Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV (ABI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, everyone, to the 2021 ABI Investor Day seminar. While we look forward to the moment when we can all be together in person again, I'm glad to have each of you joining us today remotely. For those of you who I have met before, it is great to see you again. For those I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting, I want to take a moment to share a little about myself. I've been with the company over 25 years, leading businesses around the world and working alongside the industry's most talented and passionate colleagues every step of the way. Some of the things to know about me. First and foremost, I'm a beer guy. I have the passion for Budweiser long before I was part of this company. This is me, helping my parents carry few cases back when Budweiser was a small aspirational brand in Brazil. Second, I'm a family man. My family and I have lived all over the world. And as you can appreciate, that's only possible when you have a supportive family. And finally, I love simplicity. Company sometimes tend to overcomplicate things. And I want to make sure we don't do that here. As I take you through the evolution of our strategy today, I think you will see what I mean. So 3 things to remember about me. I'm a beer guy, I'm a family man and I love simplicity. I've been looking forward for today for a while. And I don't mind telling you, I spend a lot of time thinking about what to say in today's meeting. It is a tremendous privilege to lead this company and a great responsibility to get it right. For the last 6 months, I spent most of my time listening to people, our colleagues, partners, investors. Honestly, assessing how we have gotten here and where we need to go. So I want to start with what brought us to today. ABI has a foundation of over 600 years of history, heritage and tradition. Over the last 30 years, the beer industry as a many others went through a consolidation phase. ABI was a major agent, of this, through the execution of a simple and repeatable strategy. One, focus on cost management, cash delivery, M&A and value creation. This strategy brought us to where we are today, a company that has a portfolio that includes some of the world's most iconic, trusted and valuable beer brands. The world's largest brewing and distribution network, $50 billion in revenue, some of the highest operating margins in the industry, strong cash flow and delivering 1/3 of the total global beer profit pool. And I believe this is what most people see when they look at ABI on paper. But let me tell you what I see. My reflections on where we've come from and what excites me the most as I think about the journey ahead for ABI. I believe our previous strategy was effective in building many of the competitive advantages we have today and it make us category leaders as the #1 brewer in the world. But recently, this simple and repeatable strategy and the strengths that brought us to this moment also yielded collateral effects. As the industry consolidated and we became the largest global brewery, we took our eyes off consumer trends and innovation. And as a result, growth in the entire beer category did not reach its full potential. While focused on business integration and delivering synergies, we did not see the bigger value, waiting to be unlocked in our ecosystem, given our unique position to solve real problems for our customers and consumers. And in pursuing growth through acquisitions, we accumulated high levels of debt and our deleveraging pace has been slower than it should have been. Good news. All of these are strategic, not existential bottlenecks. And we have an amazing starting point for the journey ahead. Let me tell you what I see. I see a beautiful global beer platform with global and local brands, 7 out of the top 10 in the world according to BrandZ. I see a route to market that is unparalleled by any other global FMCG. I see a powerful ecosystem of thousands of farmers and suppliers over 2 billion consumers and 6 million customers, resulting in over 10 million weekly transactions. Let me repeat that. 10 million weekly transactions, 1.4 million a day. What I'm talking here right now in the last 60 seconds, 1,000 transactions have been taken place between ABI and our customers. Or better said, 1,000 opportunities to drive the beer category and create additional value for our ecosystem. Beyond that, I see untapped opportunities to use data and our reach to solve real problems. What kind of problems am I talking about? I've seen up close the challenge our consumers, customers and partners grapple with. Problems such as consumers wondering why can I get the hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes, but I can't get cold beer delivered when I need it? Consumer is asking, why can't I have a great quality cocktail wherever I am like an outdoor occasion in a convenient package? Small independent retailers in Latin America, having a tough time getting consistent and reliable access to great products and services, limiting their ability to grow their business. And thinking more broadly, with projected population growth and climate challenge, how can we help provide protein to feed the road a sustainable way. So when I look at the company now, I see a beautiful beer platform with iconic brands, of which we can expand into beyond beer spaces. A powerful tech platform that use huge and valuable amounts of data on consumers buying trends, a B2B software solution that didn't even exist 5 years ago. And today, there's over $25 billion in transactions. And I see an opportunity to combine our brewing infrastructure and expertise with biotech investments to help address increasing global food and sustainability challenge. When I talk about meeting the moment, this is the moment we find ourselves in. This is why we are defining a new journey forward. One that builds on our legacy and our rich ecosystem, takes learnings from our journey so far, [indiscernible] [ harness ] our physical and digital assets to again create extraordinary value for the category for our customers, consumers and shareholders. I believe we can reimagine what a beer company can be. This is how we begin our journey. Our journey forward needs to begin with a clear and inspiring purpose. While our current purpose served us well at this point? It is no longer unique among our peers. And it is not unique to our category. More importantly, it does not reflect where we want to go in the future or the role we want to play in leading the category. So we did some very deep thinking about our purpose, our category, who we are, why we exist and where we are going. I am really energized by the final product. This redefined purpose that will be our north star. I want to share a preview video on how this purpose comes to life. [Presentation]

So our purpose is clear. We dream big to create a future with more cheers. As I said, I'm energized by the final product. Our new purpose enables us to unlock, harness and realign our existing infrastructure and assets to take us beyond beer, to more innovation, more sustainability, more occasions and more value for all. I believe it gives us a clear signal of who we are, what we do, and where we are going. To transform our business and create a future with more cheers we must evolve our strategy from inorganic to organic growth, from being category leaders to leading category growth. Those of you who know me know that I'm always looking to the future and I am obsessed with planning for the long term. In the course of my career, I have seen how having a long-term view provides a competitive advantage and gives you the ability to capture the full potential of change in consumer and customer behavior. In China, our 10-year plan allowed us to lead and shape the then nascent premium and super premium segment and capture 45% of what has become a $2 billion profit pool. In the U.S., our 10-year plan anticipated fundamental shifts in the category and allowed us to resume sustainable organic top line growth. I spend a lot of time thinking about our global business. But even more, my colleagues and I have been investing time building the plan the next 10 years. From this work, 3 areas of growth stood out. First is the beer category. As I shared, our beer portfolio and footprint are like no other. We sell 1 out of every 4 beers in the 1/3 of the global beer profit pool. Beer will continue to be our core business and represent a sizable opportunity for us and our ecosystem. We will share more facts about the beer category with you today. But to quickly [indiscernible], beer is a growing and profitable category. We believe we have a golden opportunity to further grow and expand it in the next 10 years because our global footprint is very well positioned in emerging and developing markets. And we have unique capabilities and expertise. Second is beyond beer. Because of our unique capabilities we can innovate bringing new liquids that capture incremental occasions, currently dominated by other categories, providing meaningful growth that's incremental to our current business. And third, new businesses that harness the power of our existing platforms and ecosystem to help solve those real problems I described earlier. We are focusing on 2 areas: technology platforms, such as our B2B software, direct-to-consumer e-commerce solutions and fintech services that compound the value of our core business. Any specific biotech opportunities that leverage some of our core brewing implementation capabilities in new and exciting ways. You will be hearing more about this new business and how we are expanding our addressable market. Given these opportunities, we have evolved and simplified our strategy. One, lead and grow the category; two, digitize and monetize our ecosystem; and three, optimize our business. We'll take you through each of these pillars and how they will help us deliver a future with more cheers. [Presentation]

Let's start with our biggest opportunity. Let's talk beer. I know that like me, a lot of you are beer people. People are passionate about beer. And like everything people are passionate about politics, sports, music, there are lots of conversations and opinions of beer, led by those passions but not by facts. Now I'm passionate about beer. But I like data and facts just as much. So let me bring some facts to the table. First, the beer category is inclusive. Men and women across geographies and socioeconomic groups enjoy having a beer with friends. Beer has always been a great equalizer, a fun beverage, accessible to all adults. And in fact, it has the highest penetration of any alcohol category, meaning more people drink beer every day than any other spirits, wine or alcoholic beverage. Beer is made with simple ingredients, processed naturally, Essentially, a handful of very simple ingredients, brewed with high-quality water, and that's the magic of beer. Beer is fundamentally local. It is made of local ingredients grown by local farmers. It is brewed locally, and it is often a major part of local communities and economies. Second, beer is loved, resilient and reliable. All over the world, people are passionate about their favorite beer brands, it is part of human culture. COVID reinforced this truth. During the pandemic, people continue to drink beer and remained loyal to their favorite brands, proving how resilient the category is. And as of year-to-date, beer revenue is outperforming pre-pandemic levels. Third, beer is big and profitable. Beer is the largest single category within CPG and the #1 driver of CPG growth according to our monitor. Finally, there is a lot of conversation around the performance of beer within the alcohol category. Based on the most comprehensive data set I've seen, covering over 100 countries across all channels, the facts are clear, beer has been growing volume and share of growth in the last 5 years. This is happening across several key markets like Africa, Latin America and Asia. And when we compare premium beer and premium spirits growth, over the last few years, beer wins, growing almost twice as fast, and it is better positioned to further benefit from premiumization, given its size versus spirits. Given the runway beer has to further premiumize along with population and per capita consumption growth expected in key beer markets able to monitor projects that beer will grow and gain share of value and volume over the next 5 years. I want to reemphasize that beer will continue to grow volume and share of growth in the years to come. So recapping it all, the beer categories inclusive natural and local. Beer is loved, resilient and reliable. Beer is big and profitable. And it is growing volume and share of growth. Given our footprint and ecosystem, we are uniquely positioned not only to capture this growth but to accelerate it and expand the total category. We want to move from just being category leaders to leading category growth. These are simple worlds. But they signal a very powerful shift in mindset and behaviors within our company from inorganic to organic growth. And from an internal view to a consumer-first mindset. So how will we do this? You are familiar with our market maturity model that we shared a few years back, a model that helped us understand how our consumers and category evolve as markets mature. Over the last 5 years, we've been rigorously refining and evolving that model, leveraging all the data flowing through our vast ecosystem. We've launched many, many pilots and innovations. We've experimented, tested and learned from our hits and misses. As a result, we are evolving from an outdated market matured model to a consumer-first, data-driven category expansion model. This model takes the best of what is working and focuses on 5 proven scalable levers that position us to expand, not just watch the category. The first is category inclusivity, attracting more consumers to new occasions by innovating and offering more choices, package, liquids and price points to all. Second, core superiority. We continue to strengthen our core portfolio by improving our liquids and package and democratizing access to premium benefits for the category. Third is occasions development, reaching beyond traditional beer occasions such as sports to in-home and meals. Next, which comes as no surprise. It is premiumization. As I shared earlier, beer has a great runway, especially relative to other alcohol segments to drive growth through premiumization, giving our unique capabilities, we can be a leader in this growth. Lastly, beyond beer plays a critical role in expanding the category by addressing new and incremental consumer occasions. So 5 simple but proven levers that through relentless execution will position us to lead and grow the beer category, creating a future of more cheers. I've asked Pedro Earp, our CMO; and Rosie, Global VP of Strategy and Insights to share more details and examples of how are activating these levers across our global footprint. Pedro and Rosie, over to you.

My name is Pedro Earp, and I've been ABI's Chief Marketing Officer since 2019. And also Head of ZX Ventures, our disruptive growth unit since 2015. I've been in the company for 21 years in a variety of roles in marketing, innovation, consumer connections and also mergers and acquisitions. For the past years, we have used our global footprint, combined with improved data and analytics capabilities and an agile innovation process to test improved initiatives to lead and grow our category. We've undertaken hundreds of experiments globally on what drives category development. Our lead and grow category strategy is a set of proven initiatives to expand the category as markets develop. To be more specific, emerging markets are experiencing fast population growth, but they have low disposable income. Our primary objective here is to make the category as inclusive as possible and ensure we have superior offerings. Developing markets and fast economic expansion in rising disposable income, our goal here is to premiumize the category and also expand it through the development of new occasions, especially the in-home. In developed markets, most of [indiscernible] consumers have broader [indiscernible] needs. Our opportunity here is to attract new consumers in the category by expanding beyond beer. In summary: one, beer is an inclusive category; two, offer superior core propositions, extend the occasions. Four, lead premiumization; and lastly, expand the category with beyond beer. These initiatives, combined with our relentless execution during COVID have ensuring positive results and will get us to 2022 and beyond in a position of strength. Now I would like to invite Rosie Coppiano, our Global VP of Category Strategy and Insights to share a more detail of these initiatives and some exciting results.

