Philip Morris International Inc. (PM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. I'm Pamela Kaufman, Morgan Stanley's U.S. Food and Tobacco Analyst. I'm very excited to be joined on stage with Emmanuel Babeau, CFO of Philip Morris. Emmanuel, thanks for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Pam. Thank you very much.

Before we get started, I just need to cover the standard disclaimer. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.

I'll kick it off with questions and we can save some time for audience Q&A at the end. So Emmanuel, maybe -- did you want to start with the remarks?

Thank you. Just a few words of introduction. Good morning, everyone. Great to be here to have a last catch-up before the year-end. Just a few words to probably start our discussion by repeating what we've been saying this morning in our press release. Q4 is developing as expected, and we have been confirming this morning the guidance that we issued on the 19th of October. We are repeating a target of growth excluding ForEx for our adjusted EPS of 10% to 10.5% for the year 2023. That would mean that for the third year in a row, and we are also, by the way, repeating all the assumptions that are, of course, underlying these growth objectives. That will mean that for the third year in a row, we would be growing volumes. We would be growing organically at a very high speed, our revenue. And we would be delivering a double-digit growth, excluding ForEx of the adjusted EPS. So that would mean the third year in a row of strong growth. And of course, this performance is powered by our 2 star brands, IQOS and ZYN. And I think with that, that's probably launching our discussion on a good note.

Great. So given that we're kicking off a consumer conference and given your kind of unique vantage point with a global view of the consumer, can you talk about what you're seeing from the consumer across various regions and how you're thinking about demand over the next year?

Look, I mean, I -- like all of you know, I'm reading a lot of data on the consumer being under pressure in some areas. It is clear that we are still in a world where the economy is slowing down, unemployment is going up in a few places. Inflation is there and has been heating significantly and especially on FMCG product, the consumer. Now if I look at the tobacco industry specifically, we are repeating our vision of combustible and heat-not-burn business globally excluding U.S. and China. So I know that here in the U.S. because of the very sharp decline of CC, you may have another view. But we're expecting a decline between 1.5% and 2%. And frankly, that bodes -- that's relatively a good performance versus what we've seen in the past for this market. So there was no acceleration in the global decrease of this market which shows that the consumer seems to be prioritizing in their spending, the nicotine spending, and that's quite an interesting element. We've been also, as you know, increasing price very significantly in 2023, more than 8%. And despite that, we are growing our share of segment on combustible. I think it's just showing the fact that when you are coming with the right brand, with the right consumer proposition, with the right attractiveness for the product, we are in a resilient environment and we have a resilient portfolio. Now having said that, there are a few markets where we see some more pressure or some down trading. I mean if I mention one market where clearly we see that Philippines would be an example of a market where we've seen the consumer under pressure. That means for us that we need to be active on managing our portfolio of brands and notably on combustible because I think that this is not really something that is impacting our IQOS business. That means that we need to work on what we call the bending. So working on the Marlboro franchise, we need to be in a position to offer to the consumer access to the Marlboro brand, but maybe not with the top reference or red reference, but with some alternatives that can come cheaper. We also need to work on the part of our portfolio with a medium and low price positioning or that has the potential to be there like Chesterfield or Philip Morris, so we are, of course, actively managing our portfolio to ensure that we are meeting the consumer situation. And again, the fact that we are increasing our share of segment on combustible. despite this economic environment is attributed to the strength of our portfolio.

I think maybe just moving on to your growth outlook. You announced a new mid-term growth algorithm at the Investor Day recently. Could you talk about the puts and takes that would get you towards the high versus low-end?

