Morning to all of you. Let me start by saying welcome back to Amsterdam. I don't know about you, but it felt so incredibly good last night to share a beer together back here at the Heineken Experience after all those years of looking at the damn little screens. When we were planning this, we realized that you guys love to go to Ho Chi Minh City, São Paulo, leadership team here at the company by telling our story at home. Eh? For Heineken, this is sacred ground. This is where it all began 158 years when the wort was cooled down, and there's these ventilation, you know, spaces up front before it went to fermentation, where the magic happens. We hope this next day and a half, magic will happen again.
Our story is a story about continuity and change, like the Heineken Experience. As a 158-year old company, we have a deep sense of legacy, of the foundation that we're building on. At the same time, you only get to be a 158-year company if you adapt and change, you renew yourself continuously. EverGreen is really the story how we built on the past while renewing ourselves, adapting to a fast-changing world around us. Now, real quick, all of us will shortly introduce ourselves. I think I've met most of you, but for those I've not, a quick introduction. I'm what's called a lifer. In February, I will be celebrating 25 years with the company. My background is in marketing and sales. I have to say, sometimes I miss it, but then James allows me in the candy store.
I get to play a little bit before he kind of kicks me out again. I guess the other thing that's maybe nice to share, that I was lucky that I spent, yeah, the majority of my career in the Heineken world. We say born in Amsterdam, raised by the world. Very true for me personally as well, as I started in Africa, in Kinshasa, U.S., Mexico, Latin America, and Asia, before coming back home two years ago. Now, more relevant is that this day and a half will also really give you the opportunity to meet the team. You get to see Harold and myself with some regularity, but this is the team that is leading the charge, that's really bringing EverGreen to life in the company. This is a team that's shaped in the crucible of crisis.
Between June 2020 and June 2021, eight new members out of 11 came together. I think, again, on this theme of continuity and change, we have Marc and Roland, who are lifers, who have been with the company for a very long time and were already on the executive team. People like myself and Ronald and Jacco, who are people who have spent all their lives with deep institutional knowledge at the company, new to the ET. We have a couple of colleagues like Søren and Yolanda, who are already five to 10 years with the company, but new to the ET. We have some new members joining us from outside, bringing fresh perspectives and expertise, like Harold, Stacey, and James.
For me, maybe the most important is not just the membership and what everybody brings, but it's really how we operate as a team. Again, this team was shaped in the crucible of crisis. We got together virtual with people sitting at four different time zones. We have been very deliberate on how we work together and where we really take collective ownership of setting the direction, shaping the strategy, and bringing it to life. I really hope that that sense of alignment comes through over this next day and a half. You will hear everybody speak. Today is skewed a little bit more to superior growth. You know, we like to say of ourselves we are a growth company first and foremost.
Today skews that direction with James, three out of four regional presidents with Ronald really speak to the eB2B, and Yolanda. Tomorrow is really about superior and balanced growth and really how we also bring productivity and capital efficiency. Harold will kick that off. At the end of each day, we have extensive period for Q&A. Really save your questions, if you like, for the end of the day, and we'll make sure that we have enough time to address them. What I would like to share in my remaining 40 minutes or so is revisiting, recapping shortly the rationale for EverGreen. This will be a bit of a repetition of what I shared in February 2021 when we kicked off EverGreen.
I would like to, you know, further sharpen and clarify the EverGreen strategy. We get to speak as always, first and foremost, about growth, how we aim to shape the future of beer and beyond, and ultimately how it translates to value, as we aim to deliver superior and balanced growth. Starting with the rationale for EverGreen, and as said, it's a story of continuity and change. It's grounded in a very, very strong foundation. Our global footprint, our kind of growth orientation, our global portfolio, of course, led by the Heineken brand, present in 190 countries, and actually accelerating rather than slowing down. A very OpCo-centric entrepreneurial culture, where we're deeply kind of in sync with local consumers and customers.
Strong values and a quality and people-centric culture and mindset, a long-term focus, a long-term bias. As Tom likes to say, a little bit of ability to suffer in the short term to do what's right for long-term value creation of the company. Yet we all know the world around us is changing very rapidly. The industry is changing very rapidly. Already when I was nominated to February 2020, before that little thing, COVID, was there, it was already the intent to really start a period of organizational renewal. I think all the kind of successive crises have only encouraged us to really go deep and make sure that we future-proof the company for the future. Now double-clicking a little bit on that strong foundation.
First and foremost on how this company has and always aims to deliver superior growth, which is what we have been doing in the prior periods. It's really, you know, built on a very powerful footprint, with over 70 number one and two positions through our operating companies and our JV partners. Very balanced between emerging markets and developed markets. A very diverse, broad portfolio, but skewed premium. I think we dare to say that Heineken was one of the first companies 20, 30 years ago to start leaning in to the premium segment, which is where the growth and the value creation is. Brand Heineken, 1/5 of our total volume, but of course symbolically and in value creation and much more. We like to say we are a company that will always go for brand pull first before going for push.
We always want through our brands and through superior connections, with our consumers, we want to generate that brand pull and then make sure that we give it the appropriate brand push. Again, underlying why have we been able to do it is that entrepreneurial OpCo-centric culture with strong local management teams, with ownership, with commitment, with accountability to deliver the goods in the local markets. We take great pride in ourselves as creative brand builders. Always trying to delight and surprise our consumers. That long-term orientation, which also translates itself how we relate to our JV partners, how we relate to our customers. Not transactional, but in a kind of strategic long-term way. It's also good to be transparent about the flip side. What are the things that we feel we need to address?
Maybe not a lot will, you know, be so transparent to show this, but I already showed it to February last year, so I might again, here are some of the things that we felt that we had to bend to trend. We were seeing our gross margin was starting to slide. We were seeing that we were starting to squeeze our marketing and selling expenses to hit our operating profit targets for the year, which were stagnating. On the capital turnover, we also were seeing that it was becoming a bit less efficient rather than more. More relevant is even, okay, why was that happening? What was kind of the root cause as we look at it from EverGreen point of view? One is that we have this amazing global network of OpCos, but we were not leveraging it.
The flip side of that very entrepreneurial OpCo-centric culture is that every OpCo is a bit a company in itself, a little bit of an island, with a strong not invented here syndrome, and where everybody was a little bit reinventing the wheel, creating a lot of inefficiencies and limited collective learning. Therefore, that was really blocking us from scaling capabilities very rapidly, whether it's in revenue management or in digital, et cetera. You know, this has been much publicized as well, that we never truly harmonized our technical backbone. We still have our transactional processes, data definition systems not yet harmonized, which then gets in the way of really leveraging the power of a network of companies in over 70, 75 countries.
That is a little bit in the most succinct way, as I can say, it's our core strength and the key thing that we aim to address through EverGreen. We're not doing this in a vacuum. As I said, the world from February 2020 to February 2021 to now has evolved more rapidly than I think any of us could have imagined. There's deep geopolitical change, which for us as a truly global company has its ramifications. You know, amongst others, our decision to leave Russia. It has ramifications on the global energy footprint, which of course has a bit big impact on us.
Technology speeding up, the power, but also the threat of AI, socioeconomic, the war for talent, Black Lives Matter, diversity inclusion, climate change going from a risk to reality and starting to impact us, like, scarcity of water in some of our operating companies. EverGreen is really about building on our strength, addressing some of the challenges as we saw them emerging, but also really adapting to this new external environment. It's also good to say this is not the first time that we have to do this as a company. Heineken in its 150-plus years, has adapted to these big changes in the world several times. Actually this company was crafted in the second half of the 19th century when the industrial revolution was really starting to scale.
Heineken was one of the few brewers that made the jump from being a small, artisanal, local, around the chimney brewery to really becoming an industrial scale brewery. This brewery is literally one of the first industrial scale breweries in the world. In the early 20th century, with the first wave of globalization, Heineken was one of the first to really take advantage. Already late 19th century, we built a brewery in Rotterdam for exports, fully dedicated to exports. At the time that 99.9% of brewers were still very local. Our first international participations in Central Africa, in Indonesia, were taken in that time. Mass marketing after the Second World War, mass media, television becoming, you know, mainstream, allowing to market your products very differently. Freddy Heineken, one of our founding fathers, really led the charge on that.
Late 1990s, early 2000s, with the emergence of global capital markets, the second wave of globalization, consolidation really starting to happen. Again, Heineken playing a leading role in that particular, you know, want to acknowledge my predecessor, Jean, in really helping lead Heineken in that era. We feel there's a new era upon the world, therefore there's a new era upon the company. It's not yet fully clear how it will manifest itself, but we feel deep sense of responsibility of making sure the company is ready for it and is agile and adapting itself to both the challenges and the opportunities. That's how EverGreen was born, let's say, in the summer of 2020. Building on strength, really all about sustaining growth within a fast-changing world.
It was always meant to be a multi-year effort, and it is about gaining speed, agility, ability to future-proof the company going forward. We used EverGreen because we wanted a metaphor from nature, because nature is the ultimate system of resilience, agility, and adaptability. Beyond that, our color is green, as you can see, so that fit as well. What I would love to do in the next few slides is really starting now, moving from the rationale of EverGreen to clarify the strategic focus points for EverGreen. On this slide, we try to capture some of the key shifts that we are trying to make. First one is that in that prior era of global consolidation, our model has been very M&A-driven.
Scottish & Newcastle, FEMSA, APB, It has generated a lot of value for the company. At the same time, we feel that driving growth organically in the rest of the network, we can do really a better job, and we need to do a better job going forward. We have always been a leader in premium, We see still big opportunities. You will hear Søren tomorrow how big of an opportunity premium still is, for example, in Europe, how we can truly become, you know, more consumer-centric rather than just brand-centric. We have a great execution culture, deliver the goods, as we say it in our language, we feel that we need to move from that more relational world to a more digital world, You will hear Ronald on that.
We are a superior top-line growth company, but it was biased to volume. One of the things that we want to do is to start balance that by delivering and the volume and the pricing, but also really making sure that we hit the other quadrants of what we call our Green Diamond. I will come back to that in a minute. Moving off that very local OpCo-centric culture to a more network business. What that means, I will also specify a bit more. Now, all of this, of course, needs to be grounded in purpose and values. Together with literally thousands of our people from all our operating companies, we have spent time to really try to sharpen and verbalize our purpose more strongly. Where we landed is with this wording: we brew the joy of true togetherness to inspire a better world.
Beer has always been the ultimate social lubricant since the time of the Egyptians. We feel in this world of divisiveness, of fragmentation, of polarization, that we can be, as a category, but also as a company, as a brand, be somebody who brings people together and just enjoy a beer together and strengthen that notion of human connection. I think you start seeing that really coming through in our advertising, but also, for example, how we are together as a company. Then our values, passion for consumers and customers. We always had passion as a value, but it was passion for quality, which we don't mind, but quality was a very internal kind of expression. It all became about rules and regulations and recipes and compliance.
Ultimately, it needs to be at the service of consumers and customers. By shifting that value from passion for quality to passion for consumers and customers, we want to bring in a notion of more e-external orientation. Courage to dream and pioneer is new. That's a new value, but it's not new to the company because we believe it's deeply embedded in our DNA. Freddy Heineken was a very courageous man, and in this time of shifting seasons and shifting eras, we really feel we need to appeal to that notion of courage to dream, curiosity, imagine, create. Care for people and planet has always been there. We are a very people-centric culture. We are we culture, as we like to say, and we extend that to the planet and enjoyment of life.
You know, we're the beer guys and girls, and we might as well have a bit of fun while doing it and hope, like last night, you get a feel for that. Those are our values and our purpose, but you don't sell beer through your values and purpose. You do that through strategic focus. The five things that we want to focus on going forward, as we have been focusing on for this last 24 months, are these five things. One, the first one is all about top line growth, and we call it Shape the Future of Beer and Beyond to win with the hearts of our consumers. The second one is about digitizing the business and really becoming the best connected brewer. The third one is all about productivity.