Thank you, Pedro. Hello, everyone. I'm Rosie Coppiano, and I have been with ABI for 9 years in a variety of roles across the strategy, innovation and insights both in New York and the Middle America zone. Now let's dive a bit deeper into our category expansion levers. The first lever in our strategy is making the category more inclusive through revenue management, product and pack innovation. The opportunity to make the category more inclusive is sizable as around 450 million adults of legal drinking age have limited access to the category today. Since 2017, we have piloted the use of revenue management pack price in new products such as our local crop beer in Africa. Given the success we've seen we're expanding these initiatives to 10 markets in the Middle America and South America zones. By making the category more inclusive to all, we estimate we could capture an increment of 50 million hectoliters of volume across our footprint. A great example is Colombia, which through the successful execution of this strategy, which is the highest beer per capita consumption in the country's history in the third quarter. A little later today, my colleague, [ María Angélica ] will describe how we did this. For the past 3 years, inclusive products have contributed to more than $500 million to our top line, and we're only just starting. Now let's talk about core superiority, our second lever. There's still a significant opportunity to gain share within beer through superiority, which we define as superior products, packaging, positioning in store and digital activation in a superior value creation to consumers and customers. Gaining share through superior value equation is not new to ABI. We have a track record of delivering strong commercial results by launching superior innovations that disrupt category codes in democratized access to premium benefits. For example, the launch of Harbin Ice in China in 2005 was ABI's first flint bottle with national reach and within the core plus segment. Similarly, Michelob ULTRA has been the largest market share gainer in the U.S. beer industry since 2016. We achieved this by pioneering low cal and low carb beer, and we did it again with Brahma Double Malt in Brazil, the largest innovation in non-bev's history. Since its launch in 2020, Brahma has sold more than 9 million hectoliters, making it a top 5 brand by volume. The learnings from these initiatives were synthesized into our core superiority framework. Our Brahma Double Malt proposition is a great example of the framework in action. This proposition has been rolled out across 14 brands in our top 12 markets in 2021, and will continue to be expanded in 2022. For the past 3 years, according to our estimates, we have gained 90 basis points of beer market share across our footprint by delivering superiority in product and execution. Let's take a look at some examples and results of core superiority. [Presentation]

Now onto our third lever, occasions development. No category development strategy would be complete without extending beer into new and growing occasions. Our evolved category expansion model gives us a view on how occasions and consumer requirements change in developed markets. And our geographic footprint gives us the opportunity to lead and expand in these occasions and developing markets. In 2020, during COVID lockdowns, as consumers spent more time at home, we saw an opportunity to further develop occasions by leveraging insights from developed markets combined with our data and analytics capabilities to develop a series of communications and direct to consumer [ pilot ] to elevate beer in meal occasions. For example, Zé Delivery in Brazil, our beverage courier platform, leveraged its millions of consumer records to gain a deep understanding of how consumers' needs were evolving during the pandemic. Through continuous learning and activation, it was able to quickly expand its coverage. And today, Zé Delivery reaches over 50% of the Brazilian population. In Q3 alone, it solved 15 million orders, that is 50% more orders by September this year than in all of 2020. Among global premium brands, Stella Artois is our bev in meals occasions. The brand grew in 2020 through programs like Rally for Restaurants, even with the challenges of the on-trade globally and has delivered over 20% net revenue growth outside of Belgium year-to-date September 2021. These learnings are the basis of Stella Artois' meals development program. Let's take a look. [Presentation]

Premiumization is our fourth and most important lever to drive category growth. We do this by providing consumers an opportunity to trade up through a market-leading portfolio of premium and super premium brands that can address new and diverse needs in these occasions. This portfolio has made ABI the leading brewer in the premium segment, delivering double digit revenue growth over the last 3 years and making premium the #1 growth driver for our business. Our premium global brand portfolio has been growing revenue at 10% CAGR since 2017. The next big opportunity within premium is a continued international expansion of Michelob ULTRA, building on its success pioneering low-carb, low-cal beer in the U.S. Globally, as of September, Michelob ULTRA has delivered about 26% year-on-year revenue growth. Outside the U.S., revenue from this brand grew by more than $200 million over the past 3 years. We will continue its expansion to more than 20 markets in 2022. Let's have a look. [Presentation]

Our last lever is beyond beer. Beyond beer expands the category by tapping into consumers and occasions in which beer is under indexed. Beyond beer products tackle perceived beer barriers like bitterness, masculinity and high carbs. To win in beyond beer, we are focused on the fastest-growing segments where we can leverage our core supply logistics and route-to-market capabilities. The first is flavored alcoholic beverages or fabs like Mike's Hart Lemonade, which has doubled in size since 2019. Another is hard seltzer including neutral in Canada. Bud Light Seltzer in the U.S. And Michelob ULTRA Seltzer in Mexico. And lastly, canned cocktails led by Cutwater, which has been growing in the U.S. year-to-date at twice the rate of the segment. This year, we're on track to double the size of our beyond beer portfolio to be about $1.5 billion of annual net revenue. We'll build on the success by expanding this portfolio to reach 65 markets in 2022. Our category expansion model relies on strong partnerships with our customers. Key to building these partnerships is an evolved retail category strategy anchored in a deep understanding of consumers, shoppers and occasions enabled by data analytics capabilities. A great example of this is The Vault. A Customer Collaboration Center in the U.S., which reflects our commitment to growing the category. Let's hear about it from Amanda Tilley, U.S. VP of Category Leadership.

Thanks, Rosie. We've been on a journey here over the last 3 years to transform our category capabilities. The goal is to elevate both our strategic plans with our wholesalers and ABI's position as the trusted partner to our retailers, driving growth across total alcohol and the beer category as a whole. Key to this strategy has been the creation of our retail category strategy, which powers our category thought leadership across total alcohol and we're ready to take this to the next level. The Vault is our game changing Customer Collaboration Center, located within building #1 in the famous Budweiser brewery in St. Louis. Once an old school house, this building is one of the most iconic story buildings on the Anheuser-Busch brewery campus. It was first a place of learning. Then a hub for innovation and now in its third act, it is being transformed into an immersive collaboration experience for our retail partners across the U.S. powerful forward-leaning insights across consumers, shoppers and occasions are at the core of our retail category strategy. Encapsulated in The Vault, this capabilities become the epicenter where our commercial portfolio and category strategies are brought to life. Insights, analytics and leading-edge technologies converged as we collaborate with our retail partners to design the future of alcohol. It's my privilege to introduce to you The Vault. [Presentation]

Our discussions with our [indiscernible] are not limited to a PowerPoint deck or presentations in a conference room. We have conversations dealing with supply chain and store level operational issues that drive their business, touching, feeling and tasting our new products while they're still in development, collaborating with our brand teams and providing transparency on strategies to jointly deliver above-average category growth together. This approach to joint strategic planning resulted in participating retailers in the 2021 U.S. Advantage survey ranking ABTI as the #1 alcohol supplier across all retail sales capabilities and #1 in the total consumer packaged goods industry. The Vault provides us with an enhanced environment to have our retailers fully commit the time to collaborate with us in an elevated way. We're excited to continue to develop an expand the category together and lead future growth.

Thanks, Amanda. While it's still early days implementing the strategy. We're enthusiastic about its early results. Our top line has been accelerating, the category has been gaining share globally, and we are gaining significant share within beer even in some of our key markets like Brazil, Mexico, Canada and South Africa. We have been clear global leader in innovation. Our rolling 36-month share of innovation, growing over 6 percentage points in 2021 with a clear acceleration in the last 12 months. In conclusion, we are in a growing and vibrant category and we still have many opportunities to lead and expand it. We feel enthusiastic about the early results of our strategy and excited about the prospects of continuing to lead and expand the category for years to come. Thank you.

Thank you, Pedro and Rosie. To reinforce what we have said here, be it is a profitable an exciting category, projected to grow volume and share of growth over the next 5 years. Based on our footprint, we have a unique opportunity to not only capture this growth, but lead and grow the category above expectations. Our evolving category expansion model with repeatable and proven levers is how we plan to do it. This is compelling on its own, but we can make it even better by digitizing and monetizing our business, which is our second strategic priority. Before we jump in, let's have a quick break. [Break]

Welcome back. I want to talk to you now about the second pillar of our strategy. How we will unlock value from our existing assets and expand our addressable market through the digitization and monetization of our ecosystem. We have built an unparalleled ecosystem with more than 200 breweries that matched distribution route to market that enables us to reach 2 billion consumers, 6 million customers generating 10 million weekly transactions. New technology capabilities have unlocked multiple ways for us to create value for and from that ecosystem, and we have access to data at scale. By understanding the pain points and opportunities in our ecosystem, recognizing the assets we have and taking a few pages from the well-known industry tech playbook, we developed products and solutions to address these pain points. As expected, some of these have failed. And we've always learned it from the efforts we have made, but several have thrived and continue to gain momentum. We now have a portfolio of new businesses and products that have a few things in common. They all solve real customer and consumer pain points. They all have the potential to create significant value for our ecosystem. And their success will significantly strengthened our beer business. Given our scale and reach, these technology innovations are positioned to have an impact on our business and on the category globally. I'm going to turn to several of my colleagues now to describe these efforts in 3 particular areas: our B2B software and fintech services, our direct-to-consumer e-commerce solutions and our biotech initiatives. Let's go to Ricardo Tadeu to talk about our opportunities in the B2B space. Ricardo is with you.

Thanks, Michel. Hello, everyone. I'm Ricardo Tadeu, ABI's Chief BEES Officer. I've been with the company for 26 years, operating mostly in Latin America and Africa before moving to global sales. And today, I have the pleasure to lead our B2B digital transformation through BEES. So what is BEES? BEES is our B2B e-commerce platform, focused on turning customer pain points into growth opportunities, leveraging the power of technology. The customer is at the center of everything we do at BEES because when our customers grow, we grow. But before I get into the details, let me share with you a brief video that clarifies how we bring customer centricity to life with BEES. [Presentation]

And how are we doing on delivering all these solutions to our customers? As of today, we are live in 13 markets, with more than 2.1 million monthly active users and more than $25 billion in annualized GMV. This rapid expansion has been supported by a state-of-the-art tech platform that we have been developing and investing behind for several years. Jason Lambert, our Global VP of Product at BEES, we will discuss the technology behind our platform.

Thank you, Ricardo. Hi, everyone. I'm Jason Lambert. Been with the company for more than 6 years. And in that time, I focused exclusively on building out our technology for B2B sales. We've invested heavily in our platform, building it from the ground up with a team more than 1,200 developers. To provide our customers with a modern e-commerce platform, our in-house engineering teams built a cutting-edge microservices architecture that enables all of our core e-commerce capabilities. This modern architecture also drastically reduced the platform's dependencies on our legacy ERP systems, which would have been a barrier to providing many of the most valued and utilized features on BEES. These 200-plus micro services now support over 10 next-generation applications, each one built to provide the visibility and empowerment to a specific touch point along the customer journey. In this time, we've also built a customer data infrastructure that not only helps us warehouse billions of monthly data points but also allow us to send these data points to hundreds of downstream tools in real time. This opens up a new world of opportunities. We can send event-based messaging and commercial campaigns to customers, personalizing each and every interaction. We also equip our frontline sales team with real-time information on customer behavior for our BEES [ force ] app, giving them algorithmically driven tasks to uniquely support each customer's business growth. Lastly, our data infrastructure also provides our customer support agents the detailed information they need to deliver a superior customer service experience through BEES CARE.

Everything Jason mentioned drives service improvement and enhances our relationship with customers who are our gateway to consumers all around the world. I also want to share with you how BEES is impacting ABI. In addition to a better service to our customers, BEES has 2 main commercial objectives. The first one is to accelerate profitable growth in our core business. And the second one is to unlock new profitable business opportunities. Now let's start with accelerating profitable growth for our core business. On that matter, I can give you 3 very clear examples. Number one, BEES is a 24/7 personalized communication channel with our customers that ensures our commercial priorities are delivered with world-class execution and speed. Number two, BEES allows the rapid rollout of our commercial strategy, enabling faster go-to-market for our key innovations. And number three, within BEES, our AI-generated personalized recommendations help customers to place orders in a fast and convenient way and help us avoid loss sales and more efficiently allocate our commercial investments. I will now show a video which demonstrates some of the capabilities we have developed to deliver successful commercial campaigns. And afterwards, Jean will talk about innovation and promotional investments. [Presentation]

Hello, I'm Jean Jereissati, Zone President for South America and AmBev CEO. I've been with the company for 21 years, operating in Latin America and Asia Pacific. And BEES is live in many of our markets, and I'm excited to share how we are deploying BEES to better serve our customers. We have been evolving the way we sell, promote products and build our brands. In short, we have been evolving the way we help our customers to thrive. In Brazil, we see that customers who are fully engaged with BEES grow faster than other retailers. And fully engaged means the use of our recommendation when purchasing, the redeem rewards from our programs and engage with other platform features. Compared to pre-pandemic levels, fully engaged customers grew the number of our beer SKUs by 10%. Our net revenue per delivery increased by 26%, and we increased the number of deliveries to these retailers by 2%. Today, more than 80% of BEES customers use our AI-generated recommendations, and they repeatedly trust them to support their purchasing. These are real numbers from Brazil. But in all markets and over time, we see higher volume and wider assortment for orders placed with our recommendations. And of course, with every new purchase, every new use of BEES app, we are gathering data points that further elevate our relationships with our customers. In addition, I'm very excited about the recent capability we developed to better allocate promotional investments. Historically, discounts always raised hard-to-answer questions. Do I really need to make this investment? Is this the correct audience for the investment? Is this the correct level of discount? In order to test our latest AI capabilities for revenue management, we conducted a pilot with a promotion for Budweiser from August to September. One group was targeted with the traditional approach to discounts and the other with algo-driven promotions. Let me show you what video of this new capability in action. [Presentation]

And the results were impressive. We were able to deliver a 22% higher redemption rate and a 12% higher profit per hectoliter compared with our traditional way of promoting products. We learned a lot from this experiment, and I'm very excited to deploy this new capability at scale going forward. Now let me discuss how BEES is unlocking new profitable adjacent business opportunities through our e-commerce marketplace. Always focused on easing our customers' lives, this marketplace enables customers to purchase products, manufactured by other suppliers through our app. Now customers can find their favorite products at competitive prices, all in one shopping experience. The marketplace is proving to be fantastic for our business and is already driving incremental profitability. In the most recent quarter, we saw the following results among our marketplace customers versus our non-marketplace customers. A Net Promoter Score, 5 percentage points higher and beer net revenue growth of 1.7 percentage points higher. Finally, I wanted to share with you a video that we will make even more clear how we are able to serve our customers as they run their business on a daily basis. [Presentation]

In a nutshell, BEES is allowing us to know our customers better than ever before. We are providing better service levels through one-on-one solutions for their different needs from multiple category assortment recommendations, personalized promotions, our rewards program, multiple delivery day options, financial solutions and many more services to come. We are still in the early stages of a very exciting journey for all parties connected in our BEES ecosystem, and we are looking forward to what's to come. So back to you, Ricardo.