Yes. So we've been announcing a target of growing our revenue organically between 6% to 8% for the next 3 years. So obviously, we see ourselves able to continue to drive very dynamic top line growth, starting with the continuation of some volume growth, which frankly is a change of paradigm for a nicotine company to believe that in the long-term, we're going to be able to grow even starting with our volume. And this is coming, and this is really the top ingredients of this ambition. This is coming from our 2 top brands, IQOS and ZYN that have been demonstrating and demonstrate day after day their very strong growth potential and success. If I start with IQOS, the brand continues to be growing at a very nice double digit. And what is very good to see is that we continue to grow first in places where we've been incredibly successful. I'm sure we're going to talk again about Japan. But for me, it's quite striking to see that in Japan where people could say, well, there would be a limit in what we can do. We continue to grow market share in this country. So that shows the potential of IQOS to be growing over a long period of time. So we continue to deliver success in country where we've been successful. We have identified and for those who have been following our Investor Day, we've been very clear country where we are not yet with the level of success that we could be targeting. If you take Germany, if you take Spain, it's quite obvious that we can do more, and we want to accelerate there. And we think we have the road map to do that in the coming 3 years. And then you have always at stake in the new economy and low-middle income country where we see that the IQOS proposition, the heat-not-burn proposition is also relevant. What we see today in Egypt and the success in Cairo, what we see developing in the Gulf country, what we see starting in Indonesia shows that this is resonating with the consumer that we have great potential with IQOS. And therefore, that is going to contribute to the growth of IQOS in the next 3 years. So that's for the IQOS universe. Of course, I'm sure we're going to talk about that. I don't want to finish this vision on IQOS without talking about innovation. IQOS is, by definition, the brand that is bringing innovation to the consumer. And you may have heard that we are launching this very exciting innovation of stick that look like a cigarette, but without tobacco. The brand is called LEVIA, and that's when, if you want heat-not-burn is meeting vaping to some extent. And we believe that this is going to be an exciting innovation that also is going to drive growth over the next 3 years. Now moving to ZYN and the other leadership that we have today in another smoke-free category, nicotine pouches, I think the Nielsen months after months tells about the success that we are meeting here in the U.S. ZYN is simply the most successful nicotine product in the U.S. today. I think nicotine pouches as a whole and ZYN in particular, is opening just a new way of enjoying the consumption of nicotine. New movement, sometimes new purposes for people using it, new feeling on the way you are using nicotine. Of course, it is the highest level in terms of tobacco harm reduction. And the growth trajectory here in the U.S. is simply formidable. And we believe that the reason why this product is so successful in the U.S., and we may come back in our discussion on that, will mean that you have great potential for ZYN outside and that it would -- it will also show up in the next 3 years. So I think with that, with IQOS and ZYN, you have really the 2 drivers for the growth. We, of course, as we said, expect to maintain leadership in the combustible at the same time. But what's going to be very important for us to see how far we can go in terms of our growth ambition will be to see how the regulator is helping us because today, the product do exist, and IQOS and ZYN can be very attractive for the consumer. The science is telling us very clearly that this product are much better than combustible cigarettes. So it's really time for the regulator to say, okay, now, I'm going to make sure that I create all the right landscape, all the right incentive to convince the smokers to move towards this better product. And that comes with, of course, the way for us to communicate in a different manner on this product. All the discussion around flavors, we may come back on that, all the moment of consumption that you allow and of course, on taxation, the fact that you create a differential. And we believe that, if we have the right evolution that [ respective ] if some of the basic things like some key market for us opening to IQOS and heat-not-burn, just doing that, there is a way to really go to the high end of the 180 billion, 200 billion stick that we've been giving as an objective at the end of the period.

So I wanted to dig into your opportunity for margin expansion. Clearly, the shift in mix in the portfolio towards reduced-risk products is accretive from a profit dollar standpoint. But how do you think about growth in margins versus profit dollars, your algorithm implies that margins expand. So what are the levers there?

