spike in costs for everything, and it was everything from natural gas, but the big one was wood. There was so much demand, and everybody wanted to get into the whiskey business that the cost to make a barrel shot up. It had been going up for the years pre-COVID, but it really went up during those couple of years there. We are now taking the whiskey that was made in that window of time, and we call it being dumped. We're dumping that whiskey now, and bottling it and selling it a little bit, but we're feeling the impact of the costs from that window of time. We just wanted to get out in front of it when we know it's coming a little bit, but it's also something we know there's an end to. We have taken a massive amount of effort in the last couple of years to change the trajectory of our wood costs 'cause they really have increased quite a bit over the years. We've now outsourced essentially the barrel making process, which for 75 years, we were really the only one that did it ourselves. We started that back in the 1950s when there were no alternatives. There was no one that could make it at the scale that we needed it. We invested in a cooperage. We had the cooperage in Louisville. We built a second one down just south of where Jack Daniel's is made. We just were not cost effective. We weren't cost efficient enough, so we sold that off a couple of years ago. We'll get the benefit of that a couple of years from now, but we gotta get through these expensive barrels to get to the less expensive. That's helpful. You know, maybe sticking with the margin discussion, you know, a little over a year ago, you announced some strategic initiatives, changes in leadership, you know, reductions in the workforce, what have you. Obviously, these are never easy things to do, but productivity and cost savings, it seems like a relatively new muscle, if you will, for Brown-Forman. Can you maybe just talk about how you think about productivity, whether you see an opportunity to lean in further, especially in an environment where, you know, category demand is clearly not where you would like it to be? Well, I mean, I think. Look, we're pretty comfortable with where we are within terms of this was an SG&A reduction, it was time, and it was about reallocating as much as anything. We didn't really touch or very little touch the commercial world, the sales functions. It was an overhead reduction. It was moving basically costs out of Louisville, out of overhead, and then taking the opportunity to be able to reinvest those around the world in spots where you know, where we are seeing growth. It's just the growth has been very uneven in the last 2.5 years, where, as you said, even in your intro remarks, the U.S. has slowed down quite a bit. Mostly Europe has slowed down quite a bit too, but the rest of the world is still actually showing some pretty nice growth rates. We're moving things around and doing what you would expect every consumer company really is doing right now, which is trying to reallocate resources to capture the growth where it's coming from. Makes sense. I mean, one more question before maybe pivoting to the demand backdrop, but you know, free cash flow. Yeah. You've significantly increased your cash flow generation in fiscal 2026. Is that sustainable? I guess, what do you plan to do with the cash? Well, because it's a couple parts. Our free cash flow, which in the period right after COVID, we were investing so much in capital. We spent literally $hundreds of millions expanding both our whiskey and tequila facilities, and in inventory too, because the demand was so high. The demand has slowed enough that we essentially have both in finished goods and in bulk inventory, too much. I mean, we are bringing that number down, and that's releasing a whole lot of cash flow, and we just don't have to lay as much down. The same thing on the CapEx side of things. We're not gonna have to expand our facilities for a number of years. We expect that free cash flow will be growing faster even than operating income, say, really for the foreseeable future. It is a big positive in our story. What was the second half of the question? Just what do you know as you build that cash. Yeah, I mean, look, the whole capital deployment question. Our standard answer has always been, we invest in our brands and our facilities first. We are a family-controlled company, and so we have a strong desire to continue to pay dividends in a healthy way, and so we will continue to pay dividends. That's really, you know, we'll just have to see how fast we can continue to grow. We have this term Dividend Aristocrat, which we've had for 50, 60 years, something like that. We have every intention to continue doing that. Acquisitions, you know, are always kind of the last, and we did a couple big ones in 2022-ish. There's not a lot of activity in that in our space right now, but we'll continue to look around. We essentially have a play in every major category that we wanna be in, except vodka. Vodka is the one, remember, we sold Finlandia a couple of years ago. Vodka is a very difficult category. It's low, generally speaking, particularly when you're outside of the United States. The prices are low in the vodka category, and so it's just not as appealing, and I don't see us really making a significant play there. You know, never say never, but it's not a very high priority right now. Okay. Great. Lawson, you've been pretty vocal and upfront about the challenges the industry has been