Thanks, Jean. I hope you have enjoyed learning a little bit more about BEES. In summary, everything centers around our customers because when our customers thrive, ABI grows. We have invested on this journey for the last 6 years, and now we have more than 1,200 people focused solely on this initiative. We are already operating at scale in 30 markets with more than 2.1 million monthly active users, and we are continuing to roll out rapidly. We are delivering real results today on our 2 objectives: to accelerate growth in our core business and unlock new profitable growth opportunities. At BEES, we are very excited to continue to inspire growth and promote digital inclusion to millions of small retailers. Here's to a future with more cheers. Now let me invite my partner, Pablo Panizza, to talk about exciting opportunities in the DTC space.

Hello. I am Pablo Panizza, Chief Director of Officer. I joined the company as a global management trainee 21 years ago. Prior to my current role, I served as BU President of Argentina. And now my focus in direct-to-consumer is building innovative solutions to better connect our brands with consumers. The consumer is at the center of everything we do. We are developing direct-to-consumer channels to provide the best experience for beer occasions, designed by people who knows beer the best and continuously improve through consumer feedback. Direct consumer is made up of a portfolio of digital and physical products that address different consumer needs, combining fast-growing e-commerce platforms with 12,000 retail stores, to create an omnichannel ecosystem that has generated more than $1 billion in revenues year-to-date September and have scaled in several key markets. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, our online channels saw significant growth that continues today. Our e-commerce platforms have fulfilled nearly 50 million orders year-to-date, September, representing sales growth of 90% year-by-year and 5x increase versus pre-pandemic levels in 2019. Our growth was not a coincidence. Over the last 6 years, we have proactively developed malls and technological capabilities that enable faster expansion, resulting in an accelerated growth as consumers shifted online. And we're skilling with quality because our platforms have achieved an average NPS above 80%, demonstrating the strength of our value proposition. As online penetration of beer sales increases, our direct-to-consumer platforms allow us to connect one-on-one with each consumer, gaining detailed insights. And this enables ABI to personalize at scale, executing activations to drive higher customer lifetime value. So owning the consumer transaction from awareness to purchase help us to better direct our marketing investment while increasing the speed to market. And this is opening very exciting new opportunities for us to expand into new occasions, to premiumize and to grow the category. So as we learn also more from our consumers, we can use this knowledge to help our brands improve execution with our retail partners. ABI is uniquely positioned to develop a sustainable direct-to-consumer offering for several reasons. First, our diverse portfolio of leading brands give us a differentiated value proposition, raises awareness and drives consumer adoption across our DTC platforms. Second, ABI's extensive logistics network, the partnership we have with millions of retailers and footprint of owned physical stores help us to increase last mile delivery efficiency, promote best-in-class service level and ensure superior beer experiences. And finally, our proprietary technology seamlessly connect these 3 elements into a single ecosystem that enabled us to rapidly expand our direct-to-consumer platforms. Today, I would like to highlight 2 of our direct-to-consumer digital products. First, let's start with the delivery, a courier platform that is offering the best assortment of cold beers delivered at home in less than 30 minutes. Let's take a brief look at the video. [Presentation]

In 5 years, became the preferred app for beverage delivery and is now the #2 delivery app in monthly downloads in all of Brazil. Even after the pandemic restriction eased, we saw our monthly orders growing to record levels. And by year-to-date September, we delivered 1.5x more orders than what we had in all of 2020. We're expanding the e-commerce segment in Brazil, driving increased penetration. So Zen leverages the capillarity of our route to market through long-standing relationships with our retail partners, to deliver with very high service levels. We are driving incremental transactions for our partners and solving the last mile in a very efficient way. So based on the success in Brazil, we have expanded the courier platform to 10 additional countries in Latin America, covering 51 million new inhabitants. We choose to expand initially in Latin America because it's one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in the world. As we expand into new countries, we are also connecting with our physical retail footprint. For example, in Mexico, we are leveraging our Modelorama stores to create an omnichannel ecosystem to drive consistent profitable growth. Let's highlight now a second direct-to-consumer product, PerfectDraft. We're combining e-commerce with an innovative draft machine to deliver the ultimate in-home beer experience. I would like now to invite my colleague, Andy Logan, who leads direct to consumer expansion in Europe to talk about this exciting product.

Thank you, Pablo, and hello, everyone. I'm Andy Logan. I've been quenching thirst at AB InBev for the last 15 years, the first decade or so, primarily in global marketing and commercial roles and the last by accountable for establishing e-commerce as a meaningful growth engine in Europe and mature markets around the world. Our mission with PerfectDraft is to deliver your ultimate home beer experience. Let's take a look at this video to get little tease of what that's like. [Presentation]

PerfectDraft delivers a wide assortment of the beers you love for pub-quality home-draft experience. And we can deliver that because our PerfectDraft operating model seamlessly links all the way from our breweries to the beer lovers' home and back again. And this means we can optimize every single step along the way, but it also creates a circular model, which is good for both the economic as well as environmental sustainability. Now we've been working incredibly hard over the last 5 years and the model is proven in the U.K. and France. Year-to-date September, we're outpacing the category, and we've delivered more than $100 million in revenues in those markets. Further, the growth is sustaining post-COVID. In quarter 2 and quarter 3 of 2021, we added more new shoppers than in the corresponding periods in 2020 at the peak of COVID. And as a result, we're now rolling out the perfect draft experience to the millions of households around the world where draft quality is recognized. Our e-commerce success is providing new ways for our brands to grow in our mature markets through the in-home channel. We can sample new beers or trial beers directly to consumers all the while collecting valuable feedback.

Thanks, Andy. We see direct-to-consumer as an engine to help transform the way we build brands and drive category growth. As we have highlighted before, direct-to-consumer leverages our competitive advantages by combining strong e-commerce technology products, our industry-leading portfolio of brands and a global network of retail beer logistic infrastructure. And all these is seamlessly interconnected in a proprietary ecosystem that enables us to win in the beer e-commerce space. We are very excited and proud of what we have accomplished with our direct-to-consumer platforms but we are far from finished. And now I would like to pass it to Bernardo Novick, who will talk about exciting opportunities in the biotech space. Here's to a future with more cheers.

Hello. I'm Bernardo Novick, Head of ZX Ventures, and I'm really excited today to show you our biotech initiatives. We live in a world that's facing extraordinary challenges. Our rapidly growing population is putting pressure on our food system, natural resources and our environment. An unprecedented and necessary transformation in food is underway. A central part of this involves a shift away from animal to alternative sources of protein. AB InBev is well-positioned to play an active role in this transformation. We have unique assets, capabilities and expertise that can make a meaningful contribution towards solving these challenges. And in doing so, we can generate long-term growth for our company. AB InBev is a global company developed on local communities. We operate over 200 breweries in more than 50 countries worldwide. In developing our business, we have created vibrant local ecosystems, connecting farmers, supply footprints and distribution networks. We are the largest fermenter of barley in the world. And with our size, we can create and scale biotech solutions to increase value for our partners, shareholders and society. I want to present 2 opportunities we have developed over the past 6 years. We believe, today, they are poised to contribute meaningfully to both ABI's growth and the development of the biotech space. The first opportunity is evergreen. AB InBev is the world's leading consumer of malting barley, sourcing over 3 million metric tons of quality malting barley directly from 20,000 farmers every year. Historically, in the fermentation process, we have extracted only carbohydrates from our body, leaving behind rich protein and fibers in the form of [ saved ] grain that were sold as byproducts for a very low price or even giving away for free. Every year, our 200-plus breweries around the world produced 1.4 million tons of saved grain with exceptionally high nutritional value. We have realized we have a huge opportunity to upcycle our used barley. We have developed the technology to extract proteins and fibers from our saved grains and create nutritionally rich ingredients. This represents a tremendous opportunity. With our pilot facility in New Jersey, and a new $100 million facility in St. Louis that is coming online next March, we are on track to generate $20 million of net revenue in 2022. Let's have a look. [Presentation]

The second opportunity is [ buy brewery ]. No one in the world possesses as much scaled fermentation knowledge as ABI. We have developed specific expertise, supporting infrastructure and best-in-class operational processes that have potentially wide range in applications in the emergent biotechnology space. Partnering with precision fermentation specialists, we are developing high-margin value-added products that extend our reach. The application of biotechnology to food and beverage is expected to be a massive opportunity in the next 10 years to 20 years, and the market for alternative fermented protein alone is estimated to reach $22 billion by 2035. While we are still in the exploratory stages, we already have good traction. [Presentation]

The facts are clear. Population growth trends in today's consumption patterns tell us that more food will be needed to be produced in the next 30 years that has been produced in all of human history. To sustainably meet this demand, the way we produce food must change, starting with a shift away from animals as a source of protein. With our exceptional scale, assets and fermentation expertise, we are making a meaningful contribution to addressing this global food challenge. Scaling and monetizing these solutions will create value for our company and our society. We are dreaming and acting big to solve big problems, to generate more value and to create a future with more cheers. Thank you.

Great stuff. Thank you all. In simple terms, here's how I summarize this high-priority technology products. This is already a very large business for us. We were able to take an analog installed base of business customers and move them into the digital world at almost no cost. Think about that. In the process we created the best B2B platform of any FMCG, and we are just getting started. On the other side, we are starting to reach a large underserved consumer base directly through our e-commerce and mobile commerce services. As of today, we have attracted millions of consumers to our platforms across Latin America. What do we mean? Consumers get their cold beer in 30 minutes at home. And we, we direct access to the occasions and to real-time data that is opening up a new world of possibilities to serve them better. Biotech, it is in the early days, but it is very exciting. I don't know if you know, but I started as a chemical engineer, and I love fermentation. On the production side, we have the breadth, depth and control of a scaled fermentation process at a global level. By combining these capabilities with breakthroughs in biotechnology, we have the potential to be part of the solution to sustainable food production in the future. Just imagine the possibilities. These initiatives are powered by over 2,000 tech developers and some of the world's leading fermentation science. These are terrific and very real opportunities to accelerate our growth and to build on our unique ecosystem, to create a future of more cheers for our partners, customers, consumers and communities around the world. Hopefully, you are as excited as I am about the opportunities we just saw. Of course, it all comes down to execution, and execution demands simplicity. So we have simplified the way we look at and manage our business, grouping our footprint into 4 clusters based on similar macroeconomic and consumer trends. This simplified framework makes it easier to create and share repeatable learnings, leveraging our scale and make better resource allocation decisions. These cluster,s, in order of priority, are developing markets that are seeing first population, economic and per capita consumption growth across all segments. And as a result, we represent a sizable amount of global beer revenue in the future. China, because of its size and unique operating environment, it is its own priority. The growth of middle and upper economic classes is unparalleled. And in the next 10 years, this part of the population will grow faster than in the last 10 years. Just imagine the opportunity. We know how big it is. And it will play a key role for us as we continue to premiumize in the future. Developed markets, where people are typically wealthier and older, and consumer trends are constantly evolving, require an innovative approach in the market and expansion into new incremental segments such as Beyond Beer. And finally, emerging markets. While these markets may have lower disposable income relative to others, they represent a sizable population that it is growing fast. As a result, there will be a big opportunity for beer in the long term. So with that, let's take a quick trip around the world, starting with Lisboa to guide us through developing markets, how our strategy is lending and how our execution is making the difference. [Presentation]

Hello, everyone. I'm Carlos Lisboa, and I'm the Zone President for our Middle Americas zone. I consider myself a homegrown talent being at ABI for almost 28 years, with experience leading our business in both emerging and mature markets as well as operating in global positions. I'm a marketeer leading the best moment in my career, leading one of the most important growth engines for our company. And talking about growth, that's exactly what maturity to you or developing markets means for us, a unique growth opportunity. Beer in developing markets is growing rapidly, but relatively underdeveloped when compared to per capita consumption levels to more mature markets. And the beer category is still very concentrated in a healthy core segment. However, premium is growing at a very fast pace. Our company is rated as one of the most admired CPGs in almost every single market in this cluster. And we have some of the leading brands across all CPG categories. The markets in this cluster have similar attributes, including demographics, economic trends, cultures and consumer trends, which allow us to scale winning strategy smoothly across the geographies. In other words, developing markets are a true growth engine with a healthy balance between both top line and bottom line growth. With what I just said in mind, the mission for developing markets is to leverage our unique position to consistently create profitable growth. To achieve this mission, we have 3 enablers. First, a combination of relentless execution and the mindset of speed, creativity and innovation. Second, portfolio transformation with what Pedro and Rosie highlighted earlier today, the Category Expansion Framework 2.0, leveraging the best practice from the global footprint to deliver an accelerated growth rate in all category segments. Third, rethinking our business model through a new digitally connected ecosystem, making us stronger partners to our customers and more agile to respond to consumer needs. Where our strategy has been fully implemented, we see consistent and strong results. For instance, in Brazil, we are delivering top line growth ahead of historical levels with double-digit growth this year versus 2019 and also ahead of the industry for the last 5 quarters in a row, led by portfolio transformation and digital platform. Mexico, year-over-year, we have been delivering strong results at both top line and bottom line, consistently ahead of the industry through a complete portfolio and business transformation. And even in Peru, where we have faced one of the longest lasting and most severe COVID lockdowns in the world, we closed the third quarter of this year with top line and bottom line above pre-pandemic levels. A great case study of the success of our growth formula is Colombia. And to walk you through the case, I would like to invite native Colombian in the Middle Americas, VP of Insights and Planning, María Angélica, to speak to you directly.