Yes. So we believe that '24, '26 should be a period of organic margin expansion very clearly. We've been, during the year '22 and '23, facing a lot of adverse element. It started, of course, with what is a very important move, but that is having at the beginning some impact, negative impact on the margin, which was a move to a new generation of product with ILUMA. When you do that, we had to sell more device to switch the IQOS user to the new generation of product. When you launch a new product, not everything is optimized in terms of cost because the productivity is a ramp-up through the lifetime of a product. We were at the most negative part. We start to have a positive ramp up as expected. So we think that this is behind us. We've been facing, of course, major disruption due to the geopolitical situation. And the war in Ukraine, I can tell you, has been a major disruption in the supply chain. We had to reorganize everything. We had to use extensively air freight. That has come with a lot of extra cost as well. Like everybody, we've been facing some big surge in inflation, impacting us a lot notably and first, the combustible business. And then we had some negative ForEx evolution. So as I said, we believe that we are now on the positive trajectory for ILUMA, and we expect to deliver nice productivity on ILUMA in the coming years. To a large extent, the disruption of the supply chain are now behind us. We have indeed a positive, very positive impact coming from the mix of our growth. IQOS and ZYN today are coming with -- that was the case in Q3 with a higher gross margin. I'm not yet talking about a per stick benefit, which is obvious and that we described, which is very big. But even in terms of percentage today, so ZYN that is absolutely best-in-class, but even IQOS taking into account the device, is today with a higher gross margin rate than the average combustible business. If you just look at the consumable for IQOS, you have a gross margin rate, which is on average 10 percentage points higher than on CC. So any growth there is going to play on the margin positively. We work on productivity, as I explained, and we continue to -- we expect going to deliver very strong productivity. And then we are in a growth story with a gain of scale and generating efficiency gains. We have a lot of investment that we need to do at the bidding when we launch IQOS and our smoke-free portfolio. As we are growing our volume, we have some size positive impact. We are able to amortize the structure on larger volume, and we are decreasing our cost per user. And that should enable us in the coming years and in the next 3 years, to decrease the SG&A on revenue ratio, i.e., to grow revenue organically faster than our SG&A adding to the profitability, hence our objective to grow operating margin for the next 3 years.

Okay. That's very helpful. And then in thinking about your 2030 targets for 2/3 of revenue coming from smoke-free, how does that break down in your view between heat-not-burn and nicotine pouches, how much of that will come from the U.S. market?

And a little bit of vaping as well, I suppose. But let's be clear, IQOS is and will remain the big amount in our smoke-free business. You know that this is a business that is, of course, a multibillion business already that we've been developing for 7, 8 years now that continue to grow very nicely. There is a launch in the U.S. I'm going to be specific on the U.S. part to your question in a second. So IQOS is going to stay big. But ZYN and oral nicotine is already a very meaningful part of our smoke-free portfolio. It's not a couple of percentage. It's largely north of 10%. And because of what is happening with ZYN in the U.S., the nature of the U.S. market with a high per stick or per unit revenue, that is growing very fast. And that is actually growing its weight very fast in the total. So when we think about a smoke-free business that would be more than 2/3 of our total revenue by 2030, IQOS will still be bigger, but you should expect to have oral nicotine with a very sizable part. And it's good to be really powering on 2 engines and 2 successful engine. I don't want to forget vaping. Vaping will be smaller. I think the question will be whether the regulation is creating the condition for us to accelerate on vaping. I'll come back on that, if you want. But we believe that the vaping category has a role to play, but that has to be regulated in a much better fashion. Now if I look just at the U.S., U.S. will have an absolute key role to play in growing the smoke-free portfolio. Just today, before the launch of IQOS, U.S. is already more than 10% of our smoke-free revenue. So it's already very sizable, growing very fast with ZYN. And if you look at 2030 and if you take this assumption of us by 2030, reaching 10% market share on combustible and heat-not-burn product. I mean we all know what is a revenue pool. That would mean that at that stage, the U.S. with the growth of ZYN that will continue, would be and probably by a significant extent, our biggest market on our smoke-free portfolio.

I guess just moving on to FX. That's obviously something that is largely out of your control. But can you talk about what's in your control and how you think about mitigating FX risk and your outlook into next year?