Really adding productivity as a value-creating engine for the company to fund both the growth and the profit. Sustainability, a big step up in sustainability and responsibility, because that's what the world truly needs. Then people, unlocking the full potential of our people and our network. I will very shortly, you know, speak to each five, then basically throughout today and tomorrow, you will hear one after the other, the different TT members speak to parts of these five priorities. The strategic priorities, that's what we do, that's what we focus on, and those priorities propel our growth algorithm. We shared the growth algorithm with you last year, which is all about that, you know, EverGreen algorithm of accelerating growth, unlocking new productivity gains, reinvesting them so we can grow faster, and ultimately deliver long-term value creation, which we measure through the Green Diamond.
Heineken was very biased to growth and actually volume growth, and with the Green Diamond, we really try to send a strong signal to the organization that we want to see balance across. We want that growth, but the growth more balanced between volume and value. Growth is no longer enough. It's growth and productivity and capital efficiency and making sure we deliver on our key commitments and ambitions on S&R. This slide is maybe the most succinct way of visualizing and verbalizing what the EverGreen strategy is all about. Again, the next day and a half will be about this one slide. What I will do next is talk to that first priority of shape the future of beer and beyond. I will do that by talking about our beautiful category.
I know there is this huge verbal battle going on between the spirits guys and the wine guys and the beer guys about who's growing faster than the other. I will contribute to that as well in one slide. We really believe beer is an amazing category. It's one of the broadest consumer categories in terms of consumer penetration on the planet. It's accessible, it's inclusive, it's moderate, it's purely natural. It's still very local business. It's large. We believe we are growing share of throat. I will speak to that. It's very profitable. At the same time, we still see major opportunities. Premium, you know, in a way, it's a 20, 30-year-old story, but actually we believe there is still another 20 or 30 years of growth. Emerging markets.
Beer is all about demographics and growing GDP per capita. That game has still many years to go. At the same time, if we allow ourselves a bit critical, we are in the certain locations and consumer groups, and we feel we can and should innovate against that. Now, on the category, what you see is that beer historically has grown in line with demographic growth, with global population growth. Global population growth is slowing down somewhat. You see that reflected from a 2% CAGR to somewhat 1% CAGR. You saw it after the economic crisis of the early 2010s. You saw in the years leading up to COVID, you saw it re-accelerate a little bit. A lot of people ask us, Okay, what do you expect? Hard to say. We see publications talking about 2% CAGR going forward.
We don't know. Anybody can tell, but I think it's fair to say there's at least 1% to 1.5% fundamental category growth at the volume level. Then we know that from a volume to value conversion, beer is actually the largest segment in total alcohol from a value point of view. Speaking a little bit about that share of throat debate, because there's a lot of talk about this, and it's good to clarify. First, you need to clarify whether you talk about value or about volume. One thing is that when you talk about value, it's super hard to get global data across all these different markets with different maturities. What I show is the global data from a volume point of view.
What we're seeing is that beer is gaining share of throat in total alcohol structurally, whether it's global, whether it's in emerging markets, where there's still a lot of conversion of economy spirits to mainstream and premium beer. Interestingly, the developed markets, it's basically a tale of two stories. I don't think this has been picked up broadly yet, whereby we see in Europe that beer is actually holding to gaining share in total alcohol, whereby in the US, core beer clearly has been losing a share of total alcohol. When you add the beyond beer space, when you add cider, ready-to-drink, seltzers, flavored malt beverages, then actually the picture is more nuanced, and you see that even in those markets, developed markets, in particular the US, it's growing a bit of share of throat in total.
What's fair to say, James will also speak to this, what the spirit guys have done very well is really super premiumizing, so driving value in developed markets. That's something we as beer players, I think we can still play a much better game at. Emerging markets, there's still a lot of growth. Again, it's always dangerous to look at averages, but in emerging APAC, Southeast Asia, India, the Africa, Middle East region, there's a lot of growth. Again, we have skewed our global footprint towards these markets. Premium, I'm gonna be short. You will hear premium a lot in the next hours. We believe it's big, it's valuable, it's growing, and we have a right to win in this space.
As I said, it's also good to be a bit critical and to be curious how we can serve our consumers better. This is really that kind of shift to becoming a more consumer-centric company, and James is really leading the charge on this, where we really feel that beer is doing a great job in certain occasions with certain consumer targets, but there are occasions and consumer targets where it's doing less of a good job. Beer is still relatively undifferentiated at the product level, with over 90% of beer being lager or pilsner beer. We do foresee that that will start to differentiate, like how almost any consumer goods category on the planet has start diversifying on its core product dimension.
As I said, spirits doing a very good job at super premiumizing, and that's something, particularly in developed markets, that's relevant, and we need to find an answer to that. Those are some of the opportunities that we see. Therefore, the strategic intent that we are setting as a company on our top line is to shape the future of beer and beyond to win the hearts of consumers. Every word is deliberately chosen. Shape the future. The big danger of a 158-year-old company is that you try to not lose, that you try to protect or defend what you have, rather than shape and create and imagine and bring something forward that is new.
It's really an invitation to our global commercial people, our global marketeers, our advertising agent, our innovators, to really imagine, to be curious, how can we better serve our consumers and customers globally? Deliberately, also the little word beyond. It's really about beer first. We still feel there's so much opportunity in beer, and to continuously renew, disrupt yourself, but then it's also really going into that beyond space. We're doing that through four key focus areas. One is leveraging our advantage footprint. The second one is about scaling premiumization, pioneering low and no alc, and exploring the beyond beer. Our footprint, I think you're intimately aware, we take great pride in how balanced and diversified our footprint is.
I think there's no other alcohol beverage company with this kind of breadth and depth of footprint, with over 70 number one or two positions across the world, 50/50, developed emerging market. Also, we are avoiding huge concentrations in a limited number of markets. It takes 22 operating companies to get to 80% of our profit. We believe there's a very high embedded growth in our footprint, at least 100, if not 150 basis points of growth. As I was saying, you know, we're really going from a model that was really dominated by M&A to a model where there still will be M&A.
We always will, you know, be on the outlook for good opportunities to further strengthen and deepen our footprint, but it will be a strategy that is more skewed and focused on organic growth, really leveraging this amazing network of 71 number one or two positions to do better. I'm not gonna speak to the details of this slide. You will hear each of the regional presidents speak to this. The second focus area, which is premiumization. Of course, we have always done this through brand Heineken. 40% of our revenues come from premium. Brand Heineken is accelerating rather than slowing down. We have double-digit growth in over 40-45 markets for the second, third year in a row. 14 markets where it has real meaningful scale, over 1 million hectoliters. A couple of observations about the future.
One is brand Heineken still has ways to go. The regional presidents will show our results in Brazil, will show our results in a market like China. You will see, you know, how we excited we are still for the future of that brand. There's big opportunities on international brands and really starting to globalize them, brands like Desperados, brands like Tiger. Again, you will hear the team from it. We really are finding a replicable model on how to do local premium, where we use insights from the network, but we apply them locally. Secondly, the way Heineken 20, 30 years ago pioneered premium beer, I think more recently, Heineken has truly pioneered 0.0 beer. 0.0 beer has always been there, but it was stagnant, it was low quality, it was bad taste, and it was not growing.
Basically, almost every single market where we have launched Heineken 0.0, we have premiumized, we have brought quality, and we have ignited growth. Not just in the usual suspects in North America or Europe, but in markets like Brazil, markets like Russia at the time, markets like Mexico, Heineken 0.0 has been the unlock on the segment. We now need to broaden our approach beyond Heineken 0.0. Again, you will hear the team on that. Last but not least, explore the beyond beer. First, there's also this big debate, what is beyond beer? The simple Definition I have in my mind is that I consider beyond beer any moderate ABV alcoholic proposition, 4%-6% ABV, let's say, that fits in a 12 ounce bottle or can, and you can produce it more or less without too much adaptation to brew.
We call that beyond beer. The original beyond beer category is actually cider. You know, it's very similar in process. You can make it in a brewery. You stick it in a 12 ounce bottle or a can. We're actually very big in this. We're the global market leader. If and when the Distell acquisition will be fully closed, we will be by far the largest player in cider, which is a very interesting and attractive segment. We have been able to ignite cider, of course, all across Europe and what have you, but also markets like Mexico and Vietnam, where Strongbow is the number one, let's say, flavored alcoholic beverage in the market through its cider proposition. Desperados, which started as a flavored beer, is really starting to go into these flavored beverages as well.
The future is about truly being consumer-centric, because what we are learning about this space, it's much less global. This is really about market by market. Seltzer proved to be a primarily U.S.-centric kind of acquisition, and the way it's manifesting itself may be in a very different way. We learned in the U.K., launching a seltzer was not working, but taking the seltzer functional attributes and applying to Strongbow in a proposition called Strongbow Ultra is really working. We really feel this is a space of innovation and where you really need to have strong local consumer insights. Again, you will hear the team on how we think and work in this space. That was the first major priority, all about our top line, shaping the future of beer and beyond.
The second major strategic priority area is digitizing the business and becoming the best-connected brewery. On the right side, it's the not so sexy part. It's really modernizing, simplifying the back end. This is about globally standardizing your transactional processes, your data definitions, your tech systems, so that you really get one common technical backbone. Sounds very obvious. Many companies have done this. Heineken, for various reasons, have never gotten to it. We need to do it. If we don't do this now, it really gets in the way of the left side. If you really want to capture the value creation opportunity of digitizing your consumer connections, digitizing your customer connections, you need that harmonized backbone. We are decided this is happening. We are now two years into what's probably about a six, seven years journey.
Ronald is really leading the charge on this. As you may recall, Ronald was appointed in a new role of our Chief Digital Technology Officer two years ago. On the left side, that is the exciting stuff. That's where the value creation sit. That is really leveraging digital to your benefit in how you relate to consumers, and in this case, customers. We are really on track to deliver EUR 15 billion in gross merchandising value through our digital B2B platforms globally by 2025. Again, you will hear Ronald speak to that in detail. A very important building block in our strategy, because this is actually an enabler for some of the other priorities. The third major priority is productivity, to fund both the growth and fund the profit of the company.
Here, culturally, we're making a deliberate change or evolution, in how we think about this. There was a little bit of mindset in the company that either you grow or you do margin. If you focus too much on margin, you're gonna kill the growth and vice versa. The way we think about it as a team is if you want to play Champions League, you need to do both. If you play Champions League, you need to attack and defend. You can't say, I love to attack. That's my culture. That's what I do, but I'm not gonna be bothered by defense. You need to do both.
I think that's really starting to sink in in the company, that we can be both a growth company, a superior growth company, and at the same time, you know, do what we need to do on the productivity side, so we can continuously invest in growth as well as make sure we have operating leverage over time. I think the crucible of the succession of crisis that we have faced over the last 24 months has been extremely helpful. This was the biggest generational opportunity to really reset a couple of ways of working, of capabilities in the company. We will deliver on our EUR 2 billion growth savings program by next year. Actually, I'm sure you all have picked up on that in the pre-release of yesterday, we have committed ourselves to EUR 400 million of savings annually a year.
You are not the primary audience. Actually, our own people is the primary audience, because we want to be very clear that this is the expectation, that this is just something that's part of doing business successfully. Tomorrow, Harold, Magne, Søren will really speak to this in much greater detail. The fourth strategic priority is sustainability, responsibility. On this, we did a dedicated investor call in April last year, where we set out our ambitions on environmental sustainability, social sustainability and responsibility. Three dimensions, nine ambitions that we have expressed, including net zero in our own operations by 2030 and including scope three by 2040 and a focus on water and gender. Out of those nine dimensions, we are prioritizing three. We're putting our money where our mouth is. We make this part of our long-term incentive program.
