Heineken N.V. (HEIA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello. Good morning, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm Pilar Rocafort, the UBS Consumer & Luxury specialist here, and I am here with Nik Oliver, the UBS Senior beverage and tobacco analyst. We are very pleased to welcome Dolf van den Brink, CEO of Heineken at what we believe is a very exciting time for the group. In terms of the structure, Nik and I will kick off the Q&A. But if you have any questions, you may submit them through the app or you can e-mail them to us.

And with that, Dolf, I will start with the first question. Hello?

Yes. I'm here.

[indiscernible] with the first question, the market was surprised, if I may say, about the announcement that Laurence is departing as the CFO after such a successful tenure. Could you share with us anything on the timing on her departure and also what her successor Harold is bringing to the role, please?

Very good. Good afternoon, and thanks for having me, Pilar and Nik. And thanks for the question now. Let me start by saying that, first of all, I'm very proud that -- we, as a company, are very proud of the 6 years of contributions of Laurence. I'm very grateful for the last 12 months where she played a quite instrumental role in the [ whole ] CEO transition and over the last months in the moment leading up to the EverGreen strategy review. Now a while back, she indicated that if and when I would have identified a worthy successor that she was ready to move on, to take some time, to kind of take a step back and reflect on the next step, next phase of her professional life. So when we were kind of beyond the EverGreen strategy kickoff and I identified Harold van den Broek as an amazing successor the time had come to for Laurence to indeed announce that she was moving on. I'm very, very happy to bring Harold on board. I think he has experience 30 years of FMCG. He's done every imaginable finance operational role, being a Finance Director of [ overall ] regions, functional areas, multiple [indiscernible] multiple companies, lately being a business leader leading the Hygiene division at Reckitt Benckiser, a lot of experience with driving business, performance management, productivity, all themes that are going to be very relevant in the next phase of our journey at Heineken. So we -- I'm looking forward to the last months together with Laurence and then very keen to get Harold on board.

And now if we move to a bigger-picture question, COVID has obviously been very disruptive for the whole consumer space, but in particular, to beverages. So looking back, and you have been at Heineken for a very long time, where do you think Heineken has performed well, especially during COVID? And what are the lessons as we move forward?

Yes. No, thanks for that question. And of course, impact was a large, particularly on our on-trade European business, important markets like Mexico, South Africa, India, which were hit by severe lockdown. So from [ that ] point of view, we were heavily affected. But as you say, there's a lot of good performance across the group as well. Very proud of [indiscernible] results in a market like Vietnam, where we now really are the market leader, 12 out of 12 months. Very good performance in Nigeria, [ a market that has been suffering a bit ] over last years, growing, premiumizing, gaining market share. Very good performance in Brazil. Maybe the most important to highlight is the performance on brand Heineken. It's much publicized that trusted brands did particularly well during the crisis, and Heineken is the most trusted international beer brand. And accordingly, it performed very well though volume broadly flat. If you take out the heavy impact of South African market [indiscernible] the brand was up double digit in 25 operating companies across the world. Heineken original did very well. But also, of course, a huge success with Heineken 0.0 now available in 84 markets. And lastly -- and also a lot of companies comment on it, but we see the same -- an acceleration of digitizing the route to consumer, where our direct-to-consumer platform Beerwulf in Europe broadly doubled in revenue, across the different direct-to-consumer platforms we have globally. We saw about a tripling of the customer orders and, of course, also an acceleration of our B2B digital platform. So those are a couple of highlights we saw throughout the year, Pilar.

Great.

Thank you, Rudolf. It's Nik here. And we're just moving on to the future. Back in February, we saw the much anticipated EverGreen strategy update, which emphasize Heineken's commitment to superior top line growth and productivity improvements and accelerated investment and sharper and resource allocation. So I just wanted to touch on some of those in a bit more detail. Firstly, on the top line growth equation, emphasizing superior top line growth and as we look backwards, Heineken has had one of the best track records in European consumer staples with a consistently good balance of volume and price/mix. As we look forward, what are the markets and categories that give you the confidence that, that superior growth algorithm can be maintained?