Yes. Everything is not under our control, you're right, Pam, but it doesn't mean that we cannot do a number of things. First of all, of course, we want to further increase our exposure to dollar revenue. And it is quite clear that the Swedish Match acquisition has been going also with a very positive coming with the Swedish Match acquisition in that direction. Today, if you take our U.S. business and again, before the launch of IQOS, together with the duty-free business, we have a global exposure in terms of revenue to dollar to above 10%. I mean, I think if we could double that rapidly by growing in the U.S. and maybe growing duty-free and other business where the currency is back to the dollar and so on. So to have a [ blood ] that is stabilizing, that would be fantastic as a stabilizer. The other thing that we do is that we are trying to manage our debt in line with our cash flow generation. So a large part of our cash flow is generated in euro. And today, a large part of our debt is actually denominated whether directly or through swap in euro, which has the benefit of matching cash flow and debt, which is a good asset liability management, if you want. And that is also providing us with a cheaper cost of the debt. And that's how we managed to have a cost of the debt that is -- a net cost of debt is lower than 3%. It's because we are with a significant exposure to euro. But that means that if the euro was to go down, we see the level of our debt in absolute number going down. So it's some kind of hedging. Then we are also working on medium-term coverage for the biggest currency and mainly the yen. So we try to smoothen the impact of the yen with a kind of 2-year plus hedging with some objective of coverage. Let's be clear, at the end of the day, if the yen is decreasing versus the dollar, we'll have to bite the bullet and the impact. But we try to limit, I would say, the volatility linked to that. And then there is all the work that we are doing that sometimes take work because that is working on the supply chain that is rebalancing where we have our cost. We try to align our revenue in which currency we're invoicing and in which currency are our cost, to try to limit the negative impact of potentially adverse ForEx evolution. We've been in a cycle of appreciation of the dollar for the last several years. I remember I was already a CFO of the company when EUR 1 was more than $1.50. I'm not saying we're going to go back there. I'm just saying there are cycles that has been quite negative. Well, let's see what happens to the yen, euro and a number of key currency for us in the coming years. But I can tell you, we're not inactive. For everything we can play with, we are really doing our best.

Maybe switching gears to ILUMA, obviously, a big product cycle upgrade. I think you have a goal of getting into 50 markets by the end of this year, and a lot of the launches are happening right now. So can you talk about what your observations are from the ILUMA launches this year?

Yes. I think at the end of the year, not all markets will be with ILUMA, but -- and we will be left with a number of notably emerging countries where we need to launch. But all the big markets, let's say, we'll have been launched with, of course, the exception of Russia. What is really good with ILUMA is that we have a very consistent experience in all the launches of ILUMA. And each time we see really ILUMA resonating very nicely, of course, with the existing IQOS user but also with smokers that so far have not been convinced that IQOS was the proper solution. It's an easier experience, it's a seamless experience. We've been killing the remaining pain point for the user. And we see the consumer satisfaction going up. We see the conversion going up. We see the retention going up, so loyalty going up. So we see a number of positive effects. And we see, therefore, that translating into volume evolution, but also market share evolution. And of course, we've been launching in a number of markets, some of them are smaller. But I think we are expecting to see what we've been seeing in all the big geographies so far.

And given there are so many launches this year in new markets, how should we think about your investment needs for ILUMA over the next year?

Look, we are growing fast on IQOS. So you should expect us, of course, to continue to support the growth. Let's be clear, we have a great product. We still need to make sure that the consumer knows about it. And that is a very important element that I should mention. We see clearly a correlation between the awareness, the knowledge, the understanding of what IQOS is about and the performance in terms of volume. So it's really important that we continue to reach to the smokers, that we continue to make IQOS exciting because IQOS is not only a great product for smokers to access to a better product. It also has to be a fun product. It has to be enjoyable. It has to be lifestyle. And we need to continue to invest in all these dimensions. So you should expect us to continue to invest significantly behind the IQOS growth story.