This year was the first year, we really are starting to work against this. Hard work, not easy, it needs to be done. It's simply part of doing business going forward. Very proud of how we are moving the needle on gender. Beer historically has been a very male-dominated industry. By the way, I believe this is one of the reasons why beer is under fair share with women, female consumers. Really, this is a dimension that gets a lot of attention. If you take, for example, our top 150 leadership between 2019 and this year, we doubled the number of female leaders on our top leadership team. We're heading in the right direction, but still a lot to do. The fifth dimension, people and organization.
People, organization, those are the kind of interventions we need to make in order to be able to deliver these other four priorities. The first one is how we think about our operating companies. As I said in the beginning, we take great pride in that the local sensibility, the local ownership and commitment from our local teams, but it's really got in the way of collective learning, collective scaling, collective exchanging. We're really moving to a much more networked approach. I think you will pick this up with all of the regional precedents, but particularly with Søren tomorrow in how he's working in Europe, you will really get a sense of how this is changing. This is not about centralizing. We don't want the ivory tower in Amsterdam to make the decisions.
What we do insist on is that we stop the not invented here syndrome, and that we start benchmarking, learning together, scaling together, because we feel there's a big upside. That's why that right side tries to express it, that the right side of our brain, our the marketeers, the innovators, the customer-oriented, there we want to be very local. There we want to empower as much as we can because beer is still a very local business. The back end, your order to cash process, nobody's competing on its order to cash process. We have 43 different ones. That part we really need to harmonize, we need to standardize. That's not, no longer a friendly question to the opcos, we're just gonna do it.
We're just gonna figure out together when and how, but not if we are gonna do that. This is a subtle but important change that we're making to how the company is running. It's not a black and white from central, from decentral to central. We want to keep the decentral nature of the business, but make it more horizontally connected. Now, the question, of course, is how does the organization react? Are these things freaking them out or not? One way to gauge this is through our annual, or actually biannual, organizational climate surveys. I'm very happy, and I'm actually proud to say that when you look to our organizational climate, and Yolanda will speak to this in more detail, it's going up year-over-year. We're now firmly above 2019.
That's important to us because we have a global reorganization, new leadership, new strategy, a lot of disruption happening to the company. Actually, the organizational climate is strengthening, particularly in areas like direction alignment, performance enablement, team embracing change. We really see big upticks, but very importantly is an external benchmark against high performance norm. This is the top quartile of companies, and you see us at priority or above. This is very important. At the end of today, our greatest asset is our people and our climate and our culture. There's still a lot of work to be done, and Yola will speak to that, how we think about talent, about our capability strategy, how we think about performance culture. Harold will say some of that more, and how we really deploy the EverGreen transformation.
I feel we set a step, a big step in the right direction on this one. That's it. In summary, our five strategic priorities, and each of one of them is boosting a critical capability. Now, very important is then how are these five priorities, these focus areas, where we're spending 99% of our time, how that is propelling our value creation. That's through the growth algorithm. Ultimately, as I said before, we measure that through the four quadrants of the Green Diamond. I will have two, three minutes on that latter part because tomorrow, Harold will really double and triple click on this part.
First, stepping back and looking at value creation, I think we can be proud that as Heineken over the years, we've always been a company in the top quartile, in the top range in terms of value creation. It's really firmly our commitment to continue to do that going forward. The growth algorithm is the way that expresses itself. At the top, deliberately superior growth because we want and always aim to be a superior growth company first and foremost through our, you know, brands, through brand pool, through our innovations, through our superior customer relationship. The change that we're making there beyond all the marketing changes that James will speak about, we will be looking for a bit more balance between volume and value.
We were a very volume-driven kind of top-line growth company, and in a very capital-intensive business, that's not always a good thing. We feel that we need to adjust that a little bit. I think if you look to how we have handled, for example, pricing over the last 12, 18 months, where Heineken has been quite assertive, basically without exception everywhere in the world in terms of really making sure we get the pricing that we need. Sharper performance management. There was a little bit of a simplistic way. If you delivered your volume growth and your volume share and your absolute operating profit, you were good. We are nuancing that. We say that's too simple. We call it the shape of the P&L. It's, if you drive your growth by diluting your gross margin, you will get in trouble.
If you drive your operating profit by diluting your marketing sale, you'll get in trouble. That's a big change. It's a more nuanced picture. It's a more nuanced, performance dialogue that we're having with the operating companies. Again, we'll speak to that in more detail. I've spoken about productivity and how important it is, and how it's simply part of doing business and running a tight shop. Last but not least, it is sharper resource allocation. In the past, at Heineken, when you ran out of capacity, you got a new brewery or you got a new packaging line. Now we really start to ask questions. What's your economic profit? How much value creation do we have after, you know, taking capital into account? Is this a place where we want to allocate more capital or not? Very new to us as a company.
It's also really about upping our investments behind our brands and customer relationships. One of the things we have changed this year, as an example, is making the bonus payout on operating profit conditional on spending your marketing selling budgets to really send a signal that, again, you can't cut your way to your operating profit target. There's real change in every part of the growth algorithm. Yesterday, deliberately, we did the pre-release also to get some of the short-term questions and concerns that may have been there out, I hope, and from what I gauged last night, that was well-received. In the Q&A, particularly tomorrow, when we have held, you know, we can address any remaining parts.
It was really meant to provide clarity, and that despite a very challenging environment, we reconfirm our operating margin guidance for this year and our operating profit growth for next year. More relevant, I find for such a strategy meeting as we have these two days, is our long-term promise. Again, we measure success by all four quadrants of our Green Diamond. What we promise and what we aim to deliver is superior but more balanced growth with a step-up in investment. EUR 400 million of ongoing productivity improvement so we can deliver operating leverage over time, disrupted in the short term with all the energy costs and COVID before. We really subscribe to the notion that your revenue should be growing faster than your profit over time. More missions that we have expressed on sustainability and responsibility.
This is where we are. I think, you know, we're still early days in EverGreen. Over the last two years, we have set that clear course. We built an amazing team, not just our global executive team, our Global 150 leaders team. We're now in the phase of really deploying EverGreen, mobilizing the organization, very encouraged by this organizational climate feedback that is starting to be well understood and received, and to start deliver on the five priorities. That's what you can hold us accountable against. That ultimately we start to generate sustainably, consistently that long-term value creation. We do this, you know, in the middle of some crisis navigation, but we have our eyes firmly on the future.
On that future, what I took away from speaking with as many as I could amongst you last night is that we are very passionate about this company, but many of you are incredibly passionate about us as a company. Many of you are long-term investors, some longer than I've been in the company. That gives us an incredible sense of responsibility. I hope that what you get out of these two days is a validation that the company is in good hands and that we have a clear direction, and that we will continue to build on the shoulders of those who came before us and continue to deliver value for the long term. Thank you very much and wish you an amazing two days together. Thank you.
Made it. It's great to be here. I'm James Thompson. One of the great capabilities we have at Heineken is an amazing photographer. I don't know if you can spot the difference between what's actually in front of you and what that very talented gentleman managed to create here. As Dolf pointed out, I'm relatively new on the block here. I started my career at Unilever, longer ago than I like to think. Spent 20 years, 24 years, in fact, at Diageo, in Europe, in North America, in Asia for a long time, in managing director jobs and marketing innovation jobs based around the world, really. Spent a little bit of time in the beauty industry. Here's our talented photographer.
Spent a bit of time in the beauty industry before I got a call and saying, Look, they're doing this thing called EverGreen at Heineken, and we think you might be interested in doing that. I found that the agenda that Dolf just set out for you, is one of the most exciting I'm seeing in consumer goods at the moment. I met all of the executive team as part of the process, and I thought, I really want to work with these people. A couple of them I'd worked with in different guises before. I've got to say, it's a fantastic, the comradely environment, with good debate and better alignment, on an agenda that's hugely exciting, and I'm delighted to be here. What am I gonna talk about?
I'm gonna talk about shaping the future of beer and beyond. We call this our dream. It's important to win the hearts of consumers. We put that right at the center of it 'cause it's a consumer-centered vision.
I'm gonna talk about the beer category and why we're excited about it and consumers in that. I'm gonna talk about the things we're doing to start shaping the future of this category and beyond. I'm gonna talk about the power of our brands and how those are growing from strength to strength. I'm going to sort of wrap it up together with the Heineken brand and look at the superior growth we're getting out of that and why we're getting it. Now, as Dolf said, we love beer, but consumers, more importantly, also love beer. It's the highest penetration alcohol category in the world. It's the highest consumer spend category in the world, and it's one with the fastest increase in share of throat in the world. Extremely healthy in the alcohol context.
I think that what is well-known is the left-hand side of this chart, the fact that in the emerging markets, beer is aspirational. It's got the fastest-growing share of throat, and we look at more than 1.5 billion new emerging middle-class consumers over the next 10 years. I think that's well understood. What may be less well understood is the growth opportunities in developed markets. If you look at the absolute volume growth that's coming from the growth pockets in developed markets, whether it's premium beer, 0.0 , or beyond beer, that absolute volume growth is higher than the total growth in developing markets. Just have a look for a moment at 0.0 Beer in developed markets. It's around half the total growth we're getting from all beer in Latin America.
There are huge pockets here, and most of this, by the way, is in premium. Dolf showed this chart. In our vulnerabilities, we see opportunity. We index high in our share of high-energy occasions, which means we've got an opportunity in lower energy occasions. Why can't we capture business in there? We're penetrated higher with men than with women. No reason for that. Plenty of opportunities there. Beer occupies a very narrow profile for taste, at least lager does, and that is about 90% of the beer category is lager. No reason why we can't expand our opportunities there too. While, as I showed you before, we do extremely well in premium, spirits have shown that you can stretch your category even further. We have opportunities for more margin and more premium opportunities as well.
In our challenges, we see huge opportunities for growth. That's what I'd like to talk about now, the shifts we're making to deliver the superior balanced growth that Dolf talked about. We've got a very, very strong foundation for growth in this company, as I think is well documented. We really do understand beer consumers, and to that, we want to add a deep understanding of total consumer demand in alcohol-appropriate occasions. I'll talk about that in just a moment. From differentiated brands, strong brands, we want to add a little bit of focus on products and add more differentiation in products to appeal to more occasions, more consumers across the spectrum. Strong reputation for volume growth. We're now putting a lens on also driving value growth out of that volume. We've got very well-documented history and passion for brand building.
It's one of the things you really notice when you walk through the door. People talk about bleeding green or whatever color of the beer they're working on it happens to be. To which we want to double down and really spike in the areas of creativity in marketing and also the science and analytics that underpin it, things which are non-negotiables to be excellent at in the modern marketing environment. We want to build on the success we've got by being local, as Dolf talked about, to being very much more intentional in terms of how we share from each other, network, learn, so we can reapply and scale fast. Let's look at how we're expanding our view of consumer demand.
We have an insight program and way of looking at the market that reframes completely where we compete from beer to all alcohol-appropriate occasions, whether or not alcohol itself is consumed in those occasions. We find, depending on the market, these tend to be 10-12 of these, what we call Demand Spaces. There are some local differences, but they very much are global patterns. By driving deep insight into these Demand Spaces, we understand consumer types, we understand what occasions, we understand the location, what people are doing at that time, what their motivations are, and critically, what type of products best fit their needs in those Demand Spaces. We find by analyzing this and looking at that as our addressable market, we have more than doubled the revenue size of our addressable consumer opportunity.
Here are two examples of what that looks like. The first is portfolio optimization. There's a market here, one of our big OpCos has optimized its portfolio as a result of these insights. Initially, it had nine brands focused on about a third of the demand spaces, clustering around 30% of the demand. They found it was more effective to reposition their portfolio to have six brands targeting 70% of demand. That means more growth, but also more efficient and more effective growth. That strategy is in place in that market now. The second thing that we can do out of this is identify white or green spaces, if you like, for innovation. If you look at this demand map and these 10-12 demand spaces, beer does really well in about 40% of the areas of consumer demand.