Very good. Thanks for that question, Nik. First and foremost, and it was a very important starting point of EverGreen, that we are a growth company. We always will aim for superior top line growth. We want to be in the top quartile of growth amongst competitors, amongst staples. And we are proud that indeed over the years we have been able to deliver that. So EverGreen, first and foremost, is all about sustaining, rejuvenating, renewing continuously our top line growth. Now the legacy that Jean-François, my predecessor left behind is a phenomenal footprint, put together partly organically and partly through M&A over the last 10, 15 -- 15 years. And that has a lot of embedded growth, which is fantastic. And in that sense [indiscernible] the large important growth markets over the last 5 to 10 years, the Vietnams, the Brazils, the Mexicos, we really believe we will continue to benefit from growth coming from these markets, driven by healthy demographics, per capita beer increases and premiumization. Then we are seeing a kind of different levels of maturity. We see that the next generation of markets that are starting to scale to meaningful sizes, markets like Ethiopia, like South Africa. And then you have the next kind of stage of markets that are growing fast and gaining in scale fast like Myanmar, like Mozambique, Cote d'Ivoire and more recent ones like Peru and Ecuador. So we believe we have a very broad, diverse portfolio with operating companies in different maturity stages, which makes for a consistent growth profile. In the more developed markets, we actually still see a lot of upside, particularly on premiumizing the business and moving in the beyond beer space. A market like Europe, which is our home market, very important, we actually feel that we're below rather than above fair share in premium. And therefore, you see a lot of focus on, of course, brand Heineken, but Moretti in U.K. and Ichnusa in Italy, Desperadosis, which increasingly is a leading premium proposition across [ Europe ]. So we really believe there's a lot of embedded growth. But then on top of that, we will continue to add and build and strengthen the footprint, as well as the portfolio, to make sure, indeed, we continue to deliver that superior [ top line ] growth.

Great. And then just moving down the income statement, margins. One of the big focuses of the strategy update was the enhanced focus on productivity. In particular, the EUR 2 billion of gross cost savings. Can you just give us -- and also I should say actually, getting margins back to the 17% level by 2023. And just -- could you give some more just comfort to us how we should think about margin progression over the medium term? Because I guess we've got the short-term pressure of transactional FX and COGS, which is there. And then also in the past, Heineken had been criticized for its inability to combine that superior top line growth with a consistent expansion in margins.

Very good. Yes. And on that last remark, indeed, we like to address that. At the same time, it's important to note that part of that limited operating leverage was really due to country mix and, in particular, due to the Kirin Brasil acquisition and the phenomenal growth that we have had in Brazil at below total company operating margin levels. And as Heineken, we will always do what makes sense mid and long term, even though there is maybe a short-term price to pay. So that is just a kind of backward-looking statement for these last 4, 5 years. Now looking forward, we do see 2 stages to it. There's a big hole because of COVID, and we need to address that. And we need to recover margin. We're drawing a line in the sense of recovering basically to pre-COVID levels at 17% by '23. It's true, there's a lot of transactional FX working its way through the P&L and that synchronized devaluation across emerging market currencies of last year, 30% in Brazil, 20% in Mexico, et cetera. Because of the hedging, the impact is making itself felt only partly in '21 and the bulk of that is coming in '22. So we have to deal with that. And there's still -- we expect for a while, we will be facing negative channel impact mix effects because of a slow recovery of the on-trade, particularly in Europe. As a big part of the deleveraging effects happening in 2020, even when lockdowns are lifted, we don't expect that to all bounce back to pre-COVID levels in one go. That will take some time. That will put pressure on our margin, and that's why we are putting a relatively ambitious EUR 2 billion productivity program in place, that will be really instrumental in recovering that 17% margin no later than '23. But beyond, we are not setting some heroic margin target beyond them, but we like to restore strategic flexibility of making sure that we unlock sufficient productivity gains to have the flexibility [ or ] have it go partly to the bottom line, but also importantly, to really continue to ramp up our investments in future growth. We fully embrace the notion of operating leverage and restoring operating leverage beyond the 17% by '23. But we want to retain the freedom to see how much we're going to reinvest and how much is going to the bottom line. Now while pursuing those EUR 2 billion in productivity gains, we intend to build a kind of new muscle in the company of a more continuous cost mindset, which we feel indeed is an opportunity for the company, which we should benefit from beyond year '23.