In October, the EU implemented a menthol flavor ban. So I guess 2 questions related to that. One is, what are you observing from demand from the consumer in response to this? And then second, it did kind of create some volatility in inventory movement. So how should people be thinking about the impact going forward?

Yes. So it's still very early days. I don't know whether you are, in this room familiar with how it's implemented, but it's implemented country by country, not all countries and far from that, have been implementing it at the end of October. I don't have, frankly, at that stage, any relevant data, it's far too premature. There was probably a bit of pantry-loading in a few countries in October based on that. But we need to see that at the end of the quarter. And a number of countries are going to be implemented now between November, December and some will only implement it in 2024. So it's a progressive implementation. And again, too early to say anything, and I don't have any meaningful data. What I can say is that everything we've been hearing or seeing today, nothing is in contradiction with what we've been saying so far, i.e., that we expect that this flavor ban may have, of course, some disruption on the short-term and that you have the moment where the consumer has to go for a new choice, and there is some adjustment but it's not going to materially change the long-term trajectory of the category and of the consumer. If you look at what happened at the time of the flavor ban in May 2020 on combustible cigarettes, the impact remains extremely limited. If you look at the flavor ban in California at the end of 2022, there was a blip of a few weeks, and we've been experiencing that within. And then the growth resume with even more speed and today, we are north of 30% above where we were before the ban in California. So I think it shows that it doesn't derail a movement, and we believe we're going to see the same thing in Europe. Now to finish on your question on the level of inventory, I mean, frankly, I don't know whether we're going to see any impact on that. We've just been signaling that as part of the blip, that could be something that is playing as the reassortment is being managed by the distributor. We'll see it -- again, it's too early to say we'll see at the end of December, whether there is something impacting. In any case, it's going to be on the short-term only that there is this kind of impact. And again, what is important is not so much the level of shipment, but rather the level of consumer offtake. And today, we believe we're going to finish the year with a pretty good alignment between consumer offtake and our shipments.

And then in the context of the changes in flavor regulation in Europe, can you maybe talk about some of the new innovation that you're coming out with.

Yes. So it's not a response to flavor to be clear. But we just believe that IQOS, as I said, is by definition in the eyes of the consumer, the brand that is innovating and the brand that is coming with new and exciting things. And I think there are 2 analogies that we can make with this new product, LEVIA that we've been launching for the time being in Czech Republic. So it's really the first weeks of the launch. One is an energy with what has been happening on oral nicotine. You know that the traditional product was snus products, so it was pouches of tobacco that you are putting against -- between the gums and the lips. And nicotine pouch at the end of the day is the same, I would say, retool except that you don't have any more tobacco. You just have nicotine in the pouch. That's what nicotine pouch is about. And to some extent, LEVIA, is a stick that resemble a tobacco stick but with no tobacco. It's a substract with nicotine. And therefore, for a lot of legal age and adult -- young adult user who are not necessarily keen to have tobacco in what they're consuming, well, that's a nice new proposal with a cool retool of IQOS. It's a very adult retool and something that we think can be very attractive. The other analogy I can make is, in fact, with this product for the consumer, we are offering something that is allowing the consumer to be mixing the pleasure of the heat-not-burn IQOS retool with the experience on the plume of the vaping business because in vaping, you don't have tobacco. It's a liquid that you eat and you extract the nicotine. Here is the same. It is a substract with nicotine. You either substract -- you extract the nicotine without, of course, burning and without smoke. And so that's going to be an interesting mix and combination. And indeed, it's not covered by the flavor ban. But -- but that was not an answer to the flavor ban. It's just more evolution of consumer expectations, to be clear.

And then just on IQOS user growth. Last quarter, there was a bit of a deceleration in the number of new users added. You historically were adding about 1 million users per quarter. Are you seeing an acceleration? And what drove that?