Thank you, Lisboa. I want to deep dive into 2 enablers of growth. First, our portfolio transformation through the Category Expansion Framework 2.0; and second, the digital transformation for the future. The implementation of our Category Expansion Framework 2.0 should start with the brands that our consumers love the most, our core brands. First, by developing a more inclusive big category, through offering a more complete range of brands and packs, and inclusive prices to fit with more consumer segments and more cities. In addition, enhancing our corporate portfolio through superior innovation like the launch of Poker Pura Malta, inspired in the case of Brahma Duplo Malte in Brazil that brings to the core superior elements that were previously owned by premium brands. Our portfolio transformation also requires a strong feminization strategy in which our is to create a portfolio ahead of our maturity level. First, leveraging the strength of our domestic premium brand to Colombia, to trade consumers up from the [indiscernible] through providing a superior experience with the richness of beer through a full family of varieties. We have Golden, Red, Black and now our latest innovation, Double Malt. And also introducing new pack formats to capture new incremental occasions like meals and celebrations, in which premiumness is required. We have activated the strength of our full portfolio of international brands, providing Colombians with the best beer propositions of the world, with creative and highly differentiated executions. Second, to complete our winning formula for developing markets, let me talk about how Colombia has one of our most advanced digital ecosystems. Our B2B platform, BEES, is now adopted by more than 300,000 points of sale, representing 87% of our net revenue. Digitalization has allowed us to provide more flexible and efficient services to our retailers, improving our NPS versus nondigitalized retailers and also supporting our prior portfolio transformation by increasing our ability to customize our offering through our database algorithms. In addition, we are enhancing our ecosystem with services like marketplace, in which our retailers have the convenience of finding multiple categories in one single place, and further our fintech services that are positioned to better equip and prepare our traditional trade partners for the future. Through our relentless execution of our strategy, we are delivering our mission. Our portfolio offers now more than ever what our consumers are looking for. Our business model today is more prepared for the future. We have achieved the highest volumes in our history. Our beer market share remains strong and beer category has achieved share of throat gains within the alcohol industry. And as a result, we are delivering top on bottom line growth versus pre-pandemic lens. So Lisboa, that's our story in Colombia.

Thank you, Angélica, super inspiring. Everything we are doing has the objective to make developing markets an insurgent at scale region so that they can grow scale and be agile, be strong and creative in execution, build on our legacy by modernizing for the future, become a true growth engine. In other words, that's the way we want to bring our purpose to life, dreaming big in developing markets to create a future with more cheers.

Hello, everyone. I'm Jan Craps, President of the APAC Zone. I joined the company about 20 years ago in Belgium. And since then, I've led some of the most profitable markets in the world like Canada and Australia. Since our IPO in 2019 in Hong Kong, I also became the CEO and Co-Chair for Budweiser APAC, which is one of the leading breweries in Asia, which, of course, is a key growth region in the world. I'm very excited today to share with you our strategy to win in China. China is one of the key growth markets for the future ABI value growth, mostly driven by [ premiumization ]. And we've built a very strong business year. More than 10 years ago, while other growers were focused on volume growth, mainly from the core and value segments, we made a strategic decision to invest ahead of the curve to shape the premium segment in China. We anticipated the significant growth of middle income -- middle-class households that will drive consumption trade-up and premiumization. As a result, we are leading the premium and super premium segments with more than 45% share of segments. Looking ahead, we are anticipating the next significant wave of middle-class household increase in China. This number grew from 7 million in 2010 to 43 million in 2019, and it's expected to reach 172 million by 2030, which will be 2x the size of the total middle-class population of the U.S. This rapid growth supports continued premiumization in China for at least the next decade, driven by not only premium but also the super premium segments. In line with our global strategies, here is how they come to life in China. First, in terms of brand portfolio, we are driving further premiumization with both our premium and super premium brands. Our premiumization journey started with Budweiser. This brand became the #1 premium beer by building strong local relevance and connecting to the passion points of Chinese consumers, such as being the iconic brand for Chinese New Year celebration and introducing electronic dance music to Chinese consumers. China has become the biggest market for worldwide. And the brand is contributing almost 50% of our total net revenue in China today. We have also built strong route-to-market capabilities, developing a group of capable and loyal wholesalers. As part of our Budweiser Elite Club, our key wholesaler partners have access to the top business school programs. And our best practices, to improve their day-to-day operations, such as premium brand execution, finance and logistics management. Additionally, we have an optimized footprint of 31 breweries across different regions in China, leading global ABI in efficiency and environmental benchmarks and equipped with cross-brewing capabilities for Budweiser and other brands in our portfolio. Moreover, Budweiser continues to grow through line extensions and innovations. For example, we address new consumer trends and various drinking occasions by launching Budweiser Supreme, Budweiser Magnum, Budweiser Brewmaster and Budweiser ME series. [Presentation]

As markets mature, consumers are looking for a variety of brands providing differentiated experiences. The super premium segment offers another avenue of growth with the potential to create a profit pool size almost comparable to premium. As part of the ABI family, we have access to more than 600 brands of various beer styles, many of which have centuries of history and heritage. We believe we are the best positioned to shape and lead the super premium segment in China as we have done for the premium segment. In 2014, we created our high-end company, with dedicated teams and specialized wholesalers to develop our super premium portfolio, serving rituals and experiences in a very unique way. [Presentation]

As a result, our super premium portfolio has quadrupled its volume since 2017, now contributing mid-teens of our net revenue in China. Corona grew to 1 million hectoliters already in 2018. Blue Girl exceeded 1 million hectoliters in 2019. And China became the biggest market for Hoegaarden also since 2019. The group's margin of our super premium brands is more than 9x the average of core and value products. We are very excited by the meaningful growth potential for our super premium portfolio in China. Moreover, we continue to expand our super premium portfolio with our craft and specialty brands such as Goose Island, Boxing Cat, both of which have been growing consistently at strong double digits. In the beyond beer space, we see ready-to-drink as a key opportunity and a key category to drive growth in China. That sums up how we are premiumizing the market with our diverse brand portfolio. Now I'd like to talk to you about our execution in China, following our proprietary expansion model. China is a diverse country with hundreds of cities at different development stages where using averages can be misleading. We expand geographically by implementing our disciplined city stage expansion model based on each market's maturity level. Accordingly, we have identified 31 cities for super premium expansion, more than 50 cities for Budweiser expansion, a brand which despite its size still has less than 50% of numerical distribution in China today. Depending on the city stage, we prioritize different portfolio segments and sales channels as well as teams and route-to-market developments. From a channel perspective, we have seen that the in-home channel becomes more important as markets mature around the world, and this trend has been further accelerated by the COVID restrictions. To capture this rising opportunity, we leverage different brand assortments and pack types to create a win-win for our consumers and our customers. Thirdly, I'd like to talk to you about digitization. How we are leveraging data analytics and tech to connect with our consumers and customers, driving digital commerce and digitizing our route-to-market. We are gathering deep insights through data analytics, allowing us to better connect with our consumers. BUD SPACE, our branded DTC foundation built upon a WeChat Mini program, attracts and engages consumers with a holistic digital experience. DraftLine, our in-house marketing agency, designs and delivers digital creative tailored to specific consumer segments, improving overall media ROI. In the digital commerce space, we are growing our strong leadership position, and we expanded into new channels such as O2O platforms. We also use the digital ecosystems to pilot new products, leveraging influencers and live streaming. Lastly, in digital route-to-market, we are rolling out our proprietary B2B platform BEES to build stronger connections with our wholesaler partners and POS. For example, through selling algorithms, BEES can provide business solutions to customers to drive incremental top line growth and improved operational efficiencies. In closing, we are so excited about the future growth potential of the China market, especially as consumers continue to premiumize. With our proven commercial strategies in premiumization, digitization and expansion supported by our amazing teams and strong wholesaler partners, we are confident we can deliver sustainable, high-quality growth in China. Here's to a future with more cheers.

Hi. I'm Brendan Whitworth, the North America Zone President. Before joining Anheuser-Busch, I was a lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps and an Operations Officer in the Central Intelligence Agency. After leaving government service and going back to business school, I began my career in CPG at PepsiCo. And 8 years ago, I jumped at the opportunity to join this great organization at AB InBev. Prior to my current role, I was the Chief Sales Officer in the U.S., working alongside Michel and the team to develop, define and implement our commercial strategy. And it's an honor and a privilege to be at the helm of the North America Zone, helping to continue to execute this strategy alongside a talented and passionate workforce. I have the pleasure of walking you through our plans for the developed markets cluster. First, I'll share some market context of what it means for the alcohol industry and our mission in the cluster. Next, I'll share the pillars of our success algorithm. I will also invite Jason Warner, who leads our European business and our very own U.S. Chief Commercial Officer and former Canada President, Kyle Norrington, to bring these examples to life. And in addition to discussing his business in Europe, Jason will close out this section by detailing the key principles for our strategy. Now by way of introduction, developed markets represent around 60% of the global beer profit pool today. And in aggregate, we hold the #1 share position across the cluster. These markets are highly profitable for us globally, contributing over 40% of the EBITDA for our company. And these markets are defined by 5 key factors: first, wealthy consumers with growing income, up 15% in the last 10 years. Second, alcohol consumption per capita that is on average 2x greater than developing markets; third, diversity of consumer preferences, occasions and alcohol styles. Fourth, world-leading innovation and early adoption of digital solutions. And fifth, strong currencies and stable social environments. Combined, these factors shape the alcohol industry and create a healthy outlook for our markets. And we see 2 main engines driving growth in alcohol. First, premiumization, where consumers are trading up and looking for goods and experiences with higher perceived value or more intrinsic worth. And second, beyond beer, this is also referred to as the fourth category as it represents the blurring of lines between alcohol categories, traditionally defined as beer, wine and spirits. Now typically served in a can or a single-serve bottle, the category growth is driven by consumers who are breaking up with traditional wine and spirits in exchange for the convenience of beyond beer. This category is extremely incremental to our business with some subcategories like ready-to-drink cocktails sourcing over 50% of their volume from traditional wine and spirits buyers. And we have a competitive advantage and strong right to win given our capabilities in production, agile innovation and branding and route to market. Our mission in these markets is to rebalance and premiumize the portfolio to lead future growth. And our success algorithm is grounded in 3 pillars: one, portfolio; two, digital transformation; and three, relentless execution. First, let me cover portfolio. In North America, we are already on a journey to premiumize and rebalance our portfolio. Our portfolio is a key competitive advantage, with solutions catering to consumers, ranging from the extremely loyal value consumers all the way up to the most premier offerings in craft. And leading the charge in premiumization in the U.S. has been the multiyear growth of Michelob Ultra, connecting with the health and wellness macro trend. It is now the #2 brand in the U.S. industry by volume behind Bud Light. We continue to develop our premium and super premium portfolio, led by our global brand Stella Artois and industry-leading craft offerings in our Brewers Collective business unit. Over the past 4 years, we have increased the share generated by our above core portfolio by 10 percentage points from 20% to 30%. And Jason will share how Europe is driving premiumization, which is now over 50% net revenue in the above core by building a common, scalable portfolio led by global brands, craft and specialties and bringing the success story of the U.K. In addition to premiumization within beer, we are building a robust portfolio and the right capabilities to accelerate our growth in beyond beer across all developed markets. Kyle will share some key learnings from Canada's beyond beer business and how we are replicating these in the emerging segments of the U.S. to capture growth. Now the second pillar in our success algorithm is digital transformation. Technology continues to change our ways of working, making us more efficient. By leading the digital conversation with our retailers using our algorithmic selling platform BEES, which is set for scale expansion across the developed markets cluster. It's also making us more insightful by developing machine learning tools like LOLA, our locally optimized learning algorithm, that converts POS-level insights into assortment or innovation opportunities. And it's making us more connected with our consumers with technologies like Europe's PerfectDraft, delivering a great consumer experience fueled by a direct consumer relationship. Now finally, relentless execution. Retailers are faced with more complexity to support changes in consumer choices, and we are uniquely positioned to overdeliver support. Our growing expertise in total alcohol category management, our supply chain and the strength of our route-to-market teams are focused on maintaining optimal service levels and execution excellence. All of this makes us an ideal partner. As Amanda highlighted earlier in showcasing The Vault, these execution strengths resulted in our U.S. business being awarded the #1 CPG supplier by our customers in Advantage Group's annual CPG retailer survey this year, beating all other alcohol and all other CPG companies. And none of this would be possible without our people's resilience and their commitment. So in summary, we leverage our portfolio, our digital transformation and our relentless execution as our competitive advantages to drive the success throughout the developed markets. Now to bring this to life, I'm going to invite Kyle and Jason to share how they have successfully executed against this strategy and share some of their examples.