facing, and, you know, I wanna get into more what you're seeing real-time here. I was hoping to kinda get some perspective on what's happened over the last couple of years and just, you know, clearly there's a cyclical component of this, right? When you think about some of the structural shifts that are happening, have you been able to unpack or dive into, you know, how they're actually impacting consumption? I guess, have you been able to get smarter around it, right? I think a couple of years ago, it was, you know, yeah, more directionally, some of these things are clearly having an impact. Have you been able to actually dive into and kind of, you know, pinpoint, you know, how these changes are impacting consumption? Yeah. What you're referring to, this whole structural, cyclical debate and where on the spectrum are we, started about 2.5 years ago, and we've talked quite a bit about it over the last couple of years. It is a little bit of both. Where we are on the spectrum, it's not possible, but I mean, it's very difficult to pinpoint how much cannabis and health changes and GLP-1s and all these other things that are floating around out there, how much is impacting each one of them. A lot of it is anecdotal. I do think. Look, GLP-1s, I think, has sort of leveled off a little bit, and we'll see how that impacts going forward. Cannabis is another one that feels like it's leveled off a little bit in terms of its growth and its impact on the beverage alcohol business. It's the cyclical side of it, particularly. I often call it just Gen Z, but it's really people in their twenties for the most part, that's where the per capita consumption has come down, so we know that. It's these younger folks, but I do really believe that is a lot of the cyclical side of things. I mean, just think about if you live in New York City, the cost to go out and have and drink cocktails, if you're 25 years old, is borderline prohibitive. You know? It's very, very expensive. I think that has been a big part of it. It's not quite as expensive when you leave New York City. Come to Kentucky, it's a little bit cheaper. Young folks have had a hard time, you know, coming up with the money to be able to do that. Having said that, spirits is still the place to be within the beverage alcohol category. RTDs are, I'm sure we're gonna talk about that. I mean, they're often lumped in, especially in the data, with spirits because it is most of the ones that are really growing right now are spirit-based RTDs, but they're different. You do, I think, if you're analyzing the category and the growth and different where the growth is, you need to look at it both ways. You can put them all together, or you can pull it out and look at it without it. Certainly that younger generation is starting with RTDs, and then they, you know, the idea is, and has been proven out, is often they will graduate from the RTD into the full-strength spirits category. Yeah. Maybe on building on that last point, I mean, there's clearly a lot of moving pieces as you just alluded to, but can maybe you give us an update on what you're seeing from a US consumer standpoint? Are you seeing any signs of improvement? It's just been interesting because I know there's a lot of noise, but you've seen some categories where there has been more structural concerns or debates, if you will, start to show signs of improvement, right? I know beer has been a little bit better to start the year. Curious what you're seeing today and how you kinda see it evolving from here. I mean, a couple of things. One, I mean, the consumer, in general, I mean, you all track this kinda macro stuff. Look, consumer confidence is way down. Those numbers are awful, actually, across much of America right now. That has traditionally or historically, one of the macro trends that follows spirits is consumer confidence. That is not helping anything right now. If you just look at total distilled spirits takeaway in the U.S., a lot of people got real excited 'cause it did, I don't know, I don't wanna use the term bottomed out, but it did hit a bottom in, like, November. Then there were a couple of months in a row now where we've had better trends. I saw some stuff that came out yesterday out of NABCA that wasn't particularly good. The Nielsen numbers have gotten better over the last few months. I would caution everyone that I don't spend a lot of time looking at monthly data. That's just too short-term for me. If you wanna be an optimist or you wanna find a green shoot, that's probably the best one out there. People have, you know, they do ask me, when is, you know, when is it gonna turn around? That is a question I sort of never wanna answer or try to predict. You just can't. The trend I would follow closest is that total distilled spirits number in the United States. If it hangs on for, you know, a few more months or a few more quarters, I think we'll all start to breathe a little better and start to feel like this thing is starting to go the other way. Maybe not to ask a track data question, but you know, when we look at the track trends, it does look like you know, there's been a little bit more pressure on the pricing front. I guess in layering into this, right? There's been a lot of focus on affordability, right? I know it's in a lot of categories where maybe the pricing has been a bit more excessive, but you know, you have a lot of consumer staples companies leaning more into price investment, et cetera. What are you seeing today