Great. And then just one final one for me for now before I hand back to Pilar. On the strategy update, you also talked about raising the bar on sustainability. And this is something that we get increasing questions from investors and, I guess, also consumers. Can you just share some initiatives Heineken is taking in that respect?

Very good. Yes. So first of all, we started on this journey early on. The other day, I checked, back in 1994, we published our first environmental report. So Heineken has been on this journey for many, many years now. Back in 2009, we set our Brewing A Better World ambition for the year 2020. So basically, we delivered that last year, which was about reducing carbon emissions, increasing water efficiency, local sourcing, et cetera. And across the board, we have reached and hit markets that we set ourselves about a decade ago. So it is time to set a new ambition for the coming decade. So over the next months, we will come out with our Brewing a Better World stepped up 2030 ambition. So for now, I'm not still [indiscernible] yet. But what is clear, it needs to be a dramatic step-up once again. It's actually exciting to see how many questions we are starting to get from investors, from analysts on this. I think we all agree the situation is dire. The decade ahead of this needs to be the decade of action. And Heineken is firmly committed to play its part and be a leader in this regard and put the resources, the scale and the footprint of our company at the surface of these [ goals. ] The ambition that we will share will be on 3 pillars. The first pillar is environmental sustainability. That will be about further reductions of our carbon emissions. It will be about water efficiency and water -- and the health of the watersheds, will be about circularity. It will be, secondly, about social sustainability. We are somewhat of a leader in this space across different kind of indices. We score relatively good on this dimension, but I feel there's lot more to go in this space around human rights, around fairness, around safety, around health. And the third dimension is responsible consumption. As [indiscernible] company, we carry extra responsibility, so we will renew and reset and lift our ambitions in that space. So for now, I prefer to leave it at that. But over the next few months, you can expect a pretty large step-up in our ambition for the coming decades in this space.

So now if we move back to nonalcoholic beer. Heineken 0.0 has been super successful this year. You are now in 84 markets. But what are your views on the potential opportunity going forward and also the margin evolution?

Very good. We believe we are just scratching at the surface at this moment. This is very early in its life cycle. I'm super proud of Jean-François, [ Jan Derck ], my predecessors in their vision and their ambition to go all-in on 0.0. And for years, it has been a promise [ that form ] the quality of the recipe. Alcohol-free beer was ever [ as tasty as ] it should be. When we correct the recipe back in 2016 and really made this extraordinary tasting recipe, we said we are going to put it on Heineken, our most valuable brand asset. And we're going to go big. We're going to go on a global rollout, and we're going to spend 25% of the global budget behind this. It's something that at that moment in time was rather insignificant subsegment within beer. And we -- I think we have all been surprised by the successes since then. And the scale it's getting, some markets are more intuitive. We always expected this to do well in, let's say, Western European markets, North America, but we also see a lot of traction across less developed markets. The Russian market is a fairly large Heineken 0.0 market. Brazil, in just 6 months after launch, is our third largest Heineken 0.0 market, South Africa, India, et cetera, et cetera. So we see that it plays in a lot of different market [ qualities ]. Right now, it's less than 1% of the global beer market. As said, it's very early stage. [ It's some ] Western European markets. You see it's already 5 -- between 5% and 10% of the beer market. That would be a [indiscernible] to what aim for. But there's absolutely no reason to not believe in at least reaching 5% of global beer market [ with alcohol-free beers, ] and we like to be -- to stay and be the leader in this segment going forward with Heineken 0.0. But increasingly, [ with a more ] portfolio across our various brands and different taste profiles, but -- so it's early days, much more to come on this, Pilar.

Great. Now if I move to Vietnam. That's been a also a very successful story for you in recent years. And the main focus initially was on the Heineken brand and then on the Tiger brand, which is [indiscernible] kind of affordable premium. But now recently, the emphasis seems to have moved to more mainstream price points. So what is your strategy for Vietnam? And what is that strategy going to imply for margins?