It does okay in the rest of it, but there are clear opportunities for innovation and product development in areas at the moment where sometimes other drinks or mixes do a little bit better. We're not just excited by how we can optimize our portfolio, we're really excited about the white space that we can take our products and our brands into. That's why we're boosting our innovation. We're putting up innovation hubs in key centers around the world to scale up the ideas that we see to create that kind of network that Dolf was talking about. Also to work on the product opportunities and the big long-term opportunities indicated by the white spaces. We've really, over the last few years, taken an intentional approach to scaling our launches. First of all, with Heineken 0.0, and more recently with Heineken Silver. Huge success in Asia Pacific.
We'll talk about the great start we've had in Europe. We're already in a lot of the Americas, we're going to the United States next year. It's also on our local jewels that we're learning, sharing, and reapplying. For example, with the Non Filtrata proposition that was started with Ichnusa in Italy and has now moved to our El Águila brand in Spain, and also into brands in Brazil and beyond. The outcome of this is we've started to shape the category and beyond, and we look at this sort of bow tie representation as the outcome of this work. Right in the middle of this, of course, is our core business, core lager. If you look across this map, all these products that you see were launched in the last four to five yea rs by us.
There's a nice link here to the tasting opportunities you're gonna have later on in this program. If you look at the two circles at the bottom of that, they're representing both our total revenue this year and our revenue from innovation this year. What you'll notice, as you'd expect, is our total revenue this year is still heavily characterized by core lager, around about 80%. No surprise there. If you look at our innovation revenue, you'll find it's much more balanced, much more tilted to expand and beyond beer. What that will do, as we intend to keep that going with our innovation year-over-year, is it'll shift our mix over time. This is all driven by our three growth priorities, which are part of our Shaping the Future. The priorities are scaling premiumization.
Leading category premiumization with Heineken, but also at scale through our strong portfolio, and I'll talk about that shortly. Secondly, pioneering the growth in low and no. Pioneering the growth and capturing a strong share of that. First with Heineken 0.0, and then expanding the category and portfolio. This, of course, leverages our route to market and our production capabilities and our product development capabilities in a very positive way. To explore beyond beer. Leading and shaping with cider, innovating and extending our beer brands, and transforming our portfolio and our capabilities, for example, pending regulatory approval, with the Distell business. What is in common across these three growth priorities? Firstly, these areas are growing faster than the beer category, much faster than the beer category. Secondly, they're significantly more profitable than the average of our portfolio today. I'm gonna look at them in turn.
Let's start with premium. Premium is approximately 25% of category volume. By the way, it's about 32% of our volume and over 40% of our value. Premium has been growing consistently. If you look back over the last 20 years, it's been growing at twice the rate of other beer. If you look at that time period, in that time period, there's been pandemics, financial crises, wars. The growth of premium has hardly missed a beat. It's just consistent. That demand for premium beer just keeps growing. It's growing at about twice the rate of mainstream and economy, and clearly, as you can see on the right, it's more and more relevant in emerging markets than other alcohol categories. We clearly have led the way in premium over time and now, shaping this category.
Our volume is higher than the total, if you look on the right-hand side, you see three markets, three big markets, where since we have entered those markets with intent, the premium segment has grown explosively. What's more, we've gained the lion's share of the growth in those markets. When we enter a market, we premiumize it, we gain the leading share of that premium growth. It comes from a diverse range of brands. Clearly, the Heineken brand is the one that everyone knows and everyone talks about. However, our international brands portfolio grew 38% between Q3 this year and 2019 respectively, significantly ahead of the mainstream and economy program. Several of these brands are now becoming multi-country or multi-region brands. This is really important because it's behind the growth of the portfolio that we're deploying premiumization at scale.
Tiger is no longer just in Vietnam and Singapore. It's across much of Asia and turning up in the Americas and also in Africa. Desperados no longer Poland and France only, across a lot of Europe and also in Africa. Strongbow is able to travel. Moretti is rolling out across Europe with intent. It's a powerful portfolio and one that's getting stronger and stronger. Part of what is driving this is the fact that this is where we're focusing our above-the-line marketing or consumer-facing spend, if you like. As you can see, we've always over-indexed here, 1.7x the rest of our portfolio in 2017. While the absolute total has also grown 2.2x that last year. It's not just growing the amount of investment, it's the focus of that.
I want to talk a little bit about one of those brands I referred to. It's a brand perhaps we should talk about a little bit more, Desperados. It's leading spirits beer for high-energy occasions, growing at 10% compound consistent over the last 20 years, way ahead the rest of its segment. It's a brilliant example of expanding beer, of premiumizing, and of the benefits of a really differentiated product, something I told you was becoming more and more of a focus for us. It's a brand that really supports innovation. Over 10% of its growth this year is coming from innovation, and it's bigger than any RTD brand outside the United States. Now in 80 countries at a 160 price index, twice the gross profit per hectoliter than the rest of our portfolio, growing now across our regions.
Gonna look now at low, no, and pioneering there. The big point I'd really like you to take out of this is that we've ignited the segment and taking a great share of it. You can look back over time, non-alcoholic beer as a percentage of the total beer category. The growth actually sort of comes in waves, really. About 10 years ago, when we launched Radlers and Cruzcampo 0,0 in Spain, you can see those two markets start to really pick up. In the last four or five years, markets in Western Europe, such as Netherlands and also Poland and other markets in Eastern Europe, and now really picking up, the United States, which has doubled the size of category since 2018, and Brazil, which is growing almost exponentially. Another wave of growth is on its way. It's accelerating.
As you can see on the right, there's lots of headroom for penetration. About half our volume in 0.0 is being sourced from outside beer. We think this category has long-term potential to be around 5% of total beer. It's already exceeding that in some markets. Here's how we're leading that category. We have a share of around about 17%. Our nearest competitor has got somewhere between 12% and 13%, but we're getting 32% share of 0.0 category growth. A lot of that is because we're investing. 25% of the Heineken brands consumer-facing sales spend goes behind Heineken 0.0. We're innovating and consumers are willing to pay the price, which is resulting in strong gross profit per hectoliter for us ahead of our total portfolio. Our model here for growing is really clear.
We know what to do. We know how we're doing it. Let's have a look at the United States. What we did with that was we went in very clearly nailed on the head the consumer barriers, whether it's how you look, what it tastes like, where you drink it, and so on. Availability, even. We came in and addressed all of those barriers, and we're now the category leaders. Just think of that. We had our share of 0.0% in 2018 was 0.0%. Our share this year is 24%. We've gone from zero to market leader in four years. The key is to crack the barriers to the category acceptance with Heineken and then expand to other brands and other areas. We're starting now to innovate really positively in the whole non-alcoholic space. Just a couple of embryonic examples.
On the left, just launched in the last few weeks, a brand called Zagg in Nigeria. It's an energy malt. It adds the sort of our global credibility by being number one in malt drinks, with the nutritional credentials of that segment and allows us to drive a price premium. Just launched, we've got good hopes of that. In the United States, it's been around a little bit longer. Lagunitas, the world's number one IPA, has used IPA flavors and hops to add to water in a zero calories, zero carbs, zero ABV, zero gluten product, which is absolutely fantastic. It's leading that segment. 20% or more of that volume is coming from soft drinks. Around about 30% of consumers use this as a mixer. I can highly recommend that myself, by the way. It is a fantastic proposition.
You can see we're now really beginning to stretch how we participate in low and no. I'm gonna talk about beyond beer. What do we know about this? We know it's the fastest-growing space in alcohol. We know that we're number two in the world outside the States. We know that should the regulatory approval be given to us, we will be number one outside the U.S. and number three globally in this area. We know that it's all growing inside or outside the U.K., also growing. Fine. Typically, the noise around this is U.S. and seltzers, sometimes a bit of spirit-based RTD. That's the kind of clutter. What we're really talking about is a very broad and interesting consumer space.
Tends to be for products that are more flavored, a bit sweeter, certainly innovative, maybe a different approach to branding, with some functional attributes perhaps. Perhaps a more natural perception. As Dolf said, also moderate in beer-like packaging and presentation. This is beyond beer. The base can be anything. The base can be apples, it can be fruit, generally, it can be locally grown, it could be malt, it could be ethanol. The point is that the consumer space is what we want to address and what we want to meet. The consumer space can be addressed a number of different ways. By the way, including with beer. I think you can see from the descriptions how beer can start to address that in some ways.
What we are doing is we're starting with what's in front of us and what we can see, and we're going to expand our lens over time. Here's two examples that we like the look of. The first is from the U.K.. Strongbow Ultra, launched this year. It's low calorie, low carb, natural, addresses very similar needs to hard seltzers. By the way, although it launched this year, it is already around 70% of the size of the total hard seltzer category in the U.K., and we expect it to at least equal that size by the end of the calendar year. Its price index is 136 against the rest of the category. It over-indexes with 18 to 34-year-olds. About 60% of Ultra shoppers had not bought cider in the previous period.
Bringing in new consumers at a premium, higher value, new occasions by understanding the consumer space and addressing it with what works locally. What seems to be working locally in the United States is what we're doing with Dos Equis, a brand that, as you can see on here, and the franchise was declining in 2018 to 2020, and the core lager brand was also declining over that time period. We've identified this as a brand that can meet multiple consumer demands, and we've launched Dos Equis Lime and Salt building on a ritual that consumers do, the way they consume products, Dos Equis Ranch Water, tequila and soda, and so on. These launches have helped propel total franchise growth over the last two years, and also, very importantly, reignited growth in the core lager business as well.
Two very nice examples of how we're expanding and innovating beyond beer that's benefiting our entire business as well. Should the Distell deal go ahead, we will transform our capabilities with some really distinctive brands. Just want to showcase these brands a little bit. You may not have seen them on your travels, but in South Africa, Savanna is an iconic brand, and it's also in 19 other countries. It's got worldwide acclaim for its marketing. It sells at a premium to beer. Bernini is a grape-based RTD which has doubled in size since 2016. It sells at a premium to beer. 4th Street is the number one wine in Africa. It has 7.5% alcohol by volume. It sells at a premium to beer.
We add these capabilities to what we already have very strongly in the U.K. and in Brussels, in Belgium, Western Europe. I think we're gonna have a powerhouse in beyond beer and technology here, which will help us really drive even further. That's the end of the look at growth priorities. I want to now move on to look at our brands. I've used just as an illustration to kick us off with, Birra Messina, our beautiful beer from Italy, from Sicily. It's a great example here of how brand power, driving that, delivers more valuable growth. Because in the last couple of years, we've increased our brand power by 50 index points.
That has been driven by the core measures of being meaningful, which is really relevant and different, which tends to mean worth paying for, by meaningful and different growing significantly in consumer polling. That's helped us driving a price advantage, price growth over that time, and of course, value share gain as well. That creates the financial capacity to invest more behind the creative work that drives brand power, sends the virtuous circle around again. This is not just happening at that local brand level. This is happening across our portfolio. We're building an advantage portfolio of great brands where our brand power is greater than our market share. That indicates a business built on consumer pull with further opportunities for growth.
Over the last couple of years, our brand power index on our strategic brands, that means our core business, has continued to grow from a strong point. If you look at our game-changer brands, the brands which we're really doubling down on accelerating now to become our strategic brands in the near future, that is really ramping up. Our brand power is growing for our largest international brands compared to our competition where we compete. Nine out of 10 of our largest local strategic brands are also growing their brand power. If you look at the pie chart on the right-hand side, it shows in the dark green the number of cases where our brand power outperforms our market share, consumer pull areas. The gray is where it's neutral. As you can see, around two-thirds of our portfolio is driven by consumer pull.
The reason for that is we're focusing on doing three things really well: being efficient, effective, and doing great work which drives results. Let's talk about focus first. In 2017, 80% of our marketing sales spend was allocated to 29 different brands. Now it's 20 different brands. That shows we're really focusing and driving performance where we think the biggest opportunities exist. Those strategic and game-changer brands received around 1.5x the investment of the rest of our portfolio a few years ago. Now it's over double. Really putting our resources intentionally on the biggest size of the prize. Doing that in a more effective way too. Working spend or consumer-facing spend, if you like, has gone up 6 percentage points since 2017.