in terms of pricing and promotion? Is it rational? I guess if you were to look at your two key categories, you know, whiskey, tequila, you know, are the dynamics different? They are a little different. Pricing is down a little bit. I can tell if you use Nielsen, which is the one that I have in my head a little bit right now. Over the last, at least the 13-week period, TDS was down one point, not three or four points. The anecdotal that you hear or that I hear even sometimes from our own teams of XYZ brand is getting more aggressive. But it's not coming through in the numbers. What we've been saying now for a while, and I think it is a little bit different than maybe it was five or 10 years ago, where the big players in spirits are being pretty rational with their pricing strategies. I think, look, we've all invested a lot of money and people and revenue growth management strategies, things like that, where we're trying to be more professional with the pricing, our pricing discipline, I guess I should say. I think everyone, you know, all the big players are trying to hold on to that. If TDS is down 1%, tequila's down 2%, American whiskey category, which everyone is focused on, and they're looking at the inventories, and they're saying this price, you know, this thing's gotta come down, is not. It's down, too. Half a point. Whiskey is actually down less than the market as a whole right now. As I say, it's rational. We use the term low and slow. I use that even with my own teams a bit. We do wanna have that discipline to continue to go up a little bit, even recognizing, you know, the tough market to do it. Our goal of low and slow, we're gonna deliver that this year, and I expect we will, you know, in the following year, too. Relative to other categories which you mentioned, it is interesting over now, you know, more like a 10-year window. I mean, beer has been very aggressive in pricing now for quite a while. Carbonated soft drinks have been incredibly aggressive now for quite a while. Spirits is not. I can argue both sides of this a little bit. You know, we should have been taking a little bit more along the way. At the end of the day, today, compared to, say, 10 years ago, spirits is relatively less expensive, say, than a serving of beer even. I don't think pricing is the challenge for the industry or is the demand challenge that we're all facing right now. Makes sense. I guess, do you see that changing at all? I ask that 'cause, you know, I don't know, it seems like things are constantly evolving. You know, is there anything that you're seeing today that might have shifted this year? I mean, maybe if I were to ask it differently, if I were to ask you the same question, call it six, 12 months ago, would your answer be the same? For the most part, I mean, I think it has weakened a little bit. I mean, six-12 months ago, pricing was kind of flat. Now it's down 1%. Tequila is a real factor in that right now. So tequila had an explosive growth for six or seven years, something like that. When the whole market came down, they have some of the real big brands. The multimillion case tequila brands are struggling right now, and so there is a little bit of pricing pressure in that category itself. But I think, I mean, the other factor within tequila is costs have come down so much. I mean, agave, which peaked at sort of MXN 30 a year ago, something like that. I'm not even sure when the peak was. Call it a year ago. Now you can buy agave for, like, MXN 2, 3 and 4 pesos on the open market. You're talking about what percentage is that. 80% reduction in costs in the tequila world. I think some of the big players are looking at that saying, "We can afford to be a little more aggressive on price 'cause our costs have come down so much. Okay. You know, maybe pivoting back, and you touched on this more as more of a challenge, but curious how you think about capturing the younger consumer, but more from an opportunity perspective, right? I'd love to get your, you know, perspective on just kinda how the changes in health and wellness, but also just the different product offerings, you know, are impacting how younger consumers are discovering the category. You kind of alluded to this, right? Like, are RTDs pushing younger consumers into spirits at a faster rate versus maybe where we were, you know, 10, 15 years ago? Yeah. You know, it's funny 'cause I was reading even in the sort of the fall about how Gen Z's just entering the spirits category later, yet that's the opposite of that saying. That what they are doing, it appears, is they're coming into RTDs as their entry point. I don't know what age, but, you know, a few years into that, they sort of graduate into that, into regular spirits. The drinking less but better, which we've said this for a long time right now, that is still very true. Less but better, but the market was still growing at 4% or 5% per year. We're still saying it now, and the market is declining at 4%-5% a year. I do think there still is a great opportunity in that super premium spirits space. While some of it has even been in the news lately, you know, some talk about should we have more volume down at the lower price points. We have reshaped our portfolio away from that over the last decade, and I don't have any intention of changing that. I am not one that believes that all of a sudden trading down is gonna be a big feature of the U.S. spirits market. It's if you look at the price and the volume numbers by price