I'm Kyle Norrington, the Chief Commercial Officer for the U.S. business. I've been with AB InBev for 21 years and held many roles across sales and marketing. Most recently, I had the honor of leading our Canadian business as President of Labatt Breweries of Canada. Canada has been executing a similar strategy to the U.S., focused on rebalancing our portfolio mix to growing segments while still maintaining the health of our mainstream brands. For years, we found ourselves in a declining beer industry. As we repositioned our business to include beyond beer, we increased our addressable market. Now we have a growing business within a growing industry, where we lead the way with an amazing portfolio of beer and beyond beer brands. As Brendan noted and similar to other developed markets, the beer market in Canada continues to shift toward premium segments. We have an unmatched portfolio across international premium, craft and core plus brands, and we continue to bolster our position as the #1 brewer by gaining in this growing premium segment. Beyond beer is a significant category in Canada, representing about 20% of the combined industry. For the last decade, we have built capabilities and a portfolio of leading brands that have and continue to deliver substantial growth. Canada's success in beyond beer lies in 2 key transformations to our business. First, we have made beyond beer a core pillar of our business in terms of structure and strategy to ensure it is a priority. Second, we increased our capacity for innovation, which remains an engine for industry growth. We are now the leaders in this growing segment and have established an amazing portfolio of brands that deliver on diverse consumer needs across all subsegments from vodka sodas to sweet ready-to-drink coolers. Take vodka sodas, for example. In 2020, we acquired Canada's #1 vodka soda brand Nutrl and scaled that brand across the country with great success. As a spirits brand, Nutrl appeals to traditional wine and spirit consumers looking for a quality product in a convenient packaging format. We continue to see the brand sourcing disproportionately from these consumers and occasions. Across our beyond beer portfolio, we continue to innovate and grow, bringing incrementality and new consumers to the category. To date, we generate over $200 million of annualized net revenue and 1/3 of all ready-to-drink beverages consumed in Canada are one of ours. Looking forward, our portfolio and our capabilities remain our competitive advantage. We continue to premiumize and rebalance by being consumer-first and meeting their needs of today and tomorrow. I'm excited to bring these learnings to the U.S. market as Chief Commercial Officer. Here's to a future with more cheers. Jason, over to you.

Thanks, Kyle. Hello, everybody. I'm Jason Warner, and I'm the Zone President for Europe and the Middle East. Before joining AB InBev in 2009, I spent my career at Nestlé and Coca-Cola across various roles in sales and marketing, building global brands and robust portfolio strategy. At AB InBev, I started my journey by leading Budweiser globally, followed by Corona, after which I led global innovation and renovation. Recently, I was the Business Unit President of the U.K. and Ireland, where I had the privilege to build the portfolio of the future alongside a talented and passionate team. And now for the last few years, I have the honor of leading our European operations with a clear mission to lead future growth in the region driven by a common, scalable portfolio built with our iconic premium and super premium brands. As Brendan mentioned, our success in developed markets is focused on portfolio, digital transformation and relentless execution. This focus applies to our European business as well. I'd like to talk to you today about our experience in the U.K. The U.K. beer category historically was a market where the core lager segment accounted for most of the consumption. Back in 2016, our proprietary category development model helped us predict that consumers would accelerate the trade-up to premium and super premium segments. Consequently, we proactively repositioned our business and our portfolio for growth. We invested behind a focused portfolio of scalable, premium and super premium brands led by our global brands. In the last 5 years, we've generated more than 1/3 of the growth of the premium segment. And in doing so, we became the #1 brewer in the U.K. In addition, since the Brexit referendum of 2017, our business has been gaining share as well of total alcohol. Growth begins with consumers, and we are driven by anticipating and meeting their needs. Our brands in the U.K. have the highest household penetration in the industry. And in 2020, we continue to accelerate penetration growth almost twice faster than the industry. We are constantly seeking out new growth opportunities. We knew that consumers would seek elevated beer experiences in the home, and we knew that their beer purchasing would move online. We invested accordingly. Andy spoke earlier about our in-home draft technology, PerfectDraft. And in the U.K., there are now more PerfectDraft machines in people's homes than there are pubs, which is remarkable. In addition, our early investments in e-commerce, our own platforms such as Beer Hawk have paid off. We are the market leader in online beer sales with more than 20% of our revenue in the U.K. now online. We continue to invest for future growth, enhancing our profitability, our sustainability and our consumer relevance. Since 2015, we've invested over $240 million in brewing capacity to keep pace with demand for our premium and super premium portfolio. We've invested to ensure that 100% of our portfolio in the U.K. is produced with renewable electricity from solar, wind and that our full beer portfolio in the U.K. is brewed with only ingredients of natural origin. We are replicating this winning formula across our European business as we continue to rebalance our portfolio for growth. Led by our global brands, our premium and super premium portfolio now delivers more than 50% of our total revenue. That's up from 39% in 2015. Our playbook for our developed markets is not just U.K. or Canada specific, but it's applicable across our footprint. We will continue to leverage our portfolio of iconic global and local premium and super premium brands supported by our digital platforms and relentless execution to win with consumers and to lead future growth. Here's to a future with more cheers.

Let me introduce myself. I'm Ricardo Moreira, and I'm the Zone President of Africa. And I have worked for ABI in the last 27 years. I have worked almost my entire career in sales, marketing and operations. And over the last 13 years, I have led our soft drinks business in Brazil, the commercial integration of Grupo Modelo in Mexico, the SAB integration in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. And since 2019, I have been leading our operations in Africa. Over the next few minutes, I just have one goal, to share with you how our emerging markets will be a very strong lever for our future profitable growth. The potential behind the expansion of the beer category in these countries is meaningful. And in the next 10 years, we expect to increase our volume contribution from these markets significantly. These markets currently have a population of around 0.5 billion people with expected growth of 24% by 2030. Income per capita is still relatively low, but projected to grow steadily by mid-single digits over the next decade as these economies continue to develop. Taking Africa continent as example, excluding South Africa, the average age is below 25 years old. Our internal forecasts indicate that around 70 million new legal drinking age consumers could be added to our existing base of consumers by 2030, which represents growth of over 30%. Furthermore, the current average beer per capita consumption in emerging markets is just 22 liters compared with an average of around 78 liters in developing markets, which implies a significant beer volume growth opportunity. You have heard earlier from my colleagues, Carlos and Angélica, about the success of winning growth formula in developing markets like Mexico or Colombia. This experience has helped us to design a clear road map for how to win in our emerging markets. Let me give you an example of how this road map translates into strategy in Africa. Our commercial plan can be summarized by 3 main objectives: to build an inclusive category, to develop superior core and above core portfolios via innovation and to accelerate our digital route-to-market transformation. Let me start with how to make our category more inclusive for new consumers. According to our estimates, more than half of all alcoholic beverage consumed in Africa are informal, representing a significant opportunity to formalize alcohol consumption. Consumers want better quality consumption occasions and alcoholic beverages at price that are still within their means. Our brands are aspirational, interested but purchasing power is still a relevant barrier with consumers needing to work an average of 130 minutes to buy beer. So what's the solution? We need to make our category more inclusive by offering new products that are high quality at a relatively moderate cost. This will attract new consumers to our products initially, and we expect over time that these consumers will trade up to our well-established core and core plus brands. By doing that, we will help foster economic growth in the communities in which we operate by investing in the entire value chain from farmers to point-of-sale owners. We have done this in Mozambique with our local crop brand Impala that was launched 5 years ago. By focusing on the right distribution channels and in the right geographic areas, we were able to grow in a profitable way, limiting cannibalization of our core portfolio and steadily increasing per capita consumption from below 10 liters in 2017 to around 11.5 liters in 2021. Needless to say, these initiatives also support local governments through formalization of the economy and increased tax collection. Similar projects have been implementing in Zambia, Uganda and Tanzania, which brings me to our second objective, to develop superior core and above core portfolios via innovation. A further example of how we are building the right portfolio for the future is Brutal Fruit, a beyond beer brand that was created in South Africa and that is expected to become a pan-Africa brand over the next few years. To speak to you about Brutal Fruit, let me introduce Leanne, our Beyond Beer Director for Africa.

Thank you, Moreira. As you know, South Africa is one of the largest and most dynamic ready-to-drink markets in the world. For many years, the overall category was opportunistic with the launches of many different liquids to take advantage of short-cycle flavored beverage trends, but we knew that this wouldn't be a sustainable approach. So we put the consumer at the center of our innovation efforts and by meeting their underlying needs, we have shown that we can create enduring innovations in the beyond beer space. As an example, our consumer research indicates that women in South Africa prefer a sweet, fruity and sparkling taste profile and desire the look and feel of sophistication and elegance. So we built the Brutal Fruit Spritzer brand on this idea of accessible sophistication. Firstly, we looked at liquid sophistication. We created a complex yet accessible liquid. Secondly, it was about ritual sophistication, distinctive imagery around glassware representing the uniqueness of women. And lastly, it was about execution sophistication. From packaging design to communication, the goal was to be aspirational and beautiful. As a result, since the launch of spritzer in 2018, Brutal Fruit has grown nearly 4x and improved from the sixth to the second most powerful brand with women in the ready-to-drink category. And we have almost doubled our female consumer base since launch and all this with a premium positioning, complementing our high-end portfolio. Brutal Fruit Spritzer is so much more than your typical beverage. It is a purposeful brand that appeals to a co-ed consumer base that is now on its way to expand to the entire continent.

Thanks, Leanne. That's really a great example of innovation and portfolio expansion to meet consumer needs. Then our third and last objective for emerging markets is accelerating our digital route-to-market transformation. We have a very traditional structure in our emerging markets to serve our clients and consumers. However, through our global digital platforms like BEES, BEES Marketplace, CXC, we can leapfrog our traditional route-to-market development path and with our scale and footprint expand our reach to consumers and customers by solving their key pain points. The combination of these platforms with our fintech solutions can unlock value for our clients, especially as banking services are generally not as developed as in other more developed countries. With our global capabilities, we want to be the first global CPG company to establish a relevant marketplace in these emerging markets, building an important competitive advantage for the years to come. For example, in Tanzania, we are already piloting the BEES Light app, which was developed for markets with reduced infrastructure. We are focused on expanding app across categories to create a strong relationship with distributions and point of sale. I'm really excited about the great opportunities ahead, but mainly because the future in our emerging markets is already here. The long-term results are worth the efforts to attract new consumers into the formal economy to fuel the development of the communities in which we operate and to create and share superior value for ABI and all its stakeholders. Here's to a future with more cheers.

You see we have a team of people who dream big and are fully aligned to our evolved strategy to create a future with more cheers. Now let's take another quick break. [Break]

As I shared earlier, ABI has a renewed purpose. We dream big to create a future with more cheers. But more cheers means so much more than just more toasts. It means more sustainability, more innovation, more inclusive, more natural ingredients, more local impact, more prosperity for all. That's a future we can now celebrate. For us, sustainability is business as usual. It's been a foundational part of our company for more than 600 years. Our business cannot exist without farmers, without clean water supplies, without healthy communities, strong suppliers, diversity, climate action. That mindset is the foundation in everything we do. I'm very happy to introduce you to Ezgi, who is going to take you through our sustainability approach.

Thank you, Michel, and hello, everyone. I'm Ezgi Barcenas, Chief Sustainability Officer. And it's a pleasure to speak with you today. I've been with AB InBev for over 8 years now. I was born and raised in Cyprus. After getting my engineering degree and a Masters in Environmental Health, I worked in international development, public health and foreign trade. These experiences allowed me to witness firsthand the role of business in the economy and society as well as the materiality of sustainable development for business and value chain resilience. I hope that you're as excited as I am about the purpose and vision presented today by Michel and my colleagues. I believe we have a very bright future, one centered around our consumer and customer-first strategy with our ESG principles as the foundation. To us, a future with more cheers is shared prosperity for our communities, for the planet and for our company. It is growth that is inclusive, value that is shared and wins for the world that are truly worth celebrating. As Michel mentioned, sustainability has always been core to who we are and what we do. And we've been on an incredible sustainability journey. We have paved the way in climate action as one of the first 100 companies to set a science-based target, one that is in line with a 1.5-degree pathway. From reducing our operational emissions by 24% since 2017, to sourcing over 70% of our global electricity volume with renewables from solar and wind power, to the launch of our 3 carbon-neutral facilities, we are creating local change. We have improved recycling supply chains, localizing cost, eliminating waste and lowering emissions while innovating across our primary and secondary packaging. We've empowered thousands of entrepreneurs and small businesses across our value chain. And we are now a leader in sustainable innovation as we scale up our award-winning 100+ Accelerator program. In agriculture, we've invested in predictive analytics to improve supply security and enhance climate resilience. We have adopted regenerative practices and we've digitally and financially empowered tens of thousands of farmers across our direct sourcing regions. We've improved our water efficiency by nearly 40% in a little over a decade, becoming the most water-efficient global brewer while setting a new standard with our partners for measurable improvement in high-stress watersheds. We've empowered consumers with choice and information with 80 no and low alcohol beer brands, the largest portfolio of its kind as well as a global voluntary labeling initiative in markets without mandatory government labeling in place. We are proud of our progress so far. But as always, we continue to dream bigger. We believe that a strong ESG agenda is vital for our future. From building a resilient and agile value chain, to solidifying our role as a trusted partner in local communities, to identifying and capturing new sources of business value, ESG will play a key role in delivering on our company's strategy and purpose. To this end, we've identified 8 strategic priorities, water stewardship, sustainable agriculture, entrepreneurship, ethics and transparency, circular packaging, diversity and inclusion, smart drinking and moderation and climate. We believe these priorities are the ESG topics for AB InBev to focus on, and they're also where we can drive the greatest shared value for local communities and the planet. As part of this refreshed strategy, I'm also proud to announce today our ambition for a net zero emissions future by 2040. Finally, it is through these priorities that we have also identified 3 crosscutting themes, inclusive, natural and local that we feel best capture the shared prosperity ABI brings to the world. Let's take a look. [Presentation]

As you just saw, it is these 3 themes: inclusive, natural and local that encapsulate who we are and how we will create shared prosperity. Across all our priorities, these themes distinguish us and their power becomes clear when applying them in different markets. In developing markets such as Brazil and Mexico, it is by empowering small businesses with access to technology, financing and skills that we'll grow inclusively. In developed markets such as the U.S. and Europe, it is by investing in nature and reconnecting consumers to simple ingredients that we'll premiumize our portfolio. And in emerging markets, like Uganda, Nigeria and Tanzania, it is by strengthening local economies and supporting smallholder farmers that we will build our category. I'll leave you now with this one final thought. The future of business and of the planet is inclusive. It is nature-based and natural. It is local. We are proud to lead the way to that future and to be a next-generation business today. As always, we welcome your feedback and partnership. Please join us as we dream big to create a future with more cheers.