Well, actually, Q3 was not that bad. Remember, we are in a business that has some seasonality. And the summertime and wintertime in the Northern Hemisphere is having some impact in people who are open to changes, testing things, way of consumption, moment of consumption. So actually, Q3 '23 was a pretty good quarter versus the Q3 that we've been experiencing in the previous years in terms of user acquisition with around 200,000 new user acquisition. So there was no kind of deceleration versus what we see normally. We are indeed expecting to have a Q4 that will be above Q3. But I would draw your attention on the fact that this is not a scientific calculation. When we talk about margin progression, when we talk about volume, indeed, we are talking about real numbers scientifically measured. When you talk about user acquisition, well, we make a number of assumptions. We make consumer survey to assess what is the average daily consumption. What is the potential per usage. When should we measure exactly the moment of consumption to determine the number of users. So that's not as reliable, I would say, and therefore, coming with more volatility than market share and volume growth.

Understood. Can you talk about the new BONDS product and how you're thinking about the opportunity in emerging markets?

Since the beginning of our journey on heat-not-burn product, we said this is not a product that is only for the wealthy countries of the West. We absolutely want to bring this heat-not-burn opportunity to all smokers in the world. And among the remaining 1 billion smoker on the planet, many of them are in low middle-income country. And we believe that we should be able to offer them a product that's going to be affordable and bringing a very, I would say, similar benefit to IQOS. So the IQOS technology, the positioning of IQOS, it's too expensive to be able to offer to a broad part of the population in this country, the heat-not-burn technology. And that is the reason why we are developing BONDS. And that's going to come as a new technology. It's not going to be coming with this susceptor in the stick and induction within the stick. It's not going to be, of course, at the level of the IQOS experience, but we think we're going to be able to develop something that's going to be value for money, good enough and really bringing a lot of satisfaction to all the smokers who want to go for something better for them and different at a much cheaper price. We've been launching today BONDS in 2 countries for learning. One was Colombia, the other was Philippines. We are still working on the results. And that's a plan for the next 3 years, '24 will certainly come with some -- an evolution on the plan and some announcement. But that is part of this vision of we want to reach all smokers through the planet, and therefore, we need to develop a portfolio that is able to do that and IQOS, IQOS ILUMA cannot do it on its own.

In Japan, if we could touch on the competitive landscape there. There's been some recent product introductions from competitors. How is that impacting your strategy?

Well, the first thing, Pam, is that in Japan, we see the heat-not-burn category that keeps growing. So it shows that there is no, maybe, glass ceiling or if there is one, it's pretty high. So the category is probably now around 40% market share, if you accumulate combustible plus heat-not-burn. It's, therefore, of course, a very active market in terms of competition. And it's great to see that despite the fact that you have all the big names competing with us in this market, where we continue to grow our market share very nicely. And again, despite the fact that the competitors are super aggressive in terms of price positioning, for many, many references, we took about 30%, 40% premium now that the consumer has to pay to access to our product versus what the competition is offering. And they've been -- they continue to reposition their product at a lower price. And despite that, we keep growing our market share. I think it shows the strength of IQOS. For me, it shows as well the fact that the ILUMA story is not just the next 3 months, and this is it. It is a long story of growth once you have launched. We continue to come with innovation in Japan that is certainly helping the trajectory. But there is, for sure, a lot of lesson learned on the strength of IQOS and how we can continue to grow in the future as Japan is, of course, ahead of the curve in many dimensions.

I wanted to see if there are any questions from the audience, we have some -- a little bit of time. Okay. Well, I have 30 questions prepared. So we can continue. So you submitted the PMTA application for ILUMA with the FDA in October. Any sense on timing of approval from the agency?