point, which are another Nielsen chart that you can look at, they're all basically the same. I mean, it is a little bit steeper at the $100 and above is weaker than any other price point right now. The 100 and above is kind of a unique thing. There's just not that much volume there. You know, it does get a little, you know, I'm talking a point or two better, as you get to lower price points, but I don't think that's more of a short term feature. It's not one that I particularly worry about. The RTDs are different, though. It'll be interesting to see how that market evolves. It is famously, for many years, been very volatile. It's very tough to play in RTDs as a supplier because the brand loyalty is nothing. I mean, it changes so fast. For those who are a little bit older, we used to own California Cooler. Now I'm talking 30 years ago or some more. Hell, 35 years ago, something like that. It was 10, 11, 12 million cases, and two years later it was zero. You look at now what's happened in the last few years, the malt-based ones, the White Claw and the Truly and those brands. They went up and then they went down so fast. High Noon is feeling a little bit of that pressure now. There's very little loyalty, and the consumers, which tend to be a little bit younger, switch brands quickly. How you play that is tough. Now, we're a little different. With Jack and Coke, I would actually say is very different 'cause that's been around for so long. We have a brand called New Mix, which probably most of you have never heard of. It is. I think it's 12 or 13 million cases in Mexico. It is massive, and it is growing at a huge clip. It's an El Jimador RTD that we're now introducing in the U.S., and it's off to one of the best starts we've ever had on a new product launch for the United States market. It's focused on Mexican Americans and heavy in California and sort of the Southwest and that area. It's off to a great start. Awesome. Maybe pivoting to some, you know, category trends. Would love your perspective on how you think about U.S. whiskey growth looking out over the next three to five years. Clearly it's been a key driver of broader TDS growth for a while, but we always get this question of when the cycle, if you will, may end. Would love your view on the industry looking ahead. You know, within that, you kind of alluded to the supply and demand dynamic that it gets widely discussed. Just give us an update on that and how you see that ultimately playing out. The whiskey. A little, a really quick history of sort of American whiskey. It declined from 1970 until 2010-ish. That was 40 years of decline. Jack Daniel's was the one brand that bucked. Not the one. There were a handful, but I mean, it was by far the most successful over that 40-year period, both in the U.S. and internationally. Everything started to get really hot in 2010. I've mentioned that earlier. We were sort of the big player at that point, and then there became these, call them craft brands. Not a term I love 'cause, like, we've got some really good craft brands ourselves. There was that boom. These numbers are not gonna be exact. I mean, it's really hard to get data on this stuff, but it sort of peaked three or four years ago at around 4,000 different distilleries across the United States. Once again, these are not exact, but there was about 3,000 at the beginning of 2025. A third of those went bankrupt last year. You are having a massive swing. Now we're down to 2,000. Half of them have gone away already, and it is a real struggle. I get it. It's not. Well, it's a struggle at a lot of levels, a consumer, but it's also a struggle to get through the U.S. distribution system and the retail system that when beverage alcohol slows down, they don't want, you know, obviously, they don't want brands sitting on the shelf, and they're just not turning. That is a big dynamic that's changing both from a retail and shelf space and all that kind of thing to what these, you know, these brands that there were so many. Everybody knows someone who created a whiskey brand, especially if you live in Kentucky, they're everywhere. They're going out of business faster than anything right now. That element is going away. I won't say less competitive because they never got to be that big, but that is a dynamic that's at play in all this, in this. There are still, I mean, Woodford Reserve, which is one of the largest brands in the U.S. system, with a lot of international potential for us. It's still right. It depends on which data source. It's growing very slowly, right now. It's not growing at the rate it was. If you look at the top 20 largest brands in the United States right now, not one of them is growing. There's not one brand in the top 20 that is growing. It's a challenge across the whole sector. Back to the whiskey category itself, you know, we were talking about the inventory that everyone, including us, went long or got too much inventory, and we're all, everybody has slowed down. I've been making this case for a while. The big players are now back dominating the categories again. This is the Diageo and the Brown-Forman and Sazerac and those companies. They're all very rational. They're all very sensitive on returns. You've, without calling everyone out, you've seen some of them close, you know, and publicly saying, "We're closing for a year." We've had several of those, big facilities that are already well into that year. I do think the inventories are gonna balance out a lot faster