Thank you, Ezgi. Sustainability is critical in creating a future with more cheers. We are also committed to driving sustained value over the long term. This is the third pillar of our strategy, optimizing our business. You've seen throughout the day, we have abundant opportunities to invest in the organic growth of our business. Now let me turn it over to our CFO, Fernando Tennenbaum, who will describe how we are optimizing our business to maximize value.

Hello, everyone, and thanks again for joining our investor seminar today. This is our final presentation, after which I'll hand it back to Michel for some closing comments. Then we will see you all at our Q&A panel. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Fernando Tennenbaum, AB InBev's Chief Financial Officer. I've been with the company for more than 17 years in various finance functions, including Investor Relations, Treasury and M&A. Most recently, I was the Chief Financial Officer of our publicly listed subsidiary, Ambev. I hope today's presentations have given you good visibility into our strategy to lead and grow the category and to digitize and monetize our ecosystem. Now I would like to talk to you about how we are optimizing our business to deliver our strategy and create a future with more cheers. As CFO, my objective is always to maximize value. To do this, I'm focused on 3 areas: optimize resource allocation to drive growth, robust risk management and efficient capital structure. Let me start by talking about optimizing resource allocation to maximize the growth potential of our business. I want to reinforce what Michel shared with you earlier. Over the years, we've built a unique global ecosystem with our iconic brands and unmatched global footprint. In terms of both profitability and cash conversion, we are best-in-class among our FMCG peers with an EBITDA margin of around 36% and operating cash flow as a percentage of revenue of nearly 27%. That's despite significant headwinds from COVID-19, transactional FX and commodities. And there is no shortage of opportunities to invest for growth. As you heard earlier today, we are focusing on 3 areas. First is the beer category. Beer is a growing and profitable category, and we have a golden opportunity to further grow and expand it with our global footprint, unique capabilities and operational expertise. Second is beyond beer. Because of our unique capabilities, we kept innovating beyond beer to drive incremental growth to our current business. And the third, new businesses that harness the power of our existing platforms and ecosystem like EverGrain and Bio Blue. Part of my job is to optimize how we allocate resources to these opportunities. We make these choices by taking into account both growth and economic profit potential. We look at economic profit because it considers required capital investment and relative risk as well as profitability. Some examples of these choices have included shifting resources in the U.S. from our mainstream business to our premium and beyond beer portfolios, investing ahead of the industry in premiumizing the beer category in China and invest in increasing scale in markets like Nigeria and Mozambique. We are also taking a long-term view, thinking about our customers and consumers will be 5, 10, 20 years out. To position our business for the future, we will continue to devote resources for new businesses, investments that may have longer return horizons but extract new value from our ecosystem. Examples include the investments we've been making behind digitization, like this platform presented by Ricardo and the emerging biotech platforms Bernardo described, EverGrain and Bio Blue. Enabled by such investments, our business can continue to generate significant cash flow. Moving on to my second focus area, our approach to risk management, starting for balance sheet. It probably won't surprise you to know that as a CFO, I'm always keeping a close watch on it. We have taken steps recently to derisk and delever our balance sheet. We have paid down more than $22 billion of debt and redeemed almost all of our maturities over the next 5 years. With these actions, our current liquidity is more than sufficient to cover all of our maturities in aggregate 2027. Additionally, we have no financial covenants on any of our debt. With that, let me talk about the third area, capital allocation. The primary objective, as I said earlier, is maximizing long-term value, and we do that by dynamically balancing capital allocation. Let me elaborate. At the end of 2020, our leverage ratio was 4.8x net debt to EBITDA. At that level, deleveraging can create significant value. As you can see here, as we approach 3x, approximately 90% of the benefits from deleveraging can be captured. As we move toward 2x, returning cash to shareholders and pursuing selective M&A opportunities can have a more meaningful impact on value creation. To wrap up, I want to reinforce that we have a great business with plenty of opportunities to create economic profit, which we optimize through effective resource allocation. While we continue driving consistent profitable growth, we will manage our risk profile to further enhance value creation. And finally, looking to our capital structure by dynamically balancing our leverage shareholder returns and selective M&A, we will further unlock value. By optimizing our business through these 3 areas, we will create a future with more cheers. Now I'll hand it back to Michel for some closing comments.

Thank you, Fernando. I believe our financial discipline, combined with our evolving strategy and resource allocation, will position us to consistently create value. Thank you again to the team who joined us today to share our exciting journey. A few things I want to leave you with before we close. As I told you before, we are committed to meeting the moment. and we are delivering on our 2021 commitments. Year-to-date September, our top line is performing above prepandemic levels. Our ambition is to continue to fuel this momentum for the long term, starting with a refined purpose of creating a future with more cheers and a simple strategy. One, lead and grow the beer category. Beer is a great category to be in. The beer category is inclusive, natural and local. It is big and profitable, and it is positioned to grow volume and share of throat in the years to come. We are uniquely positioned with an iconic portfolio of brands, road to market and renewed consumer-first mindset to not only capture this growth but become leaders in category growth. Two, digitize and monetize our ecosystem. We have built a vibrant ecosystem unlike any other made up of consumers, customers and communities around the world. We can solve real-world problems in this ecosystem by harnessing our data and unlocking value from new businesses. And three, optimizing our business. We will apply strong financial discipline and thoughtful resource allocation to drive superior value creation. This simple strategy is powered by our flywheel, which you saw in action here today: owners who drink big; brands that consumers love; our engagement with consumers, customers, communities to solve real problems; our commitment to sustainability at scale; and our disciplined investment strategy to drive growth; and our ability to consistently create and share superior value. Now in the beer world, there is always a final, final, one last round. What I say there, here is mine. I believe the culture of ownership in this company is our greatest competitive advantage. I recently shared with our Board a few amazing stories of this culture coming to life, and now I would like to share those with you. Let me start in the U.S. Last year, in the middle of the pandemic as our team was already working through a challenging operating environment, a tornado struck Jonesboro, destroying all the key equipment in our Anheuser-Busch rice mill and ultimately shutting it down. [ Mark Lee ], a senior solutions zoner in St. Louis, took it upon himself to load up his personal camper with the IT equipment needed, drove over 9 hours to the rice mill to power up the facility and to bring the rice mill back online in 72 hours, and then he lived on site for over a week to make sure it kept running. Mark's extraordinary efforts enabled us to avoid major disruptions to rise supply for our brewing process. Jumping now to Mexico. During COVID, the government imposed alcohol restrictions that limited our ability to bring products to our customers and consumers. Instead of just packing up shop, [ Yuniel Sanchez ], the Victoria brand owner at that time and her team, worked to develop brew and launch a low alcohol, Victoria beer in just 2 weeks to continue to provide our great quality beers to our consumers. Over in China, in the beginning of the COVID break, Wuhan was completely locked down. Factories, transportation, schools all stopped. What didn't stop was the utility system of our brewery in Wuhan, owners such as [ Yuan Hain ] and [ Chao Xiao ] lived on site away from friends and families for some time during the pandemic, all to keep the brewery running and ensure business continuity in one of our largest provinces in China. And finally, I want to highlight the entire South Africa team. Despite several lockdowns, alcohol bans and social unrest in the country, our business, not only has been delivering revenue above expectations, but is also performing well above pre-pandemic levels. What an effort, an exemplary ownership across the commercial and supply team. These are just 4 out of the thousands of stories I could have shared with you, stories of people taking on entire retail resets overnight, the only time that they could have access to our customers, leaders keeping that our daily push on volume performance to ensure we can provide best-in-class service to the market, teams develop entire new can and bottom lines in the middle of the pandemic on the volume shift to off-trade and we had to serve them. They were supporting our customers and consumers. Our teams in Brazil building hospitals in the middle of the pandemic. These examples of commitment, passion and tenacity of our people show why I believe deeply that the culture is our greatest competitive advantage. I am inspired by the dedication of all my colleagues around the world, and I'm honored to work with them to unlock the value of our unique platform and create a future with more cheers. So that's it for me. I want to thank you all again for joining me today, and I hope you are as energized as I am about the journey forward for ABI. Now I would like to turn it over to you to hear your thoughts and questions.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Q&A panel section of our seminar today. I'm Shaun Fullalove, the Global VP of Investor Relations for ABI. And I'm joined here by Michel and Fernando and some of our management team that you heard from today, including Ricardo Tadeu, Jason Lambert, Ezgi Barcenas, Pedro, Rosie Coppiano, Pablo Panizza and Bernardo Novick. Before we start, I just have a couple of quick disclaimers to note, and then we can dive right into it. Firstly, the presentations you heard today and the answers in this Q&A contain forward-looking statements. Please refer to the disclaimers contained in the materials posted to the Presentation section of the Investors page on our website. Secondly, all participants in studio, including the panelists, staff and crew, have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The health and safety of our teams is our #1 priority. So although we are maskless during this Q&A, all crew and staff off-camera are masked and socially distanced to maintain safe working conditions. So with that out the way, let's move to the Q&A. Thanks to all those who submitted questions throughout the day. We have collated some of the frequent themes. So Michel, let's start with one for you. From Celine, JPMorgan. The question, what is your assessment of the beer industry, medium-term growth in terms of both value and volume?

Celine, thanks for the question. I think that we discussed during the presentation today something that was very important for me to share with you and to bring the data forward. You know that we discussed during the quarter 3 results, my 100 days, that I spent a lot of time talking to people, listening, understanding what people knew about the company and their views. And one thing that struck me very deeply was this idea that there was a lot of conversations about the category, a lot of assumptions, but very little data. So I asked questions to people while they were talking about the category. And most of the times, nobody could refer to any data point. So I think that as leaders in the category was our job to clarify the trajectory of the category and to bring some perspectives around the beer category and its future. And the data is very clear. So first, beer is big and beer is profitable. So beer is growing share of throat in the last 4 years' share of volume. And every monitor on these 100 countries pending, which is very comprehensive data, is also doing a forecast about the future of the category, and it shows that beer is set to grow. A lot of this growth is coming from emerging markets, so we see what we call the maturity 2 markets growing. But even in very developed markets in the last 3, 4 years, we saw a huge turnaround for the category. So the second data that's very important is that beer has a lot of headroom to continue to premiumize. There is more opportunities to premiumize in beer than in any other categories that are already very advanced in terms of premiumization. And the third point is how important and how meaningful this idea of the fourth category, the beyond beer as we call, brings for us to have further growth and to continue to expand the category with the model that we built today. So more than 50% of the volume that comes from beyond beer, it comes from hard liquor and wine from occasions that today beer under index, and we are very well positioned to capture. The growth that the beer category will have, the growth that exists with the beyond beer innovation possibilities. And moreover, the position that we have is very unique in terms of markets that will allow us to continue, not only to capture this growth, but also to accelerate it in the future. So we are very happy with the learnings that we have, very confident with our ability to continue to drive the category forward, and we thought that it would be very important to share this data with you here today.

Great. Thanks, Michel. The next for you, Ezgi. So with the announcement today, we received multiple questions on the same theme. So summarizing here, I think in relation to net zero, can you provide more details on what our net zero ambition is? And secondly, does management have incentives linked to this ambition to make it real?

Thanks, Shaun. So at AB InBev, we have a very strong track record in sustainability. And decarbonization and building climate resilience across our entire value chain is something that we've invested in for a very, very long time, including through our 2025 sustainability goals, which were announced back in 2018. So we are all very proud today to announce a new ambition to achieve net zero emissions across our entire value chain by 2040. And you've heard about our framework: inclusive, natural and local. That's exactly how we want to approach this new ambition towards net zero. Our approach is strengthened by inclusivity. So we're going to work with our retailers and supplier partners. We're going to engage with the broader industry to identify breakthrough solutions. Our approach is also underpinned by natural solutions. So we'll continue to invest in nature-based solutions in our watershed initiatives and across our agricultural supply chains around the world. And last but not least, we're going to focus on local impact. Our prioritization will be deep decarbonization across our operations and value chain. So through these approaches, we're really excited to continue to cascade targets in our organization across senior leadership. In 2020, you may have seen it in our ESG report, over 500 colleagues from around the world carry targets linked to their bonus or their variable compensation and sustainability last year. In 2021, we've got 5 chiefs that carry targets linked to broader ESG topics. So we continue -- we will continue to share and cascade those targets and create that accountability across our organization. Thank you.