Yes. So what's really amazing about Vietnam, that this is a very deliberate, strategic journey over 25 years. And this was not M&A. We really started with one small brewery in Ho Chi Minh 25 years ago. We focused on premium initially with brand Heineken and later with Tiger. We focused on urban areas. And for many, many years, we were laser focused on the premium portfolio in the urban areas. And then about 5, 6 years ago, we saw an opportunity as the brands like [ Heineken really scaled ] to start moving and building a route to market outside of the urban areas. . And then a couple of years ago, we saw particularly as we were increasingly having this premium portfolio in both urban and rural [ at ] mainstream. And by that time, the scale -- our supply chain footprint and the scale of the operation allowed us to be very competitive also at those mainstream price points. The premium segment is rather strongly developed. That's how we shaped the market, but we felt that, for the future, to also not be [ vulnerable to moments of the economic crisis when consumers might down trade ]. We wanted to make sure that we further diversify by building a healthy mainstream portfolio. We are not taking our premium portfolio for granted. We are continuously rejuvenating that. Next [indiscernible] there's a big growth coming from Tiger Crystal, which is a more [indiscernible]. Next to Heineken, we launched Heineken Silver. That was actually the first market in the world. Strongbow cider, surprisingly, is getting a lot of traction. So we're not taking the premium part for granted, but we felt that we were increasingly in a position to complement that with mainstream portfolio. We started with some of our regional positions like Larue and Bivina. And then last year, we launched a national proposition Bia Viet. And we feel, in a way, [ vindicated ] with the strategy in last year when there was a lot of disruption happening because of the don't drink and drive laws, because of COVID. And that actually, our portfolio has proven extremely resilient, and we were basically flat in a market that was almost down 15% to 20%, meaning that we grow 300, 400 basis points of market share every single month of the year. And this shift from a pure premium [ place ] to a more balanced portfolio, we've been able to do it so far with basically flat margins. Now we would even not be shocked if the margins would slip a little bit as we are further diversifying the portfolio as long as we [ look ] in and continue to [ look ] in fast volume and value growth. But yes, now I'm very proud of how very deliberately consistently over 25 years this [ OpCo ] has been led.

And then, Dolf, hello, it's Nik again. Just moving over to Mexico, again, another big success story historically for Heineken. As we look forward, how do you think about Heineken's ability to grow volumes in that market versus the wider overall market? And in particular, what kind of headwinds are you facing from the sort of 6 monthly waves of OXXO reopenings and to your competitor?

Yes, yes. This is a market that's close to my heart. With a lot of pleasure, I've lived and worked in Mexico for 3 years. So I know the market's a little bit better. Now, there's 2 sides to it. Generically, it's a market that we feel is very healthy. And it's actually surprising how much growth has come out of Mexico after the last 10 years. Premiumizing is still early stages. I think it's -- around 5%, 6% is premium. If you compare that to Vietnam or Brazil, it's still way below fair share. So we still believe that Mexico is very healthy in general and still hold the promise of further growth. Now we always knew that one day we will lose that exclusivity in OXXO. And I'm very happy that we were able to find a win-win situation with our partners, so FEMSA, to do a 4-year staged mixing and whereby we avoided a kind of cliff drop in our volume, which would have had big deleveraging effect. So we are halfway the journey. I think there are 3 more ways to go until end of 2020, and that is what it is. If you look at the [ OXXO ] regions that already have been mixed, yes, of course, logically, we lose a lot of volume. We were still above fair share. OXXO is a channel that does well at selling a more premium skewed portfolio, and that's a relative strength for us. So that is going to be a reality for the next, what is it, 18 to 24 months. At the same time, there's a lot of opportunity we have in the traditional trade, where over last years we have really built an acquisition and what we call penetration machine. And we have been growing shares over the years. And importantly, the 6 retail format, where we now have full liberty to grow that. We are growing about 800 to 1,000 stores a year. The 6 retail chain is now about 13,000 stores. It's a phenomenal platform also to experiment the direct consumer propositions, which we have been doing specifically last year. From a portfolio point of view, there's still a lot of innovation going on. We're having a lot of traction with [indiscernible]. We launched a couple of sell-through propositions last year, which are getting traction. So it's bit of a mixed picture for the short term, as we are working our way through the OXXO mixing. But fundamentally, we remain very optimistic about the market. And fundamentally, we remain very convinced that our market position is strong, and we have way of further strengthening it.