than some others think. It's very sensitive to whatever the demand forecast is. Inventories are coming down. We have not shut down. We didn't get that long, thankfully, especially at Jack. We have slowed down a bit, and that's part of the cost challenge that we and honestly, everyone else is gonna feel too. Slowing volumes is gonna spit out higher costs for you almost no matter what you do. It's still gonna be a great category. I don't, you know, it's still one of those. Even as it slows down or even as spirits slow down, whiskey, American whiskey is still one of the better categories to be in from a demand perspective. Great. Then maybe a similar question, but, you know, moving to tequila. Obviously, the category has seen exceptional growth for a period of time, but you alluded to some of the pricing dynamics. We've seen, you know, trends slow a little bit. How are you thinking about the category looking ahead, and how do you see the competitive dynamics there playing out? It is, it's similar to American whiskey in a lot of ways in that the category got hot. A whole lot of new brands came in. Now the market slows down, new brands are starting to really fall off, and some of the big ones are starting to fall off. The other thing that's happened in tequila, which is kind of famous for its celebrity-backed brands, that is getting tired. I really do believe that. We have talked and thought and analyzed this to death over the last 10 years as to should we go there? Because Herradura in particular, but El Jimador and Herradura both are some of the oldest and most established and well-known, high-quality tequilas out there. To try to either give a piece of it away to a celebrity just has never felt right for our brands. We haven't done it. Boy, there were days when we were watching some of these things that were growing at, you know, 100% a year kinda clips, and we're not. It was, you know, it was a challenging thing to watch. I think at the end of the day, we made the right call. There is a big shakeout happening in the tequila category in general right now. We're just gonna have to see how this thing plays out. I do, I could see it following sort of the American whiskey. It's American whiskey's kinda ahead of it a little bit, but you've already had a lot of brands shake out. I think it's about keeping your head down. It's still a really attractive category. It's still the demographic growth that goes with it, the appeal to sort of the younger generation, as opposed to some other categories like a scotch or something like that. There's a lot of things about tequila that I think are really gonna, you know, that will stay positive and continue to make it one of the better categories to be in for the next, you know, foreseeable future. That makes sense. Maybe rounding out the U.S. discussion, and I know you kinda alluded, you don't really like to give forecasts on when things get better. How does all this inform your view on kind of the path forward? Do you see any signs of improvement over the next six-12 months? I guess maybe more importantly, you know, can the industry get back to the historical levels of growth that we've seen? I mean, I don't see any reason why it cannot. I do think, I don't wanna say health is trendy, but American consumers are famous for sorta going after health trends, and then they kinda give up on it pretty relatively fast. We'll have to see how that plays out a little bit. I do think, you know, it's a headwind now, but, you know, we'll see how long that lasts. I already talked about the cannabis and GLP-1s and all those kinda things. A lot of those, this is where I don't really want to predict when one or GLP-1s is going to peak and come down. I'm not an expert in that space. I have no idea. It feels like consumers are going to tire of some of these things or they don't like the side effects or whatever it is. Then sort of things return to normal. It is, I do think the cyclical side of things, that almost certainly will return to normal. We just need to get a little bit of a, you know, a stronger consumer and some consumer confidence back and get back to the days of kind of low to mid-single digit growth. We're talking all about, we've spent a lot of time on the U.S. I mean, outside of the United States, you're still getting really good growth above those rates now. When does the U.S. sort of return to form? Great segue in my next question. A lot of focus on the U.S. Let's talk about international. I guess I wanted to, you know, two questions. First on the developed markets outside the U.S. I know Canada has its own unique challenges as it relates to your own portfolio. Curious what you're seeing in these markets, both, you know, as it relates to the health of the consumer, but also are you seeing any of these structural shifts as well? It's a little different. I mean, yeah, Canada's. I'm not going to talk about Canada because every time I open my mouth about Canada, I get hate mail. When you look across, say, Europe is probably a better example, its TDS trends are similar to where the U.S. are right now. A lot of those markets, the U.S. market was growing much faster than Europe was in the 2010s, let's just say. Europe hasn't fallen as far, but it likely is probably not going to come back as high for reasons I've never fully understood. Beer is actually a healthier category in Europe than spirits is, and it's the opposite in the United States. We will see. There are, you know, things about Russia and