Perfect. Thanks very much. So Fernando, maybe one for you, let's turn to finance for a minute. And I think while you're presenting, we've got multiple questions along a similar theme. So the way in which you represented the capital allocation priorities today seems a bit different to the clear priority order of 1, 2, 3 and 4 that we have historically shown. Does this signal any change in your capital allocation priorities? Or how do you think about that as we go forward?

Thank you, Shaun. Capital allocation has always been about maximizing value creation. So that's what we are trying to solve for. We have 3 very important areas of focus. One is optimized resource allocation. We have no shortage of opportunities to invest for consistent growth in our business, either beer, beyond beer or new business. So making sure that we are efficient that resource allocation and maximize that is a very important topic. The second one is robust risk management, and the third one is the efficient capital structure. When we talk about capital structure, we need to dynamically balance how we use each one of the levers. That is in different moments in time, we're going to have different outcomes or different actions. At the current level, if we look at how we finished 2020 at 4.8x net debt to EBITDA, there is a significant value from deleveraging. So we should aim to deleverage quicker. Once we get closer to 3x, we should be able to capture around 90% of the benefit from deleveraging. This can be captured. And then, of course, deleveraging is still going to be relevant, but it's going to be a different way when you compare it to selective M&A or you compare it to return to shareholders. And for me, the key message here is dynamically, to make sure that it's not necessarily at one point that is always one order, but it's kind of what is the order that maximize or what is the ratios that maximize at that given moment. We always be seeking for that. Thank you.

Perfect. Thanks, Fernando. Maybe, Tadeu, let's pivot to BEES for a second. I think we've brought some additional detail today on the BEES platform, and we've got a number of questions on really how does BEES add value or enhance ABI's ability to grow. And can you speak to the incrementality of the marketplace concept, which is really, I think, something we brought some additional detail on today?

Okay. Well, I think in terms of incrementality and talking about how we -- BEES helps ABI to grow faster and more profitably, I think that the first thing is by solving customer pain points. One very important element that we found out in the last few years is that as part of our journey to a more organic-driven growth, I came to the conclusion that it's not just about us, it's about helping our customers to grow. Because when our customers grow, their businesses grow, the economies grow, our category grows; and of course, ABI grows as well, right? So I'll give you some very tangible ways that we solve their pain points and they drive growth this way. So for example, think about the suggested order. We talked a lot about suggested order. Why is that so important for our customer? Imagine every week, the customer has to decide what to do with their cash, right? They are very cash-restrained. They have to decide what they have to purchase, and they have to be as precise as possible so they can optimize their cash. They don't want to overload. But at the same time, they don't want to do sales toward or less than they need. They don't want to miss any one of these SKUs. And sometimes, they're not so relevant in terms of numbers, but they really help with their profitability. That's why you bring a suggested order. If you think of most companies that go to the market in a traditional way with sales representatives, they have this relationship of trying to push some products. In the end, there is a person-to-person relationship going on, where normally, the customer wants to be nice to the sales representative. The sales representative is pushed by their own sales targets, but there's all these bias in the negotiation, and sometimes the customers is afraid of saying no. With this, they get an unbiased machine learning suggestion that just provides to them what is the best solution that would optimize their cash day after day. And it's great to see that today, more than 80% of the customers that are part of this -- more than 2 million customers that are already part of this are leveraging on our suggested orders to place their orders with us. And we are seeing that the average order that is based on the suggested order is at least 5% on average greater than an order that normally comes through the catalog without leveraging on our algorithms. But this is just one example, right? I mean as we can provide, for example, credit to customers, really identifying which customers need, how much they need to grow, what are the exact fees that we should be charging, providing different types of financial services. We just saw also our B2O, which is the BEES to offline, where we try to address a very important pain point for customers, which is like driving consumer traffic to their businesses. So we are doing all that. And as we do these elements, as we solve these pain points, we are creating incrementality in a very meaningful way. And one thing leads to the other in the end. Because as customers start engaging with BEES, they start saying, look, I love if I could purchase as much as possible, more products from BEES because it's so tough for me to go to different points of sales to buy things and have to resell. I don't have [ contour ] or visibility of the price. So -- and that's why the marketplace came into place. It's really by trying to solve another pain point of them, bringing more visibility, transparence, convenience to customers. And we are seeing, and John just showed, that customers that buy from our marketplace, which are totally new products and services that we are offering. They are also making more business with our -- and helping -- with us, and helping our core business. So beer is growing 1.7% on average more in marketplace customers, and that's it. Today, we are selling -- it's a business in itself that's growing, and we are selling like $500 million of marketplace products today.

Perfect. Thanks, Tadeu. So maybe one of the hot topics of today, and probably for Michel and maybe for you, Fernando, is on the medium-term guidance that we issued. So I'm going to summarize just in one question from Pinar at Morgan Stanley, which I think encompasses a little bit of the questions that we have heard. So can you please share with us your thinking on the buildup of the 4% to 8% organic EBITDA growth ambition? And we also got a few questions on what that specifically means for 2022. So maybe just your thoughts, comments on the guidance that you gave -- which we gave today and why.

I think that's very important. Pinar, thank you for the question. We started this conversation with the idea that historically, we don't give guidance, right, and you know that. And in 2021, because of the environment, the challenge that we were all facing, we thought as a company that would be important to provide some clarity and what was the ambition for 2021. So far, we've been working very hard in delivering this ambition. So year-to-date, quarter 3 results are pointing out in the right direction. Again, if I go back to the conversations I had with all analysts, investors in my listening tour, one thing that struck me very deeply was this idea that majority of the questions were related to short-term performance next quarter, next year and people really concerned in trying to model what the outlook for the company was. And I recognize that this is a legitimate concern given that over the years, we have delivered a lot of growth and very important value creation. But in the short term, we've had some misses. Because of that and because today we would like to share with you a more long-term view an evolution of our strategy and how we want to pivot from inorganic to organic, as Fernando said before, we had a lot of opportunities to invest and grow. We thought that it would be very important to give you some direction. That's why this idea of midterm outlook in which you could understand that we are going for organic growth, that we have a solid strategy and several opportunities to invest and generate growth and value creation for the long term, but our eyes continue to be on delivering each and every year. So the midterm outlook was an important evolution for us, was then based on the conversations I had with you. So I thought that was important for you to have this reassurance that we will invest for the organic growth while continue to deliver EBITDA growth and value creation each and every year. I'm not sure if you want to complement something, Fernando?

No, just I would echo you, Michel. I feel it's important to highlight that this is a medium-term outlook. Of course, every year is going to be slightly different. You're going to have tailwinds, headwinds depending on the years and different challenges. But just to reiterate and make sure, this outlook is that we aim to deliver organic EBITDA growth of 4% to 8% over the medium term.

Great. Okay. Maybe let's pivot to the back row quickly, and one from Mitch Collet with Deutsche Bank, which sort of encompasses some of the questions we've had on the biotech initiatives. And the specific question is, how important will the plant-based protein business be for our long-term ambitions as a company? Maybe that's something, Pedro or Bernardo, you could speak to.

Sure. So when -- 5 years ago, when we took a look at the opportunities that we have for the company, we took a look at consumer trends and where we believe we could have competitive advantage where we could play in a meaningful way. And out of that study, a lot of new things came in. Beyond beer is one of them, our D2C platform is another one, and biotech was another one. We felt that in biotech, we could play in a meaningful way given some of the capabilities that we have and also had attractive returns on a risk-adjusted basis, right? So our core business is a profitable business. So for us to make sense to expand our total addressable market and get into new industries, it had to make sense from a financial standpoint. So Bernardo, do you want to comment on there?

Sure. Thank you, Pedro. So definitely, food supply is going to be a global problem in the next years, but it's a great opportunity for ABI. And I wanted to elaborate a little bit more on why as, what are the opportunities that we bring to the table, right? And I would say, number one is that we have an amazing global footprint with more than -- we operate in more than 50 countries. We reach 20,000 farmers around the world, and that's a big advantage for us. Number two, our knowledge in fermentation at scale. I think that's something that is very important if you want to make fermented protein at scale, and we can do it in a very cost-efficient way. And number three, our barley-safe grain. We discovered that is very rich in protein. We can extract that protein, and it's a very high-quality protein that is also very sustainable. So we're very excited about the biotech space and the opportunity and how much we can add value to our partners, our shareholders and also our society. Shaun?

Great Thanks, both. Ezgi, maybe back to you. I think you also spoke a little bit about this inclusive, natural, local framework that we have within ESG as new news today. So we received multiple questions along a similar theme. So wrapping those into one, how does this framework translates into how ABI works to empower its partners across the value chain like farmers and retailers?

Yes. So as a global local company, we are really empowered by our rootedness and our reach, and I can't emphasize that enough. So inclusive, natural, local for us really truly encapsulate who we are and how we will continue to create share prosperity around the world and really be that next-generation business today. So by solving the challenges of our partners across our entire value chain, we know that we're creating opportunities for inclusive growth. And as you saw, we're building that resilient quality supply of ingredients globally, working with over 20,000 farmers across 13 countries, and we work with them side by side on the field directly as trusted partners. And we improve access to technology, to financing. We provide new skills, new seed varieties to those farmers so that we can continue to build their resilience, improve their productivity, but also ensure our supply security. So that's upstream, but maybe I can turn it over to Tadeu and he can talk a little bit more about how we work with our e-tailer partners downstream as well.

Okay. Thank you. Yes. So I will get back to the customer pain points that I just referred, and I think that one of the beautiful things about BEES is that we are really making digital inclusion happen at scale and every day, right, as we scale fast, as we expand to more and more markets. But why a customer pain point? I just would like everybody to think of a situation. Imagine if you run a business and you don't know how you perform, you actually -- you don't have any control about your numbers in the end of the month. You don't know if you're growing. You don't know if you're declining against your history. You don't know how you're performing against your peers. The people in the neighborhood are the same. The people are in the same market as you are. You don't know what are the products that are being successful and that are being sold by your peers in your market. So in general, you have very, very limited. And also, when you go and buy the goods that you're going to sell, you know that because of your scale, you won't get access to the best prices because you're just like small, right? And then you have to compete for consumers with different types of customers and peers that have access to much more and besides all that information. So all of this is a reality for many, many customers that today are not yet part of BEES. Because we try to solve this issue, give to the customers insights, very meaningful insights, so they can know how they're performing, they know how they are doing versus their peers, they know what's going well in the market so they can have much more educated choices. We truly believe that by giving insights, transparence, empowerments to customers, this relationship of them with us, we improve a lot, we will do much more business, and that will drive growth. And by helping our customers, they're helping the community because you know how much small businesses are important to the growth of the economy and the communities in general. And in that way, as we really hope that already making a difference today to helping entrepreneurs all around the world.

Perfect. Thanks to you both. A 2-part question here, but I think along a similar theme, so maybe we can take both at the same time. So the first is from Carlos Laboy at HSBC saying, how do the digital platforms transform how you innovate and develop your brands better? And then a second part from [ Andrea Demo ] asking, can you speak to the incrementality from your D2C platform? So maybe, Pedro, you can speak first and then we can hear from Pablo on the D2C.

Sure. So let me get the first part of the question. Technology and data analytics for us, not in and of itself, right? It has a purpose. And for us, the purpose is really to offer the right product to the right consumer at the right time in a very convenient way, right? So that's kind of the mission that we have for technology, data and capabilities. We have focused a lot on 3 main use cases for the past few years. I think the first one is portfolio management and increasingly a fragmented landscape. It's very important to know what to offer to what consumers, and we're using a lot of the B2B data to know where we need to have this product available. Also for innovation, what's missing in terms of products to satisfy need states that we don't satisfy today. The second one is meet efficiency and personalization, right? What we should offer to consumers in a very efficient way in a way that our dollars, they go further. And then the third one, it's really convenience. How can we create technology platforms that improve the availability and the convenience that we can offer consumers. So we invested a lot in these platforms for the past few years. Today, we have a very robust technology stack in marketing. The commercial organization alone, we have more than 400 people focused on data and analytics. In the D2C/B2B platform, we have more than 2,000 engineers really focused on that. And we already see some of the early results, right? So we see a lot of that category acceleration, we see the share of beer, and we see an improved media efficiency. We have them in our models that we run all over the world, and we've been seeing a lot of acceleration of our media efficiencies. So get Pablo the incrementality of D2C.

Sure. Thank you, Pedro. I think it all starts by delighting our consumers with a superior experience because we're designing our digital products to optimize the consumer journey and eliminate meaningful friction points. And because of that, we can create long-term relationship with our consumers that end up driving customer lifetime value growth. For example, out of the 50 million transactions consumer orders that we delivered this year, we can learn about the consumer preference and optimize our commercial processes to drive a more personalized activation. So all our consumer data that we collect in direct-to-consumer platforms is connected with our CRM platforms. So we can reach the right segment of consumers with the right product and brand at the right moment and with a very relevant message. And all this together drives category growth because we are reaching new occasions, we are driving premiumization. For example, all our direct-to-consumer platforms have a higher premium mix than the average of the market. And as we grow direct-to-consumer, we're also developing e-commerce that is a driver of convenience, and all this together accelerate the category growth. Thank you.

Great. Thanks. guys. Maybe from Pedro and maybe for Rosie as well. So we received sort of multiple questions on the similar theme. So in the presentation today, we spoke about the new category expansion model. Questions are sort of, what is working well versus what is not? And then can you provide some examples of the category expansion levers that we spoke about during the day?