Cool. Excellent. And I'm just going to bring in one question that came in on the portal just regarding Mexico. You mentioned that premium was relatively unpenetrated versus a market like Brazil. Is that just because the industry didn't push premium enough because the volume potential was so strong, or is there anything structural that means that premium is less penetrated in a market like Mexico?

Yes. It's a good question. Even in my 3 years, we never got really our fingers behind it because [indiscernible] propositions in market and they're scaling. We are having very good results and growth on brand Heineken. We have a more local premium brand Bohemia. We have kind of affordable premium propositions like Dos Equis and Amstel Ultra, where there's a lot of growth. But yes, I think the mainstream propositions like our Tecate did a phenomenal job of satisfying consumer needs, and more work needs to be done. And I think with time, you will see this further accelerate. In these other markets, it also has never been a linear. It's always a little bit of a hockey stick where you build brand equity, where you build credibility, where you build differentiation. And over time, it's kind of -- it starts accelerating. And it will happen. I don't know of any market that as it developed and matured didn't start to accelerate premium. But indeed, the starting point is different in Mexico from other markets.

Okay. Excellent. And just moving over to Brazil. I guess we talked about a big success market in terms of premium and particularly the Heineken brand. But recently, Heineken announced the redesigned distribution partnership with the Coca-Cola system in the market. If you could just share some words around the strategic rationale for that? Because I think at the time, some people were a little bit surprised given, obviously, previous arbitrations and those things.

Yes. So a couple of thoughts there. First of all, very, very happy with the strategic development of our Brazil operations. At the time of the Kirin acquisition, it was 80% economy brands without a lot of brand equity nor pricing power and only 20% premium, which was mostly the brand Heineken. So the task at hand was to rebalance the portfolio towards mainstream and premium. Now the kind of growth we have seen on Heineken surpasses all expectations. Even in a year of COVID, to grow brand Heineken 40%, 4-0, with very healthy pricing, price index 160 form a huge base by now, that's just amazing, and it continues to grow at a very fast clip. We were almost absent in mainstream. Now with the Devassa brand, which came from the [ Kirin ] portfolio and [ Amstel ] brand, which was a new brand launch, we're starting to gain a meaningful foothold in the mainstream. So we ended last year with already over 50% of portfolio in premium and mainstream, up from only 20% back in 2017. So rebalancing the portfolio is going very well. Now with that kind of phenomenal growth, we went out of stock, out of capacity. So we have been letting go of some volume out of necessity more on the economy brands. Overall, our volume was broadly flat. And we're very committed to extend capacity. We announced extensions in Ponta Grossa in existing brewery. We announced a greenfield. We bought the land already. So in that sense, we expect a lot of continued growth, particularly on that mainstream and premium side of the portfolio. Now over these last couple of years, where a bit out of necessity, we had a dual route to market between kind of our own route to market that we acquired through Kirin and the Coca-Cola bottling system. We have been able to grow our portfolio in a very impressive way. And I'm proud of all parties involved that -- over the summer, we kind of go back together to explore if from a strategic point of view there was a true win-win for all parties. And partly, we were quite keen to transition brand Heineken and Amstel to our own route to market. The Coca-Cola bottling system has an incredible reach in the off-trade, but a bit less [indiscernible] on-trade, that's really strengthened our own route to market. We see a lot of upside for brand Heineken and brand Amstel in the on-trade. And in transition in the brand, we will be able to unlock that. We're still way below fair share of returnable packaging as a consequence. At the same time, we realized, if the size that the operating company now has to transition all the volume would actually also entail a big risk and create -- you would end up with 4 or 5 brands all in the economy segment. So actually saying, "Hey, we have shown the last couple of years that we can actually grow our overall business in a quite impressive way while working this dual route to market. Let's see if we can sustain it. But it needed to make sense for both sides. So rightly, the Coca-Cola bottling system [ wants ] a viable portfolio. so in addition to those economy brands like Kaiser, Bavaria, they're getting the Eisenbahn premium brand and a couple of other brands on the way. And we believe that having 2 incredibly powerful routes to markets actually is strategically a huge asset to have, that almost allows us to have 2 portfolios penetrating into the market. So yes, very happy how this ended. And yes, looking forward to now see the brands transition while continue to work with the Coca-Cola bottling system on that part of our portfolio.