Ukraine and other that are hurting sort of Eastern Europe right now. That will, you know, that ultimately should fix itself. You know, particularly that puts a lot of pressure on Germany and has put pressure on some of those, the other markets that are sort of closer to the east side of things. The U.K. is, the challenge there is taxes. They continue to drive up taxes on alcohol. That is, you know, that's not helping things a little bit. Markets like France have been really good for us over the years, Southern Europe in general. When we made the acquisitions of Diplomático and Gin Mare, those are brands that are really small in the United States for the most part, but they're really big in Southern Europe. That, one of the strategic reasons to make those acquisitions was our portfolio, when you leave the United States, our portfolio is really led by Jack Daniel's. We see a huge opportunity. It's one of the, that is, if there's an untold story or where do I see the real growth over the next decade or two, it's going to be the ability to develop the rest of the portfolio in places like Europe, where, you know, we are so, you know, we might be 80% or 90% Jack Daniel's in some countries. We now have enough scale with Diplomático and Gin Mare to create a separate sales team in a lot of these countries. They're big enough so they could then Woodford follows in there or Herradura follows in there. It's a proper sales team now that doesn't have to share its time with Jack Daniel's. It's something we've learned over time. It is very hard to develop a brand from almost scratch or from very small. When the same salespeople are doing Jack Daniel's that are doing Gin Mare, that's a hard decision for them to make. It's a lot easier to make your bonus selling Jack Daniel's than it is Gin Mare. You know, we think we've made some good strategic moves there and we'll see some better growth there. Awesome. Maybe pivoting to emerging markets, been a bit, a bright spot for the company. Can you frame the opportunity, both, you know, the near-term trajectory, longer term? Are there any particular markets that you're excited about in terms of being drivers of growth? I guess related, are there markets where you're not in today where you'd like to have more exposure? Yeah. For those that have followed us the last couple of years, through all the sort of challenges that the U.S. market and some of the other developed markets have had, our emerging market growth has been fantastic. It continues to be, and it's been the driver of our growth this year. The strongest one or the best one for us around the world is Brazil. That's been true now for a number of years, and it's mostly Jack Daniel's led. The flavors, and this is one, the Jack Daniel's flavors are a little bit unique in that there are certain markets around the world where they fly, and Brazil is one of them. Apple, which has been moderately successful in the U.S. It's not caught up to Honey, and we'll see where Blackberry ends up, but it is huge down in Brazil as just one example. Brazil is a really strong market for us. Mexico is another really strong market for us. Mexico is growing to be the second largest market in the world from a top-line perspective for Brown-Forman. It's very big and very important. New Mix is driving a lot of that growth, but still, it's a healthy market for us. Jack Daniel's is in a good place. Now, where are we not? You know, where's the opportunities, I guess, going forward? We are this big in Asia. We've got to crack that nut. We have been working on it, and we're thinking strong and hard about what kind of resources it's going to take to be able to grow in a place like India. Everybody wants to grow in India these days. The market is growing so fast. It's such a big population, such a huge whiskey market. What's changed or what's new is the development of the price points that are, you know, most of the whiskey there is very, very low. They have developed a taste for Scotch and American whiskey and Irish whiskey, actually. Those markets are doing really, really well. Asia's small. We just made a big change in Japan, where we hired 100 and some odd people and assumed our own distribution there. That kind of an odd move maybe for some, but Japan is actually a huge American whiskey market. For one, it's very premium. That you don't have to deal with the $2 bottles in Japan. They're, you know, they play at the super premium level. We're just getting started really there, but that's another level. China's been a tough one for everyone, you know, for a long time. We're very small there. I'm less enthusiastic right now about probably putting a lot of resources against that. Middle East is probably worth talking about a little bit too, because nobody. Now, granted, everything that's happening there over the last few weeks is changing this dynamic. We'll see how that plays out. Previously, we were pretty big. A lot bigger than probably most people would think you would be in the Middle East and, over, you know, towards India and that direction. All successful markets that I think we can continue to grow. Okay. That's really helpful, Lawson. With the few minutes we have left here, why don't we pivot back to the U.S.? I think, you know, just more on the route to market change and the distributor changes that you've made. Maybe just to level set, can you just remind everyone listening in the room, you know, what the changes were, what led to that decision? You know, as you