No. It's very early days. And therefore, there is nothing I can report at that stage. I think we said that based on a number of assumptions and drawing some parallel, we were hopeful that maybe we could get that for the second part of 2025, which would mean a kind of 2-year process. What is important, I think, to note is that we have always enjoyed, I think, a very constructive and detailed discussion with the FDA before granting to IQOS blade, a PMTA and MRTPA, the FDA has been spending a lot of time working to, I think, millions of pages of science and data. So IQOS is a product they know already extremely well. They've been spending a lot of time. They have all the data science, but of course, consumer data that we are coming up with from other market they know that there is no market with any material underage usage, which is an element. So they have the science, they have consumer behavior. And therefore, we are hopeful that we're going to be able to have an efficient dialogue with them and get, as I said, at the earliest possible PMTA and MRTPA for IQOS ILUMA.

So given the time line that you're thinking for IQOS ILUMA approval in the FDA, how should we think about the rollout strategy for IQOS in the U.S. over the next year?

We're very clear on the fact that we are resuming, at the beginning of May, the commercialization of IQOS here in the U.S. for the time being with blade because we don't have the approval for ILUMA. Blade, we have MRTPA and we have PMTA. We have 5 SKUs that have been approved by the FDA, 2 are menthol variances. But we're going to be hear more on a kind of relaunching learning phase. So we said a few states, a few cities where we're going to relaunch or actually rather launch IQOS to start installing the brand, but of course, to also learn about IQOS and how the consumer is reacting with the IQOS proposal and we have, of course, the very broad learning of everything that we've been developing outside the U.S. and all the successes. We're going to see what is impacting here in the U.S., what is working and maybe what is less working. So there will be these quarters of learning. And once we have the ILUMA approval, then we will go for a more global launch, and we will go full speed. So that means that there will be a ramp-up on the investments on IQOS at the beginning on these few states, few cities that I've been mentioning. Now it doesn't mean that we have reduced investment next year in the U.S. because I can tell you, we're going to keep investing a lot behind ZYN. But the great news is that the success of ZYN is actually a platform for the success of IQOS. We are developing our sales force. We are developing our commercial digital engine. We are developing our external affair in order to talk to the authorities state by state and to talk about nicotine pouches on one side, but also heat-not-burn, and that's going to be very important to have this granularity. But despite this investment, we expect the U.S., as we said, to be accretive for the group in terms of volume growth, in terms of revenue growth, in terms of operating income growth and in terms of margin evolution as well.

And the FDA is expected to issue its menthol ban on cigarettes at some point soon. What is your expectation around IQOS heat sticks?

Look, I think nobody knows exactly how it's going to be formulated, how it could be presented, how it's going to be possibly challenged and so on. So I'm not going to speculate on something with too many uncertainty. But I will note the fact that, as I said, we have 2 menthol varieties that have been approved by the FDA. We have an MRTP for IQOS. So I think the FDA, not that long ago, has acknowledged the fact that this was a great product, including the menthol varieties and good for public health and for the smokers here in the U.S. So I think that's obviously a very important element.

Right. And then just we have limited time, but if you could touch on ZYN a little bit more and where...

That's -- thank you for finishing on the easiest one. It's -- the success story is incredible. ZYN has been growing more than 50% consistently over the last quarters. I'm happy to repeat that we are far above any expectation we had at the time of the Swedish Match acquisition. I mean ZYN was already successful, but not at that level. I think there is something happening on nicotine pouches and ZYN that probably epitomize the category today. I think a number of nicotine users in other category realize that it's a new way to enjoy nicotine, you can be using and consuming your ZYN while you are actually in any places, indoor, outdoor. You can be relaxing or you can be active, you can be working at your desk typing on your keyboards, you can be playing sport, you can be in military forces. You can be enjoying your ZYN moment, and people say, at the end of the day they say, it's a boost of energy. I feel better at what I'm doing and feel more focused. I feel less stress. I'm really enjoying that moment. So I think we are probably opening a new horizon of how people view and enjoy nicotine consumption, and that is probably what is behind the ZYN success today.

All right. Well, I think that, that's a great place to end. Thank you, Emmanuel, for...

Thank you, Pam. Thank you, and Merry Christmas and great break for everybody. I hope you can all manage to have some pause at the end of the year. Thank you.