Great. And just I'm going to bring in a couple of country-level questions that have come in before we move on. Firstly, on China, just can you provide an update on how your partnership with China Resources breweries is working in that market? Because I guess looking backwards from the associate line in the accounts, it seems to be going relatively well. But yes, the investor just asked for an update on that.

Yes. No. Also this one, I've been able to be quite close to, and I'm still sitting on the Board of our joint venture there. I'm incredibly impressed by CRB. That is an absolute machine with the most impressive route to market, an incredible reach and grip on the route to market in China. And we had this amazing brand Heineken, with huge awareness levels on brand equity. [ The truth be told ], we didn't have the scale in our own route to market. So it really makes sense to join forces. For CRB, it made a lot of sense to get -- to strengthen their premium portfolio. And if you now look over the last 18, 24 months of partnership, we've seen a huge acceleration in the development brand Heineken. Even last year, under the COVID impact, the brand grew very, very fast. Very impressed now, of course, by seeing how CRB is developing their more kind of premium capabilities and how they go to market. We are working intensely together to help and support building those capabilities. The launch of Heineken Silver in the Chinese market was an important proof point. And that has gone extremely well, and we're now starting to add other international premium brands for our portfolio to the partnership. So we launched Amstel at [ back end ] of 2020 and a couple more acquisitions are on the way. So no, very happy how things are going. Of course, it's different. If you fully control, own it, consolidate it, that's always nice. But given how the cards were on the table, we feel this is strategically the most viable, the most attractive option. And 24 months in, we feel validated and very optimistic about the future of our joint operations.

Cool. Perfect. And just one final one that came into me, and then I'll hand over to Pilar. I mean, just around the U.S., under the leadership of Maggie, we've seen a number of changes coming through in that business. Just, does Heineken have sufficient scale to truly compete in that market and get the attention it deserves from the wholesalers?

Yes. It's the [ internal ] debate. What is more important, scale or momentum? I actually think that momentum is more important than pure scale in the U.S. market. There's this phenomenal 3-tier system, and I was looking to spend some years there as well. It's incredible how powerful this 3-tier system is and the access it provides to market. And you see that companies were originally -- were relatively small and actually are showing phenomenal growth in ways that in the other markets with different route to market systems would not have been possible. So I'm not sure, if we lack scale. I think we have sufficient scale. We would like to see more momentum. And that means that the task at hand for Maggie and team is to bring more innovation, to bring more investment behind the brands. There's still little potential brand Heineken, and it was great to see us get the best results from brand Heineken in over a decade. Heineken 0.0 being a big part of that, already the largest nonalcoholic position in the market. Dos Equis, still a lot of potential. And the way they go about seltzers, I think, is very interesting, the partnership with Arizona, where we are launching AriZona SunRise. We're bringing new propositions on Dos Equis. So again, we are not obsessed with scale, we're obsessed with momentum, and we like to get more momentum, and I'm fully confident Maggie and team are lining up the portfolio, the new innovations, the new initiatives to accelerate our momentum in this very important market. It's still by far the largest profitable in the world, and we like to take a bigger bite out of it.

I'm going to hand back to Pilar now. I think she had a couple of questions coming to her directly as well.

Yes. So this is a question that comes from an investor regarding your reopening assumptions on the on-trade. So the investor points out that the U.K. in the Q3 when it reopened, it was up around 3%. Do you think that's reasonable rate of growth, or is that too optimistic?

Let me give a more generic number. In the on-trade business in Europe in Q3 was still down 20%, and that was after most of the lockdowns were lifted, so a lot of consumer behavior changes at that moment in time. Now we don't expect that, that [indiscernible] due to [indiscernible]. But also in a market like China, you don't see the on-trades completely coming back. I don't know. There's not like one single assumption that we're making. We're thinking in scenarios. Because so far, over these last 9, 12 months, it has always worked out different from what we expected. So we are deliberately cautious because I rather err on the side of caution than overoptimism, and we're thinking in scenarios. When markets reopened in the third quarter, we were able to bounce back very quickly. If you look to our [ purpose state ] in U.K., it opens faster than almost any other player in the market. We are also continuously [ fine-tuning ] our purpose state, away from high street, away from kind of [indiscernible] or to suburban, mixed [indiscernible]. So strategically, we feel we are well positioned for when the reopening starts. But we do expect a couple of years of impact. And therefore, we're deliberately a bit cautious on our assumptions. If it goes faster, great, we will be there. We know how to play it. But again, rather be a bit cautious and be positively surprised rather than the other way around.