Consumers are seeing more of our investment from the same dollars, but of course, the dollars are increasing as well. We have sophisticated return on investment analyzing techniques, for example, here in Brazil and Mexico, where we're seeing greater than 5% gross profit improvements from reallocation of marketing investment. As a company, we're known for our creative marketing, but what I want to point out here is from that position of strength, we've been really driving that to even further improvement levels. This is independent testing results of all our marketing communications, 2018, 2020, 2022, on the two dimensions of persuasion and meaningful or relevant differentiation. You can see they just keep growing over time. That's a result of discipline and culture and standards and people, and the partnerships that we create in our organization.
I thought what I would do at this point is be quiet and show you a little reel of some of that kind of work. Let's show the film, please. Hands up who identified every single one of those brands. It's a lovely mix, isn't it, of international and rolling out and local expertise. It's really nice. Dolf talked about courage being one of the things that we're really prizing increasingly. The person who made that Edelweiss commercial, the one, the Korean one, in the, in the woods and so on, I think deserves a lot of praise for their courage doing that. I don't think I'd have done it, but it seems to work. I want to try and pull some of this together by talking about the Heineken brand.
Talking about shaping the category, it's been doing that for 150 years. It's been doing it pretty well. Number one beer brand by retail value around the world. Growing or holding share in seven out of 10 top markets. Growing at 12% revenue CAGR, with a margin that's 50% higher than our portfolio average, with historic milestones where we're associated with changing the trajectory of the category. It's good news. Our goal is to be restless and keep improving. That's why the ambition to be the most meaningful, whether it's measured by relevant and different, as I showed before, most meaningful brand with young adult consumers is one that keeps our team on their toes and inspires them to do greater and greater work. The example I'd like to really zero in on here is Brazil.
If you look at this is not an overnight success. This is built carefully over years, and then it ignites and hits a flashpoint. Built carefully through three things, really. Focusing on the credentials and product excellence through talking about pure malt and why that's better. In fact, it created such a success there that others started to follow. Excellence in on-premise and experiential marketing. You can't really go to a great bar in Brazil without experiencing a fantastic thing from Heineken, and some of the best festivals and events and so on are put on there. People look forward to them. They're a cultural phenomenon. As you'd expect, perhaps, some great advertising and some great PR.
The scores that you see here around meaningful difference and salience, so remembered recently, are quite remarkable, and you don't see those on very many brands at all. We see the profitable gains that we're making from competition, tripling our value share over this horizon with a 40% CAGR since 2017. The point I made earlier about wanting a brand based on consumer pull is still relevant. Our brand power in Brazil is still well ahead of our market share, showing the opportunity for profitable acceleration even continues there. More broadly across the world, part of what's driving our brand strength is creativity. You don't just have to take my word for this. This comes from Kantar, independent survey done every year.
For the last two years, the Heineken brand has led global equity value growth in our category, and you can see the results here at just this year. Part of what's driving that is our continued focus on creative marketing, as I mentioned before. Though many of you in this room will know that there's a direct, externally validated link by between the strength of your marketing and your sales, your value, and ability to take price. We were the number one creatively awarded marketer in food and drinks in the Cannes Awards this year and in the top four brands amongst some quite distinguished competitors.
What drives this is a relentless look at standards, real insight into consumers, the ability to act globally, but tailor for local nuances and top spin. Also a deep understanding that the brand has the right to participate and comment on the things that it's part of, for example, the Champions League, in a way that has wit and empathy and a little bit of a twist, demonstrating open-mindedness without being preachy. I want to show a film that exemplified that, it's called Cheers to All Fans. Let's show that now.
When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high. A sweet silver song of a lark. Hello, world. One life. With hope in your heart, you'll never fall apart.
We aired that in the middle of the Champions League final this year. The response is fantastic, the Heineken brand team aren't in the room today, the work that they've done that we've aired over the last 18 to 24 months has consistently tested in the top 5% of all commercials ever tested or better in many cases, including that one. I want to talk about innovation. Let's give the example because we talked about Heineken 0.0 earlier. Let's talk about Heineken Silver. Launched with huge success in Asia. You can see some, a snapshot of the performance in Vietnam affecting the total brand as well. It's also in Central America and some Latin American countries, also doing well. We launched it in Europe this year.
We think on very good understanding it's going to be the number one fast-moving consumer goods launch in Europe in 2022. You look at some of the things that it's done. In Asia and Europe, more than 50% of the business is incremental to our franchise. 50% of this is incremental. It's attracting Gen Y and Gen Z consumers, including mixed gender audiences, critically, with a slightly different flavor profile than it has, while still remaining distinctively Heineken. More than 10% of our volumes in Europe so far are coming from completely new consumers to the beer category. It's not your dad's Heineken. Like the rest of our priorities, it is also more profitable than the rest of our portfolio. We're rejuvenating the brand in Europe through this. We're getting new consumers. We're getting new occasions.
It's helping to boost our overall brand strength. It's selling, number one launch, building on the strength in Asia. We're going to see, we believe, huge success for this in the United States when we launch it in the early part of next year, very well-funded. One of the things that gives us huge confidence in the United States is the product test results. Again, I want to draw a link to our new renewed focus on product. Compared to other big players in the space that it's going into, Heineken Silver wins hands down with consumers, and that's one of the many things that gives us confidence that's gonna be a fantastic success. Heineken is also, of course, famous for its sponsorship.
What I think is not often known is if you look at our two major sponsorships, one is the biggest and most viewed in the world, and one is also enormous, but growing the fastest and getting the more new diverse reach. We are the most recalled sponsors of those two big platforms. If you look at Champions League, that where we've been investing the longest, that gap is huge. The biggest properties, the fastest-growing properties with increasingly diverse reach. Diverse reach, not just consumers, but also geographically. The growth in popularity of Formula One in the United States is a remarkable thing to behold. Behind that, we are going to be really supporting Heineken Silver in this coming year.
In November, Las Vegas will be the number three race coming to the United States and the fourth in the North American continent. We will be the title sponsor of that with Heineken Silver. It's very exciting and is already being very appealing to our distributor network and to others. How can I summarize our commitment to delivering superior balanced growth? It's certainly volume growth, but it's also and value growth. Value growth driven by the premiumizing segments that we're going into, premiumizing our brands, understanding revenue management, revenue margin growth more. You'll hear Harold talk about that tomorrow. You'll hear Yolanda talk about it as a capability. It's something we're really driving into.
As you saw with those examples just from Brazil and Mexico, but you see our other examples too, really understanding the analytics, the return on investment of our activity and driving effectiveness as well as efficiency. Value as well as volume growth. Pricing power as well as share gain. We, as Dolf said, we have been taking a lead, taking a bold lead in pricing, and we intend to continue to build that muscle. We're known for driving penetration with consumers, but really doubling down and focusing on premiumization, something I hope you've picked up throughout this short talk. Certainly innovating on core beer, but also stretching beyond beer. I hope by defining that consumer space a little bit more clearly, you can see just how many opportunities there are for a company like us with the footprint that we have.
Growing our brand power, which we've been accelerating, but also our return on investment. That's how I look at superior balanced growth and how we look at it across our teams. What I hope you'll remember about our dream of winning the hearts of consumers to deliver this superior balanced growth, four key things, really. First, it's an incredibly attractive category, which we are reframing and enlarging what we see as our addressable market based on consumer insight and a consumer-centered culture. Secondly, that we're shaping the future of it with premium, with profitable growth segments, and with a big focus on innovation. Scaled innovation that travels, whether it's on the same brand or similar ideas that can go local in a lot of places.
Three, powerful advantage brands which are traveling with superior brand-building capabilities, which give us an edge across the world and are systemized in our culture, our people, and our capabilities. Of course, with our investment, which you can see as we focus it behind our biggest areas of opportunity. Finally, that it all tends to come together with Brand Heineken. Number one, and still improving, still restlessly trying to get better. It is by no means our on-only example, as you've seen, but it's a really good one, and it's one we're really proud of. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Thank you very much, James. We have next a break, we will reconvene to start on the dot at 11:00 AM. If you can kindly be seated again a couple of minutes before that, out of respect for all our viewers that are watching the webcast. Thank you very much. We're gonna stay in this area towards the back, restrooms to the right. To my right, your left. Please feel free.
Good morning. It is my real pleasure to talk to you about shaping the future in the beautiful region of Asia Pacific. I'm afraid that this picture is also a testimony to the talents of our photographer. Let me introduce myself. My name is Jacco van der Linden. I joined Heineken in 1999, and since then have worked and lived abroad. For the past 23 years, spent around seven years in Africa, predominantly in Nigeria. About eight years in Europe, of which four years at Heineken U.K., three years at Heineken Ireland. In 2015, I joined the beautiful Asia Pacific region, heading our business in China, initially being part of the setup of our partnership with China Resources Beer.
I had the pleasure to lead the business in Vietnam, and two and a half years ago, I succeeded Dolf as president for Asia Pacific. What I will be talking to you today about are four blocks. First block is about the strong APAC growth fundamentals that we have in the region, premiumizing our portfolio. I will talk about fortifying our leadership position in Vietnam, and then two other markets, which is about unlocking the long-term growth potential that we have in China and India. Heineken has a broad presence in Asia Pacific through its operating companies, of which we have 14, through its joint venture partnerships and our export markets.
APAC is an important region to the Heineken Group, delivering 18% of volume, 17% of revenue, and a substantial 30% of operating profit. The numbers that you see here are the reported first half year numbers of this year. More importantly, we have been capturing up until today the growth in Asia Pacific. If you look at the last 10 years, we had a overall beer market share within the region of less than 3%, excluding China, which has grown over the last decade to 17% of the overall beer market, resulting in a volume increase of 10x. That has been done by superior organic growth, but also through business development activities.
For example, our strategic partnership in China in 2019 with CR Beer, and more recently, last year, where we got majority share of United Breweries in India, and control. APAC has strong growth fundamentals. The APAC middle class is growing rapidly. Already today, more than 50% of the middle class population resides in Asia Pacific, and it is forecasted that's to increase to 65% by 2050. That's in an increasingly urbanized environment. We all know that urbanization rate is a key driver for premiumization. That leads to what we believe is volume and value growth.
That's our expectation to grow ahead of the global beer markets by 200 and 300 basis points, respectively. Now, James, before the coffee break, really deeply understanding consumer motivations and needs combined with core alcohol relevant occasions. Also over the last year, we have been doing that in the region, and we have identified four main consumer demand spaces. What is interesting is that in three out of those four demand spaces, food plays a crucial role. I will come back to that, and it's very different, for example, Western Europe, where you see that a lot of the core beer occasions are what we call wet-led. In Asia, food is a companion of the consumption of beer, requiring also different product characteristics for beer in this part of the world.
Now, based on consumer characteristics and local market insights, we can basically classify our markets in five cluster. We believe that our strategy is adapted to best capture the opportunities that we have in the region. These opportunities are a little bit different depending on the market. Here you see beer per capita consumption versus urbanization rate. We can basically distinguish five market types with their respective strategic priorities. If we start at the top left, you see the beer-led markets, for example, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, high per capita consumption, relatively low urbanization rates. There we have a category role to play, a category role to play to ensuring that beer remains attractive, remains relevant, and we have an opportunity to premiumize the overall category.
If we then go one below, there you see significantly lower per capita consumption at the low urbanization rates. You see the under-penetrated markets, for example, India, Sri Lanka, where we have a different category role. There the role is very much about driving beer penetration in the market. In the center, you see the big beer market, that of China, where we believe we have an opportunity to premiumize and shape the overall beer category, and especially the top of the premium end where international premium propositions play a key role. If we move to the right-hand side, you see the more mature or sophisticated beer markets like Korea, Australia, New Zealand. There, beyond beer plays a more significant role, and I'll come back to that later in my presentation.