Sure. So let me get started, and then I'll pass it on to Rosie. I think category expansion, first and foremost, about a mindset shift, right, from managing our business within the beer category to expanding the category. And this is the first and foremost, the most important thing that we have in there. Of course, it's not easy, right? Starting to expand the category is something not easy. For the past 3 to 5 years, we had a lot of experiments, we have kind of a new innovation process to be more agile. Today, we're putting over -- putting a lot of projects in the market in less than 100 days, and we also have improved the way to scale up these innovations, right? So we have like the sit-and-learn stage where we put products out very quickly, and we learn very quickly. And once these products are proven, these are proven in a couple of markets, we are very good at scaling them through the prove and move program. So that has been some of the ways we improve our process. Some of the examples that we have, Brahma Duplo Malte in Brazil, which is a huge success, more than 9 million hectoliters sold. We expanded. These are more than 10 markets. Today, it's a big success for us. The expansion of Michelob ULTRA, our health and wellness proposition, also has -- used the same process that we're having there. And I could mention 0, 0 and some other projects. So Rosie, do you want to talk a little bit about the levers?

Yes. And as Pedro mentioned earlier, the -- we've landed on 5 levers that we know work, and we are very disciplined in the rollout of all of these initiatives. So those start with making the category more inclusive, ensuring superior offerings to all of our consumers, expanding locations and premiumnizing, and of course, expanding the reach of our category through beyond beer offerings. And some of these are more mature than others. So you see examples like core superiority, which is quite mature, and we're seeing already gains in market share as a result. And others are a little bit less immature, still evolving like beyond beer in some of our markets outside of the U.S. So across all of these, we're seeing category acceleration, we're seeing increased share of throat as well as gains in share of beer.

Perfect. Thanks, guys. Pedro, still with you actually, I think -- actually, sorry, no. Back to Bernardo a little bit. One of the questions which you've actually heard and have got some interest in during the day in relation to BioBrew. And so one of the analyst's, Robert Jan Vos, specific question, can you provide a few examples of the products or initiatives that we can expect from BioBrew given what we presented today?

Yes. I mean I think we are ahead in terms of -- we have 2 main business, EverGrain and BioBrew. In EverGrain, there is a plant-based protein, right? We are a little ahead. So we have already a facility in St. Louis and our pilot facility in New York, and we are starting to produce next March. We're expecting to produce $20 million in the revenue already next year. So it's a fact and it's in bread, it's in protein bars and can be even in milks. I would say for BioBrew, it's a little bit more ahead. So we are still in exploratory stages. We -- the idea here is to start partnering with other people in terms of produce. So we already have a juice, press juice, that is in the market testing. But I will say for BioBrew, we are still an exploratory space. But the idea for BioBrew is huge, right, because you can ferment any type of protein. So we started more milk-related products, but the opportunity is very huge.

Okay. Great. And more to come.

Yes, more to come.

Pivoting back to BEES a little bit today. I think some of the question's more on some of the specifics on BEES. So from Simon Hales at Citi asking, how many markets have you rolled out BEES into now? What are the rollout plans for 2022? And is there an ambition in terms of what proportion of the group's revenue we hope will be coming through BEES 3 years from now. So it's sort of about how we see about BEES today and BEES into the future.

Yes. Some of these questions, we talk every quarter, Michel. So you give me -- can I update some of the numbers, so good? So we are today in 16 markets. right? We just most recently reached Tanzania as our newest market. And today, if we think about digital transactions with customers, we are reaching the threshold of 50% of total ABI's net revenue being through BEES or other digital means, so I mean we're already very relevant and getting at scale very fast.

Perfect. Pivoting to beyond beer, I think, which we haven't asked much about today as yet. But from Sanjeet of Credit Suisse, a question on, how big do we expect beyond beer for ABI to become within the medium-term time frame? It's -- I think we mentioned in the presentation today, it's around $1.5 billion in revenue in 2021. And how much of this do we think will come from extending existing beer brands versus new innovations within the beyond beer space?

Yes. I think beyond beer is a massive opportunity for us, right, as we talked about leverage some of the capabilities that we have. So we have a huge relationship with more than 2 billion consumers all over the world. We have logistics capability, supply capabilities. So beyond beer, I think is a place that we feel very comfortable that we have a competitive advantage. And you can tap into spaces. There are some barriers for beer to penetrate. So for us, it's very incremental in all the markets that we've been testing. Beyond beer usual incremental is anywhere between 50% and 100%. We discussed a lot during our 10-year plan, the potential of beyond beer. It's a more established category in the U.S., but it's due to be built all over the world. So we had an experience, for example, in craft where we had an operation in the U.S., and we saw the future in the U.S. on what craft could be. And then we took that trend that we saw in the U.S. and we took it all over the globe. And today, we lead the craft segment in the markets that we operate. We believe the same opportunity is there for beyond beer. We see that the need states and the barriers are very similar across markets, and we really believe that having some of the learnings and operating in the U.S. is a massive advantage for us to take some of these learnings and develop beyond beer in markets like Brazil, in markets like China, and Middle America is also a big opportunity for us.

Perfect. Tadeu, maybe back to you on BEES. So we've got a couple of coming in. So I'm going to summarize in a consistent theme, I think, but a lot of questions on, can you speak to our competitive advantage within BEES? And what is our right to win within the space in terms of where we are currently with our platform?

Okay. Great question. I think, first, I'd like to -- I think there's a combination of factors, I mean, that make us very competitive in the space. I think first one, it's things actually culture-related. We've been talking a lot about customer pain points and this whole customer centricity. I'd actually like to allude to a fact that a couple of years ago, we added customers to our 10 principles. It's now our principle 7. It's because we -- as we were doing this journey for BEES, we really identified as a company as a whole that we really needed to put customer also at the center of everything we do. So we really could think with the eyes of the customers and really feel how they feel and think how to solve their problems to create opportunities for both. So I think that customer centricity in this laser-focused culture on really addressing their issues is something that is a very big competitive advantage that we have. I think that a second factor, I think, are more related to topics which are more part of strengths, traditional strengths of ABI that now are being very useful as we expand BEES. I think the quality of our route to market, not only direct distribution, but also the quality of our wholesalers in many, many markets, which are very, very professional, very well organized. So BEES works very well in markets, not only that to direct distribute, but also with wholesalers. So we were prepared to work with all conditions, but I mean this is strong route to market. Together, with that very strong portfolio of brands that we have and that we keep investing on them and making them stronger every day, so we know that in these customers, we are already the most important supplier that they have with like a big amount of brands, like very relevant brands to them. So this combination of this route to market, very strong route to market with this great portfolio of brands we have is, I'll say, that's a second layer. And the third one I think that I have to emphasize also, these strong investments that we've been putting on technology to really develop the platform and create that ecosystem that Michel is talking a lot about. But I will ask Jason to help on that.

Sure. Thanks, Ricardo. So over the last several years, we've invested heavily to build a state-of-the-art e-commerce platform for our customers. We have a team of over 1,200 engineers, product managers and developers that not only have built a robust microservices architecture but are now also operating 10 next-generation applications on top of this architecture. It's also supported by a modern customer data infrastructure that captures warehouses and deploys billions of data points across our ecosystem every month. The result is not only an application but an experience that is personable and reliable that our customers truly love. And this love is seen by -- through our NPS. We have seen consistently higher NPS for our BEES customers than our non-BEES customers in all the markets that Ricardo has mentioned. And we really truly believe that we will be a reference point for B2B e-commerce given our size and our scale. Just as one sort of additional discussion on our adoption. We've had the close of the month of November with an additional 200,000 monthly active users compared to September and 9 million orders just in the month of November alone.

These are great numbers, I think, in terms of adoption. And I think that the fact that we have invested so much and really built internally, that allow us to do like releases every other week and really to make the BEES app better for our customers every 2 weeks. So I mean I think that's a great competitive advantage, and thanks for the opportunities.

Great. Thanks, guys. Michel, maybe back to you, getting some more questions on the beer category and be a share of throat. So one from Simon Hales at Citi. Do you expect beer to be able to win back share of throat within the total beverage alcohol category in key developed markets like the U.S. over the next 3 to 5 years? So with a spin on an earlier question.

Yes. I think that we discussed that and we shared the numbers on a consolidated way. And what's very exciting is that after a period of stabilization and then some share of throat losses between 2010 and 2016, beer is now consistently growing globally in the last 3 to 5 years. The projections as you look forward is that this growth will continue to happen is led by, as I said, emerging markets, but we see some very well developed markets like the U.K., like Canada, where beer is gaining in the last 2 to 3 years. You can refer as well to the U.S. with the advent of the beyond beer that you add growth on top of the beer category by going to new occasions, new liquids and sourcing from wine and spirits. So we are very excited about the opportunities to expand the category. We are very well positioned because we can capture a lot of this growth in emerging markets. But moreover, we see markets that are very well developed like Canada, like the U.K. and even the U.S., where this is turning around. And already growth can be observed like in the U.K. and in Canada. So the beyond beer, 50% incremental is a great tool for us to continue to drive and expand the category.

Great. Maybe one for you, Rosie, I think as we look at the volume of questions we have here. So can you add a bit more color on how you're making the category more inclusive? So I think inclusivity is one of the key levers which we spoke about and the question focusing on how we plan to do that and particularly for the female consumer.

Yes. So there's 3 components to making the category more inclusive, and it's a combination of revenue management, price pack as well as product innovation. So within product innovation, we're looking at a series of liquid developments are going to target the specific needs for different consumer groups. Of course, usually in the passing, historically, when we talked about making the category more inclusive, we're really thinking about some of the consumers that today do not have access but want to be part of the category. But we also know that half of our drinkers are women, and women also want to be able to take part of socialization, relaxation occasion with the beverage that would allow them to connect with the group. So that's part of what we're doing. A lot of it is actually in some of the propositions that you've seen, like Brutal Fruit, for example, and the expansion of beyond beer in North America, but also in some of our developing markets with more moderation as well as the smaller pack that allow women to have the right size for the kinds of occasions that we like to partake in.

Okay. Perfect. Thanks. I think we probably -- just looking at the time, I think we maybe have time for one more. Michel, so I'll start with you and then see how we get on timing. So as we've received from sort of multiple people, including, I think, Brett from Consumer Edge asked this question, Trevor from Bernstein asked this question in different forms. But Michel, you spoke to the fact that in the past, there was a focus on the short term, and results have been somewhat inconsistent for us as a business, and now we have the shift to long-term value creation. What is changing to position you better, including from a cultural and organizational perspective, to capture these new opportunities and drive organic growth long term as we think about the business?

So I think that the first point is that, historically, we have created a lot of value. And we had a repeatable, very simple strategy that allowed us to be part of the consolidation of this industry. All industries, they have examples of consolidation. And beer was not different, and we were agents in this consolidation together with other players. When I refer to the topic that in our conversations by listening to investors and analysts, there was a lot of focus on the short term and questions around the results in the short term. We saw that there was a reason of this collateral effects of our strategy being implemented over the years. And perhaps the 2 most important collateral effect was the idea that as we were consolidating the industry, we didn't apply enough innovation, and we didn't allow the industry to realize its full potential. And this, to me, becomes a huge opportunity for the long term. The second topic is also that in delivering synergies and being very focused on delivering the results of each and every integration, we miss this big opportunity to realize the full potential and unlock value from the ecosystem that we built. The good part, as I said during the presentation, is that those are more strategic bottlenecks and not really like existential bottlenecks. And as we upgrade and evolve our strategy with the right mindset, the right outside in view focused on customers and consumer main points and deploying tools and products that allow us to harness the value of the ecosystem, we can create a lot of that. And the change in terms of culture, just complementing the answer, there are changes that we need to be more long-term focus. So organic growth is very different from inorganic growth. It's more granular. You need to seed, you need to grow, then you can harvest. So this is something that is underway inside the company, and we just finalized our 10-year plan. So I often talk about this competitive advantage of having a 10-year horizon, right? So everybody has 1-year plans and 3-year plans. Every time that you stretch this line and can really see the massive transformation of change that consumer trends can bring to the business, then you can position yourself much better to the long run. The second thing, I think, that the culture of ownership. And everything that we do with the right focus like consumer focus, customer focus, solving for pain points and finding opportunities to lead and grow the category is something very important. We've been talking a lot to our team about that. And even our purpose now is the idea of create a future with more cheers, is more category-centric, is more explicit about our ambitions and gives us an umbrella that's much broader in terms of what we need to do to lead and grow the category, not being the leaders, but leading the category expansion and the category growth. And I think that our priorities are very clear. I hope that they were for you today. At least, the effort that we made today was to say that lead and grow the category, digitize and monetize our ecosystem and optimize our business, our laser-focused priorities on our strategy and now it's about execution. And in this way, I always say you can doubt a little bit about our directions and our strategy, but you cannot doubt about our view and our ability to execute. So I'm very confident that the team will quickly grasp all the concepts that we have around our strategy. And we will deliver, as usual, a great execution. And we will create future value, and we'll create the future with more cheers.

Perfect. Thanks, Michel. I think just looking at the time, we'll probably call it to a close here. I know there were many questions which we weren't able to address. Please reach out to myself or the Investor Relations team with those, we'll be happy to address. So thanks to you all for joining. We appreciate your time and support for the company. We hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoon or evening and hope the presentations today were very enjoyable for you. So thank you very much, and we'll speak to you all soon.