Okay. So you don't expect that [ roll in '20 stock-up ] summer as we get the vaccines?

I would love that to happen. And it's one of the scenarios. I just actually won't dare to bet the bank on it, and I want our teams to be resilient to be agile to prepare for whatever came. I remember last summer, when everybody was talking about the exit rate of June and how it's all going to be one straight-line up, it didn't happen. It has always been a story of 2 steps back, 2 steps forward. I think, in the end, nobody will be truly safe for [indiscernible] until the whole world is safe. And that's what's going to happen by this summer. The world is not going to be vaccinated by this summer. So I don't know. And I find it odd when people [indiscernible] they know because then they know something I don't know. So we are prepared for the scenarios. And we want to be resilient. We want to be agile. And if it happens [indiscernible] we are there, we are ready for that.

Another question that has come through is about the Asian market. And what are the key challenges you're facing there?

Look, Asia doesn't exist. These are such diverse markets, different market topologies, different maturity stages. Again, very bullish on a market like Vietnam. Surprisingly, we continue to get a lot of growth out of Myanmar. A market like Laos is really growing well for us. But then a market like Indonesia, which is very dependent on Bali, which is very dependent on tourism, is highly impacted. There will be a matter of when do you see international tourism coming back. May happen with a delay. We don't know. So Asia is difficult to generalize. We see a whole range of kind of, yes, maturity and kind of momentum cases. We are having a lot of traction in Korea, for example, where we are more a segment player. We're focusing on premium. We're continuously growing double-digit growth, and we see that continue. We are very happy with the acquisition of the cider and premium beer portfolio we took over in Australia, which is really strengthening our premium platform in the Australian market. Long term is crucial. The APAC region has historically been a growth engine for Heineken, and we believe it to be a growth engine at increased scale, so it is a market where -- that we are prioritizing and we're investing in, and we're quite alert for any new opportunities that may arise.

Another question that has come through is specific on the U.S. market and if you have seen some type of recovery. Okay. So the question was about the U.S. market and if you envisage some type of recovery there going forward and what's happening -- what do you want to do with the Heineken brand in the U.S.?

So is there a question on the market or on us?

On [ Europe and in ] the U.S.

Okay. Because if you -- I am a bit worried about the U.S. beer market, the beer category. The U.S. beer category has been stagnant at best and has been losing share perpetually against spirit. So I do believe, as a beer industry, we have a phenomenal challenge in the U.S. beer market and that a lot of the growth is coming from adjacencies rather than from core beer. And that's a concern. And that's certainly a dynamic that we wouldn't like to happen in our core markets in Europe. So we are investing on both and making sure we keep rejuvenating for beer in the overall beer category. But on the U.S., as said, we had arguably the best year on brand Heineken in the U.S. last year. Again, those trusted brands doing very well. Heineken 0.0 being a huge opportunity. We will always be long and bullish and investing in brand Heineken. I already mentioned Dos Equis. And I feel we need to do better. We had phenomenal growth, double-digit growth momentum on Dos Equis for about a decade. And then when the most interesting [indiscernible] campaign transitioned out, we hit a roadblock, and we need to reboot our growth momentum there. And then again, I already mentioned it, Maggie and team are lining up a whole range of innovations more than we have historically done, historically, and that's what happened on my watch. I have to admit. We were a bit narrow. We were really -- okay, those [ 2, 3 ] core brands, that's where growth needs [ to come from ]. I think Maggie and team are rightly casting the net wider and say, "No, we need to play with a broader portfolio with more innovation, with more creativity with more entrepreneurial spirit." And that's what she's doing and it's still early stage. And we will follow it closely whether some of these innovations will get traction that we can give them more oxygen and scale them up [ fast ].

Great. Thank you, Dolf. And I think with that, we're going to close it. A very warm thank you for UBS. Thank you for attending your first conference with us. We hope we can host you in a London European Conference in November or next year in Boston. So thank you so much for your time and all of your answers. Thank you.

Great. Thank you. All the best. Thank you. Bye-bye.