You have in the top, below right, you have the low alcohol relevance markets, but with a relatively high share of throat for beer like Singapore, like Malaysia. There we have a role to play to expand beer and overcoming barriers to our share of throat for beer. In APAC, we have a dream, and our dream is to shape the future of beer and beyond to uncage the full potential of Heineken in Asia Pacific. Our ambition is to seize a larger share of the growth at attractive operating profit margins. As reported in the first half of the year, we have operating profit margins in the region of 28%, which is almost 2x of that of the Heineken group.
We have four priorities. First priority is building brands to deliver premium growth and thereby improving our mix. Second priority is about shaping the category to excite young adults. Third priority, winning with customers on and offline. The fourth priority, leveraging our cost-conscious mindset. Through examples, I will be talking about the first and the second priority. Later in the day, Ronald will talk about winning with customers on and offline. Tomorrow, Harold will extensively talk about leveraging our cost-conscious mindset. Now, at Heineken, we believe in building power brands that drive superior growth. For APAC, I believe there is an opportunity to optimize the EverGreen growth algorithm even further that Dolf talked about before the coffee break. We deliver that growth algorithm by delivering superior top-line growth in a much more balanced way.
That has a volume component, a pricing component, and a mix component. Also in growth region APAC, productivity is important because through increased productivity, we have over the last three years been able and will continue to do so to fuel the growth engine that we have in APAC, and then delivering good profit margins for the group with solid returns on capital. Now, pictures say more than 1,000 words, especially motion pictures. I'd like to give a couple of examples how our local jewels and our international premium propositions make Heineken roar in Asia. Video, please. I get excited by watching these pictures. Let's move to the first priority, which is about building brands to scale premium.
Premiumization has been a key driver for category value over the last decade, and we believe will continue to be so. we have been leading and shaping the APAC premium segment, where with high single-digit growth, our portfolio has been outperforming the APAC premium segment. we believe that is best done through a combination of our international blockbuster brands together with our local jewels, one of which you see on the right-hand side, Bintang from Indonesia. apart from driving premium, we believe we have an essential role to play in rejuvenating beer for a new generation. what we have learnt is that in APAC, 85% of beer happens with food in many markets.
Easy drinking is a core functional need, requiring to have a lower ABV, significantly lower bitterness levels. A lot of the domestic mainstream brands had already captured this opportunity, but we can reignite the segment by premiumizing this. This is basically the consumer insight that have led us to develop Heineken Silver, which is a proposition that was born in Vietnam and in China, launched in Vietnam only in 2019, in China one year later. Silver and its sister Tiger Crystal, borrow from the blockbuster brands Heineken and Tiger, borrow from the overall brand awareness and brand power, but then again also built to revitalize the overall proposition.
What we see in the region today is that already Heineken Silver, after two to three years, is 1/3 of the overall Heineken franchise, and Tiger Crystal is already 1/4 of the overall Tiger franchise. More importantly, 50% of the brand growth that we are experiencing this year is coming from these two propositions. That is supported by an increase in investment, and that's a combination of increasing the overall marketing and sales investment as a percentage of revenue, but also further optimizing the working spend that James talked about this morning. That results basically in a doubling of our absolute marketing and sales spend in 2022 versus three years ago.
Now let me talk a little bit more about scaling with that build and borrow model and give the example of Heineken Silver. Here you see the total Heineken and Heineken Silver trajectory since 2013. Obviously, there's the COVID effect that you see there. Also as James illustrated, you really see that the overall Heineken brand franchise has greatly benefited from the introduction of Heineken Silver, predominantly in Vietnam and in China. Based on these learnings that we are seeing, supported by local relevant communication, we are currently rolling out Heineken Silver across the region in markets like Singapore and even more recently a couple of weeks ago in India.
Coming to our second priority, shaping the category to excite young adults, we have also started to expand beer beyond core lager and beyond easy drinking lager into Edelweiss. For example, Korea is now a top three market for the Edelweiss brand globally. Cider is an important one. For example, Australia and Vietnam are both top 10 markets within the group for cider. On the right-hand side, you see RTDs that have been launched in Australia and New Zealand. For a market like New Zealand, for example, RTDs already account for 11% of their net revenue. I've talked about premiumizing our portfolio and revitalizing the category.
I would like to talk about how we bring our superior growth priorities to life in the different APAC sub regions. We have categorized them. It's a region with a large diversity, and I want to start with Southeast Asia, which is really the stronghold that we have within the region, and it's a stronghold within the Heineken Group. It's a beer market of over 100 million hectoliter with a profit pool of more than EUR 2 billion, where we have either a number one or a number two position in seven out of nine markets. We strongly believe that we will continue the growth momentum to strengthen our leadership position in this important stronghold within the region.
I will talk about Vietnam being one of those markets in Southeast Asia amongst Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, et cetera. The second subregion is South Asia. There we have a different role to play. That's really about driving long-term category growth for sustainable profitability, markets like India, Sri Lanka, and also India today is one of the markets in focus. We have our China JV, which is about leading the premium segment and shaping the premium segment, also one of the markets in focus today. We have Oceania, which is about expanding the category in the Pacific Islands and unlocking growth in Australia. We have North Asia, where we are changing our business models a bit in order to gain market share in what is a very profitable set of markets.
Let's start with Vietnam and about fortifying our leadership position in Vietnam. Vietnam is an 11 billion market. This is retail sales value to be clear. It's a 46 million hectoliter market that has been growing by 3.6% CAGR over the last decade and where we have become the overall market leader in quarter four of 2019. When you look at the 31-year journey in Vietnam, it's quite an impressive journey that all started 31 years ago at Hoc Mon Brewery in Ho Chi Minh City. It's quite amazing to present a 25% volume CAGR over this period.
Heineken Vietnam, for many years out of that 31 years, has been a premium segment player really focusing on urban areas. Only five, six years ago, there was an intentional strategic shift to move from a premium segment player and to go for broad market leadership, which was then achieved in 2019. There are important drivers for future growth in Vietnam. Urbanization rate is still very low. The outlook on GDP increase is still very solid, six and a half% as an outlook, and the GDP per capita is only $4,000 today. We see enough headroom for further growth in a market where beer is still very sexy, very appealing to a large group of consumers.
We also see further opportunity of uncaging the full potential. We have an opportunity to strengthen our leadership position in premium and at the same time using the system strengths that the organization has in order to expand into mainstream. There's an opportunity to further move from urban areas to rural, and we have an opportunity to expand in the north. Premium, that is basically the Tiger brand is the big blockbuster brands that we have in the market. If you look at from 2016 to this year, we have about 90% market share in premium, and the volume increased by 50%.
Very much driven also by the build and borrow innovations that I talked about, Heineken Silver and Tiger Crystal, which are really fueling a new growth curve for these two brands in the market. At the same time, whilst we have a strong engine one in premium, we have also started to build our engine two, our mainstream portfolio. What you see in the middle of the slide is that actually the shape of our portfolio has been evolving to a more balanced model whereby we want to get to broad market leadership.
And if you look at the right-hand side, we have been able to triple our volume over the last five years on these regional brands like Larue, like Bivina, and we have launched Bia Viet Beer Vietnam a couple of years ago, which is growing handsomely, increasing the mainstream market share since 2016 from 5% to 16%. With that, we believe there are further opportunities for geographic outlet coverage and portfolio expansion. If you look at on the left-hand side, historically Heineken Vietnam has been very strong in the south, but with relative under-representation in the north, where there is an asymmetric penetration that represents an opportunity
We have an opportunity to accelerate outlet coverage through our eB2B, and Ronald will talk about that a little bit later in the afternoon. Really leveraging on the system strengths of Heineken Vietnam, we believe there's an opportunity for continued portfolio expansion, because we still see underserved consumers and underrepresented occasions in the current beer landscape. That's the exciting opportunity of Vietnam. Let me now move to the second focus market, that of India, which is a 10 billion beer market with a population of 1.4 billion people, a relatively small beer market of 28 million hectoliters that has been experiencing a CAGR growth of 3.7%.
We have United Breweries, who is the market leader in India with the iconic Kingfisher brand. As I mentioned, 2 L per capita, that is relatively low. There are some parallels to draw with China 20 years ago. I think India is more of a continent than a country. These are averages, and to really understand this large and complex market, you would have to de-average, I think, the market. We clearly see opportunities to unlock future growth. I think there is an important job to do to improve the beer category penetration, and we would have to do that, I think, with all the beer players together. We have started initiating some initiatives for that.
Whilst we are market leader and very strong in mainstream, there's an opportunity to extend that market leadership and gain fair share in premium. I believe that with the expertise that we have within the Heineken Group, we will be able to do so. We've recently launched Heineken Silver, where we saw same dynamics as we've seen in other parts of Asia, where there's also a consumer preference for less bitter beers in the market. We have high hopes for that. We have a job to do, I believe, to strive for a more fair regulatory environment for beer. Now, having said that, there are obstacles to overcome. Beer has only a 10% share of throat of total alcohol.
The spirits market is significantly bigger than the beer market today. The beer price is also relatively expensive versus that of spirits. Has very much to do with the excise regime. The outlet universe is relatively small. If you compare it to the average FMCG universe of 10 million, there are basically 90,000 licensed outlets that we have in India. With alcohol penetration, for example, only being 1% amongst women. We have China. Big market, EUR 65 billion beer market retail value. An overall market of 488 million hectoliters. 6.2% CAGR growth in the premium beer market. The overall beer market has been flat to declining a little bit.
Since 2015, the beer market has been premiumizing at pace. We have in CR Beer a market leader in China. We are very pleased with the partnership with CRB. It has, despite all the COVID measures that are very strict and are still in place today, really been able to unleash the performance of the Heineken brand since 2019. Since 2019, the Heineken volume has tripled with an increased momentum on the brands that we still see today. That has made China, this year, our number three Heineken market globally. You can be assured that they will go for the number two position as quickly as possible.
Our share of profit contributes mid-single digit to our earnings per share for the Heineken Group. We have seen a very solid EBIT growth that has been driving that from 2019 to 2021 for CR Beer of 26%. With that, I hope I have informed you a little bit more about shaping the future in APAC. Key messages to remember: strong growth fundamentals. We are continuing to shape and premiumize the beer category in APAC, fortifying our leadership position in Vietnam, and on our way to unlock long-term growth potential in both China and India. Thank you very much.
Good morning. Very nice to meet all of you. I know some of you. I'm very pleased that today I will present to you the shape, the future of Africa, Middle East. I will introduce myself. My name is Roland Piémesse. Belgium, French speaking, I think that you guessed. Brewmaster, supply chain background. I work always in the beer industry. I spent 11 to 12 years of my life in Africa, 12 years in Asia, six years in Russia, and from 2015, I'm the regional president based in Amsterdam. I've 27 years work in Heineken. Just for the anecdote, before that I was working for Castel. What I will speak, I will be talking to you today is really to shape the future in ME.
First, I think, in the region, we have been taking some key transformation have been taken into the region. The first, of course, is to shape the future of beer, led by premium, but also beyond beer. Leveraging our footprint, a very strong footprint. I will also share with you some good example, development and progress of our consumer-centric portfolio. I will also share with you some key transformation in some key OpCo, like Nigeria, like Ethiopia, like South Africa. Of course, big transformation for the region is the potential acquisition of Distell. I said potential because the completion of the deal is still subject to the regulatory approval.
With the potential acquisition of Distell, we strengthened a lot our number two position in South Africa, also we are able to build and create a Southern Africa beverage champion covering 12 countries. Our footprint, we have a very strong position in Africa. We start operating in Africa in 1923 in Kinshasa. Today, we are operating in 18 countries, we have a very strong number one position or number two position. What I would like also to mention that the big shift of the region five or 10 years ago, the region was Nigeria. Today, we have a more balanced portfolio of brands. Today, we are talking about Nigeria, of course. We are talking about South Africa. We are talking about Ethiopia. As you know, we are quite in a volatile environment in Africa.