look back, you know, how has that change gone relative to your expectations? Where have there been surprises, both good and bad? Yeah. Again, I don't know how close you all are to the U.S. distribution system. It's gone through a lot in the last couple of years. It's tough as it has been on suppliers and our, you know, look, generally speaking, we're still holding on to 30% operating margins. We can withstand pressure, still generate plenty of free cash flow to do everything that we wanna do and be successful. It's really tough on that wholesale tier, which is single-digit at best margins. They've been weakened quite a bit by this volume slowdown. But look, we have to look around for ourselves and say, we need strong, well-capitalized partners that can continue to grow with us. The other big thing that we wanted was dedication and focus. In a world where you literally there are some distributors out there, you won't believe this, but I mean, especially in California, where salespeople could have 5,000 brands in their book. You don't believe there's 5,000 brands in the U.S. I mean, there are. When somebody is trying to sell that, even if it's not 5,000, but say it's 500 for an average sales guy, they're not focusing on you really. They'll focus on whoever's gonna pay them the best. We were in a difficult spot. We were often the largest. Jack Daniel's would often be the largest brand in these big 500 brand portfolios for a sales guy. They still have so many other suppliers that they're dealing with that we really wanted the focus from them. That was our biggest goal. As we went around there, we changed out a lot of markets in the United States. You know, RNDC is struggling quite a bit right now. They used to be our biggest partner, and they're selling off markets every day. It seems like a different one seems to pop up. We've needed stronger partners. You know, we jumped onto sort of the Reyes, not bandwagon, but they have gotten much bigger. They're trying a different strategy. They wanna be total beverage alcohol. They're obviously a very big beer distributor, but very big in with Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper and a number of others. They're great partners. They're having to learn what it's like to sell spirits. Mostly that's an on-premise comment where they're used to moving lots of boxes through off-premise channels, and you gotta figure out how to do high-end restaurants. There's been a few bumps along the way there. They've had to hire so many people that just getting these new people up to speed, getting their capabilities up to speed, they have to learn their accounts, they have to make relationships. This is still a relationship business in a lot of particularly on-premise accounts. They've had to figure that part out. We work now with a company called Johnson Brothers, and we have a whole bunch of states kind of in the middle of the country, including Texas, that is going quite well. It varies. It has not helped, quite honestly, this fiscal year as much, but I think we've sort of solved a lot of the problems now, and we have better margins because of it, and so hopefully next year is the year when it all sort of clicks and, you know, starts to really turn the US performance around. Great. Well, maybe just to end, you know, as you think about the company's ambitions over the long term, which, you know, frankly, is how you run the business successfully over the generations, what do you think is the biggest challenge as you look out over the next five-10 years? I guess there's a lot of discussion on the near-term dynamics, the top-line growth. What do you think is the most underappreciated aspect of the Brown-Forman story that you think is being missed in the context of the current narrative? Well, I mean, look, I feel if you just compare our brands to anybody else in the industry, I feel pretty good. In fact, I feel really good. I mean, we have some of the best, most vibrant spirits brands in the world. I feel confident that, you know, that we can figure that piece out, and we can continue to grow. I think on the what is least known, I've alluded to it a little bit a minute ago. It's growing those brands outside of the United States. I mean, only 45% of our sales are in the U.S., 55% is international already. I mean, we do have big exposure to the international markets. I'll take a brand like Woodford. If I had to make a single bet on where the value growth is gonna come out of Brown-Forman over the next decade, it's gonna be Woodford's global expansion. I wanna see what we did to Jack Daniel's 25 years ago, we can do with Woodford now. I do think that can be a really good story, and it's something we're gonna focus hard on. As I said, the brands like Diplomático and Gin Mare can support other brands in our portfolio that we can then take, you know, take across the world. We now control our distribution. That's another thing we didn't really get into. Fifteen years ago, we didn't really control our own distribution anywhere, and we now control it in the vast majority of the big markets in the world. Having that under our own control is very, very helpful in choosing your own destiny and controlling your destiny. Makes a ton of sense. Well, we're at time. Lawson, on behalf of UBS, those in the room, those listening online, thank you for taking the time to be with us today. Super helpful as always, and we wish you nothing but the best of luck moving forward. Great. Thank you. Thank you all.