It's very important that we have up and down. We are used to, we have to manage it. You will see that Nigeria is a little bit down, but in the other part, Ethiopia is down. We have plenty of example. The evaluation in Egypt is down. In the same time, we have been able to increase the price in Rwanda. It's up. As a region, we represent 13% of the operating profit, 14% of the net revenue, and 80% of the total volumes. Today, we are the leader, and we are shaping the premium segment in Africa, led of course by Heineken brand with 7 million hectoliters, also driven by local production. Today, we are producing Heineken in 10 countries, and recently we start the production of Heineken in Kinshasa, DRC. How are we doing in Africa?
Africa is the fastest growing region in global beer. As you know, drive the global beer growth. 79% of the global beer was coming from Africa over the past five years. How are we doing? Over the past 20 years, we quadruple our volumes, and we increase our market share from 11% to 20%, organically and inorganically. Strong category fundamentals will fuel the future growth in Africa. Of course, you know the key drivers of our business. First, of course, is population growth. Africa, 60% of the global population growth by 2050 will come from Africa. You will have 1.1 billion additional people in Africa as a consumer. Very young population. You can see that the medium average age in Africa is only 20 years old. A strong and ever economic development.
You see the forecast expected GDP growth of 20% from 2015 to 2025 in Africa, triggering also the urbanization level from 44 to 59 in 2050 with mega cities. Urbanization triggering also the premiumization of the beer markets. On the top of that, a huge significant head room for growth in beer in Africa because the low starting point. In Africa, you have a very low consumption per capita, only from 9 L per capita per year versus average, world average of 25. Huge opportunity, head room to growth. Accelerating our transformation and meeting growing consumer and consumer needs.
Dolf already mentioned it, our ambition, our dream is really to create more value from the long-term growth potential of the region by delivering balance and profitable growth. There you have a big shift. Growth is there. We have been growing. What is very new is balance and profitable growth. This one is the shift. We have four priorities in line with the EverGreen strategy. First, of course, is scale premium and shape the future of beer. Unlock the new consumer opportunities to beyond beer. James talk a little bit about it. Of course, accelerating our digitization and strengthen the grip on our route to the consumer. Of course, on the top of that, improve our profitability and capital efficiency. As you know, Africa is quite capital-intensive. Nice. I would like to show you some vibe of Africa consumer. Two things, vibe and opportunities.
The first priority is scaling premium, is transforming the portfolio and of course, value capture in AME. First, you can see the premium segment is growing twice faster than the beer market in Africa by 6%. We have been outperforming this growth by 8%, and we capture 46% of the premium beer growth in Africa over the past five years. Of course, premium is also delivering a superior P&L. There you can see that, of course, the premium segment, we have 50% additional revenue per hectoliter versus the mainstream, and we have twice a gross profit per hectoliter versus the mainstream. Of course, the premium segment is led by Heineken, but not only by Heineken.
We have a very nice brand like Windhoek in South Africa and Namibia, Desperados in many markets, and you will see also Tiger in Nigeria. We have also some nice premium brand, local premium brand in Ethiopia, and the name is Bedele Special. Beyond Beer, the second priority. Africa is a very exciting place for Beyond Beer. James has been talking about it. Huge opportunity to reach new consumer and new consumer needs. First, I would like to talk about the malt category. Today, we are the leader of the malt category with 29% market share. Of course, Nigeria is big, but we are really growing and shaping the category in other markets, like in DRC, like in Rwanda. On top of that, we are expanding the malt category by flavored, example in Nigeria, but also with the energy malt.
Energy malt, we have already a successful track record in Ivory Coast and DRC with the Rhino brand. James mentioned it, we just launched a very exciting energy malt proposition in Nigeria. The name is Zagg. It's not only a health and functional benefit to the consumer, it's also an emotional connection to the consumer. We are very excited about this opportunity. The second opportunity, of course, it's Beyond Beer, what we call cider and RTDs. With the potential acquisition of Distell, we will be number one player in this category with 38% market share. Mainly driven by cider, but also the broader portfolio of Distell. James explaining to you the RTDs, grape-based or wine-based, so Bernini, but also the wine, especially 4th Street or Distell, has been really reinventing the wine category in Africa with a huge potential.
There we have the potential with the option to roll out Distell portfolio more broadly. Beyond South Africa, beyond Africa. Improving profitability and capital efficiency. Despite, I will say, a significant economic, social disruption in Africa, over the last five years, we have been able to increase the operating profit. We have been able to have operating margin stable and now slightly improving. Of course, driven by revenue, volumes, assertive revenue management, also premiumization, but also by reducing our fixed expenses percentage of the revenue by implementing productivity and cost saving initiative. Magne will touch a little bit some cost initiative in Nigeria. Most important is while we are investing to support the growth and to capture the growth of Africa, we have to be mindful about two things. First is Africa, we have to be prudent.
We are investing just on time and not ahead of the curve. The second things I think is very important, it's how you allocate your capital across the region. We have made a very tough choice of capital allocation in the region, knowing that the region is very capital intensive. You can see the result that we have been improving the capital turnover from 1.4 in 2016 to 1.8 in 2021. Now I will talk about three key transformation in the opco. The first one, of course, being Nigeria, where we have really a transformative turnaround in Nigeria. Nigeria, very exciting market. The second biggest market in Africa. For us, the biggest operation in Africa.
EUR 2.6 billion revenue, 16 million hectoliters, average growth of 2.8% over the past 10 years. We have a very strong number one position. We have a very strong portfolio of 19 brands. We have nine breweries and one malting plant. We start the operation in Nigeria since 1946. We have a long experience in Nigeria. Nigeria market, exciting but quite challenging economic environment. We have been through a profound transformation in Nigeria. You see the history of the profit pool in Nigeria. Until 2013, what was really an acceleration of the profit pool, driven by volumes, but also driven by very high price, low investment behind the brand, low grip on the route to the consumer. It means low cost. What we call a little bit an over-earning situation.
2014, wake-up call for two reason. Economic crisis, devaluation linked with the commodity price. The second reason in entry of ECB, fierce competition, followed by EBI with a real price war. What we have been doing, Nigerian Breweries is doing quite well. We hold our market share, you can see on the graph, we have been and remain the only big players being profitable in Nigeria. We have been through a profound transformation in Nigeria. Is the portfolio. 2011, two mainstream brands, high price, low investment. We have been transforming, totally the transform here, the portfolio with a more consumer-centric portfolio by giving more choice to the consumer. Choice of price, choice of pack type, choice of regional, sensitivity, taste. Now you see our portfolio.
It's mainly two mainstream brand, Life and Goldberg, what we are very proud if we really shape and build a premium segment. You can see today We have 80% of the market share of the premium segment. Of course, led by Heineken brand. Today, Heineken brand in Nigeria is number one brand by value. Also you can see on the graph a very nice growth of the Tiger brand and recently a very nice growth of Desperados, a premium flavored beer. Also an exciting opportunity in beyond beer and mainly flavored beer. You can see, James already explained, it's a very fast-growing category with a forecast of 28% growth from 2020-2025, reaching new consumer and specifically female consumer, and especially in Africa. There we have a very strong portfolio.
We have really well-placed portfolio with Desperados, of course, as premium, but also with Star Radler and more flavored proposition. From 2019 to 2021, we have been growing by 29%, this category with our portfolio. We have also transformed our route to the consumer, and by the way, with a lower cost. First, what we have done, we changed totally the distribution incentive structure from a sell into a sell out. Today, we are covering 80% more outlets than in the past, enabled by digitization. Today, 90% of our revenue online. We have 90% of our revenue online in Nigeria. After that, Ronald will go a little bit into details. It's more an omni-channel touchpoint, including telesales, including pre-sales, but quite impressive what we have done in a very, very fragmented market.
On the top of that, we increased a lot the Net Promoter Score to NPS to 77. In the same time, we have been structurally reducing the fixed cost of the company. The total fixed cost of the company was 36% in 2015. In 2022, it's 28, despite the devaluation and inflation. The great story of Africa, Ethiopia. Ethiopia is the third biggest market in Africa. 2.6 sales retail sales value, 16 million hectoliters. Average growth of 16%. It's huge. Of course, with a huge potential because economic development, but also a huge population of 120 million people. We are number one in Ethiopia with three breweries and a very strong portfolio of seven brands. I love this title.
From entry to market leader in a decade, in 10 years' time. We start operation in 2011. We acquire very small brewery, Harar and Bedele, and we built a big greenfield brewery in Kilinto, close to Addis Ababa. You see what we have done. In the first three years, we multiply by five the volumes. The following four years, we triple the volumes. Today, we are number one. I would like just to mention one thing. Since you see 2020, a decline of the volumes, it's not because COVID, because it was tripling excise tax in Ethiopia. Led, of course, to a price increase, a consumer price increase and a decline of the market. There you see the resilience of the market. You see recovering very, very quickly. We transform the portfolio.
I would like to say the success of Ethiopia is really the uniqueness of a proposition in Ethiopia and an opposition in Ethiopia. We are the only company with a broader portfolio of brands. With three breweries, it means a regional footprint. We have. Today, you see the transformation of our portfolio. We have been moving from two small regional brands and one national brands to two national brands and regional brands. We have been also shaping and building the premium segment that didn't exist at all in Ethiopia with Heineken brand, but also with Bedele Special. To compare to the competitors, we have competitors with one brewery with five brands, and we have four big competitors with four breweries, but one brand. We have the unique position in Ethiopia.
South Africa, the biggest market, of course, in Africa, with EUR 5.3 billion retail sales value, 41 million hectoliters, average growth of 3.2% over the past 10 years. We have a number two position in the beer category in South Africa. The story of South Africa. To refresh memory, we took back the Amstel brand for SCB in 2004. We have been through a joint venture with Namibia Breweries and Diageo until 2014 with the name of Brandhouse. In 2014, we decide to control our destiny in South Africa. We fought Diageo and by revisiting the structure of joint venture with Namibia. From 2015, we control our destiny in South Africa. You see the result, a very nice growth.
You see, of course, a gain, a huge gain of market share from 8% market share to 18% market share. Of course, led by Heineken brands. Today, the Heineken brand is number one brand power in South Africa. We have a volumes average growth of 14% despite the ban of alcohol in South Africa. Of course, we have a superior price and revenue per hectoliter with a price index of 150 versus the average of the Opco. Distell. Hello, you have seen, of course, in addition of a very complementary portfolio with a broader and large portfolio offering a lot of choice to the consumer. I would like to mention that we have also a very complementary route to the consumer with Distell. By two things. First, by reaching more customers.
We will increase or by 25% the outlet serves. We have also, you can see on the map on the left, you can see we have a very complementary regional footprint of the route to consumer. Knowing that we are very strong in the Gauteng area around Johannesburg, but in the same time, Distell is very strong in the Cape Town area. There we have a very complementary regional footprint. On top of that, we have a huge opportunity to enlarge the offer on the Trade Express. The Trade Express is a cash and carry close to the consumer. There are 24 Trade Express from Distell. Hello? Coming back. No, it's okay.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Of course, the last but not the least, we can build and we will build a new Southern African champion. The Newco, it means the outcome of the deal with Namibia Breweries and Distell. The Newco will manage 12 countries, of course, focused on Namibia and South Africa. By combining the route to the consumer, the portfolio of Namibia, the portfolio of Heineken South Africa, plus the portfolio of Distell, we will really strengthen position in many markets by scale, by offering more product, better route to the consumer in many markets. You name Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda or Zambia. Of course, adding a significant scale and unlock synergies. With the Distell deal, we will be a strong number two for the total alcohol beverage in South Africa, with 23% market share, volume share and 26% of value share.
Of course, with significant synergies to drive values with a full run rate synergy of ZAR 1.5 billion, around EUR 93 million. EPS accretive within the first year of completion and margin accretive in the medium term.
To summarize, to shape the future in AMET with a strong footprint, most important, a balanced footprint. We are shaping a portfolio led by premium and very important opportunity of beyond beer. You have seen the transformation in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa, of course, very excited by the potential deal with Distell. With very new expertise with beyond beer, we will build a very nice Southern African beverage champion. I'm excited. Thanks.
Good afternoon. I wish I could say, like Roland, that I was a master brewer, stands in front of you an accountant. I started my career in Congo as a financial controller. Afterwards, finance director. Moved to the Netherlands as finance director. Got my first chance as a managing director in Burundi. After three years in Burundi, I moved to Egypt.
Egypt, which is a paradise for beyond beer, because we do beer but also wines and spirits, retail stores. five good years in Egypt. After that, I moved for two years to France, then went to Mexico. Since 2015, I'm running the region Americas. My first strategic decision was to close the office in New York and open an office in Miami, from where we run all of the Americas from a small, tiny office where we're about 20 people. Now, what I would like to share with you today is, similar to my colleagues, a bit the footprint of the Americas, the importance not only to keeping the momentum that we have behind our portfolio, but also to accelerate it. Then I will talk a bit more about the three usual suspects: the U.S., Brazil and Mexico.
In U.S., unfortunately, it's not about keeping momentum. We have to regain momentum, and I will come back on that. In Mexico and Brazil, it is about the transformation of our business. That is not something that we are starting now. Basically, Mexico, the transformation started since day one that we got the keys of that company and that is still ongoing. That is such a dynamic environment, such a dynamic company. Transformation is ongoing there for 10 years. Brazil, basically, since the acquisition from Kirin, where we got some scale, that's where the big transformation started. We have a strong presence in what is the highest value beer market in the world. We do about 31% of volumes, 32% of net revenue, and 27% of operating profit. You do see no operating leverage.
That comes because of the weight of Brazil, where we still have below average operating margin share. Towards the year end, those numbers change because the seasonality in our region is so that November, December are the big months. We do 20 million hectoliters of Heineken. We are the largest region for Heineken, so we do not only compete with outside world, but also amongst my colleagues, regional presidents, we compete for number one positions. We have 19 number one and number two positions across the markets. I would like to call out our partnership with CCU, which is Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Bolivia, where we have about 20% of the beer volume are our brands, but we sit in the passenger seat. We do not manage the business there. The shape of the region has dramatically changed over the years.
You see on the bottom, back in 2000, we basically only had HEINEKEN USA and some export in Latin America. In 2003, we signed a partnership with CCU, we will be celebrating next year the 20th anniversary of that partnership. The big step change was in 2010 when we did the acquisition of FEMSA Cerveza. We acquired Mexico and Brazil, that's why you see the big step up in terms of size. The other big step up in terms of size was in 2016 when we acquired Kirin. Those are the two bottles that you see, Devassa and Eisenbahn. In between, a few milestones. In 2014, together with CCU, we partnered with Postobón and entered in Colombia. That's the Andina bottle that you see there.
In 2015, we entered in Jamaica, acquired Red Stripe. In 2015 and 2017, in two transactions, we acquired Lagunitas. In 2018, minority stake in Belize, and in 2019 and 2020, we entered into monopoly markets of ABI, Ecuador and Peru. That basically from 1% of share of beer, we went to 15% of share of beer over that period of year, which is a 14x in 20 years. Yet we are a distant number two. The reality is that ABI makes about 90% of its profit in the region where we make about 30% of our profits, so there is a big difference. Now what do we wanna do? We progressively want to capture more of that profit share in the Americas. Our priorities are very, very clear.
We have to continue scale premium led by Heineken. Heineken is super important in my region and by innovation. I have three more slides specifically on the number one priority. The number two priority is continue to strengthen those challenger positions. I do wanna be very clear here. We entered in markets like Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, not to destroy value, because that's a question that I often have or receive. We enter there just because we think that we can take a reasonable share of that profit market. We enter there through Heineken, we're not going there with below mainstream of economy brands. That's a very important point. We do believe that in those underserved markets, Heineken, led by the Heineken brand, we can take a fair share of those markets. Colombia, Peru, Ecuador used to be a EUR 2 billion profit pool.
We just think we have right to win there. Accelerate, accelerate digitization of our route to consumer, that is across the Americas and Mexico is leading there. We are today reaching about almost 90% of the fragmented trade we reach to our platform HiShop, and I will come back later on how that helped us in terms of the innovation of Heineken Silver. Improve profitability by local sourcing and returnable packaging strategy. That might sound very, not very sexy, but it's extremely important. Returnable packaging, it has a GP profit of about 20 basis points higher than the average of the company. That is low-hanging fruit. If we execute that well, we can dramatically improve our OP margin. Local sourcing, anecdotally, you know the growth that we have in Brazil, we have been sourcing this year of 11 countries, Heineken bottles to meet demand.
In the coming years, more and more everything will be sourced locally. Scale premium with Heineken. The left-hand side slide. Left-hand side on the slide shows you that in 2015, Heineken was about having 31% of the premium category was with us, and about 21% was with the rest of the brewers. In 2021, we own 40% of that, of that premium and 29% is with the rest of the market. Basically, we capture 40% of the growth of the premium segment over the past years. Now, that happened with an expanding portfolio that has been increasing by 2.4x. Heineken clearly leading, but not only Heineken. You will see Amstel Ultra in Mexico has been the engine of growth to gain share in the premium segment.
Bohemia, that is Mexico. Dos Equis is not Mexico, that is Dos Equis in the United States. Eisenbahn and Lagunitas. Important for us to keep on going full throttle on the premiumization led with Heineken. Next to the premiumization, it is the 0.0 game, and we have disrupted the Americas. We were the first movers, not in Mexico and Brazil, we were the first movers, not in the U.S. In all those three markets, we have today number one positions in the 0.0 category, which is a highly profitable category. We have 40% share in non-alcoholic in Brazil, more than 20% in U.S., and 70% in Mexico. Brazil, U.S., and Mexico are the number one, number two, and number three markets within Heineken. It's not only about Heineken 0.0.
In Mexico, we'll be launching Tecate 0.0 next year. In Lagunitas, we have the Hoppy Refresher, we have the IPNA. We have much more to come to make sure that we keep that category alive and that we keep on leading in that category. Now you've heard a lot about beyond beer. I just have two simple visuals here. In Mexico, we are the market leader in beyond beer and the center is cider. We own the cider category in Mexico, and it's growing double-digit. We own what we call the Mezclas, which are basically flavored beers. For the ones that are not familiar with the Mexican Mezclas, a Sol Clamato is basically beer with tomato juice, clam juice, and all kind of spices. Highly recommended beverages. We are twice as big in flavored beer in Mexico than our competitor.
In the U.S., we are very much experimenting there. We are mainly with Dos Equis, but also next year, I got a question yesterday of somebody that is a big fan of Red Stripe. You know, also with Red Stripe, we'll be moving into beyond beer next year. I was just highlighting here, the U.S. and Dos Equis Lime and Salt is an innovation that has some legs. We are going towards a million cases. That is one of those innovations that will go beyond the experimentation phase. Now we have a video. If we can roll the video.
Before going to the big three, you saw a few brands that come from Haiti, Jamaica, Suriname, middle markets. All those markets added up together also important for us. They can make a difference between a good year and a great year. Over the past years, those countries have been generating good profit growth as well. The U.S. Now everybody is very familiar with the U.S. It is a $103 billion retail sales value market, $234 beer market value with a steady growth since 2011, declining more recently. We are the number four in beer market position in the U.S. I do have to mention that the U.S. has been for us a bit of a frustration because it took us some time to come back to growth.
In 2020, let's say, the momentum that we started to have was stopped with COVID. We made a record high profit in 2020. In 2021, the momentum was there. We were gaining market share. All of the KPIs were in green. On 2022, hit the ocean freight prices, with as a consequence increase in rates, but also out of stocks. In 2022, we lost that momentum. That why I was saying that in 2023, the big challenge is to bring back that momentum in the U.S. How are we going to do that? We have three big priorities. You will not be surprised, Heineken is still the number one pillar. Heineken Original has a very solid base of consumers, Heineken 0.0. We will continue investing in that segment.
The big bet for next year is Heineken Silver. I have a separate slide on Heineken Silver going forward. Dos Equis is a top 10 brand on draft at, in U.S. It is the number two draft handle of imported beer. I mentioned earlier that lime and salt is one of those innovations that has some legs. We will expand that next year into a lime and salt 0.0 to spike and to remain active in the 0.0 segment. Lagunitas, if you would ask me, Marc, you know, are you satisfied with the acquisition in Lagunitas? I would tell you no. We bought Lagunitas in 2015 and 2017 at the height of the craft beer segment. Are we doing a disastrous job? No. We are somewhere in the middle.
You know, there have been acquisitions made for much more money and that have been sold for a tenth of the value in the meantime. We are still hanging in there, and we are innovating in the 0.0 space with Hoppy Refresher IPNA. We're still confident that we can bring back IPA to growth. It is still the number three IPA in U.S., number one IPA on draft, and we are the number two in craft in 0.0. You all know Athletic Brewing, but we are trailing nicely behind Athletic Brewing with Hoppy Refresher and IPNA. Heineken Silver. The first point I would like to make is that U.S. is a highly sessionable beer market. If you look at the penetration of premium in that segment, that is below par.
We do believe there is space to play with a premium proposition, very sessionable proposition in low bitterness beer. We have learned from the mistakes that we made in the past when we launched Heineken Light, where we didn't really made a product for the American consumer. We did that with Heineken Silver. That concept tested extremely well against the market leader. I think, Trevor, you told me yesterday, Marc, I've known many proposals that tested very well, and they do not necessarily are a guarantee for success, but we are extremely positive. You also need to know that distribution system in the U.S., our distributors do not have today a brand to fight against the market leader.
We do expect our distributor networks also to embrace Heineken Silver and to go after that segment where today they do not play. The Heineken brand power is high in the U.S. It is not translated in market share, which we will also see there some opportunity. We will put a lot of money behind Heineken Silver launch, EUR 100 million. The U.S. has always struggled. You know, platforms like Champions League or Formula One were not very relevant in U.S. That changed big time with Netflix and Formula One. Now we have three races, Miami, Austin, and Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Heineken Silver will be the title sponsor. That is big. There will be also, for the first time in many years, again, an American driver joining the Formula One.
We expect a lot of buzz around Formula One in U.S. going forward, that should help. Big bet, very important to regain that momentum. Mexico, $20 billion beer market, retail sales value, 9.1 million beer market volume. A nice steady growth over the past 10 years, we have a solid number two market position. Like I said, this is a company that we have transformed since day one, I have to explain the left-hand side a little bit because it's a bit complicated, it shows that the net revenue we have increased by 1.6x since we acquired the business. Operating profit, we have increased by 2.7x, that financially has been a huge success. What I wanna highlight on the top is the volume market share.
We have been gaining market share since the acquisition steadily, nicely. Then we reached a point where we had to start dealing with the OXXO mixing. When we acquired the business, that came with a 10-year contract with OXXO. That has been helping us to gain penetration, but it was a very expensive contract. We have decided to spread the mixing over a number of years rather than to take the hit in one year. You need to be aware that OXXO was back then 25% of our volume. Mechanically, you would lose a lot of volume. The challenge for us was to offset that by accelerated growth in Six and traditional off-trade. I have a separate slide. I will come back on that.
The strategy to further accelerate in Mexico is clearly continue to build a winning portfolio led by Heineken, which today is not the case. It's led by other brands. I'll come back on that. Continue to leverage our retail capabilities and further expand Six. We're the second largest retailer in Mexico after OXXO. Same as in Brazil, accelerate returnable glass and local sourcing. We have announced this year that we will build a canning factory in Mexico so that we are not depending from high import costs. That's very important. All those local sourcing at a certain moment, they just kick in in your P&L. Expand the digital route to consumer.
Ronald will come back on that more in detail, but that is definitely something where we are catching up, I would dare to say, almost at par with Ambev in Mexico and increase productivity that comes along. This gives you a bit of a view of the impact of OXXO mixing. OXXO mixing was at the end of 2018, represented 25% of our volume. That is a volume, you open the door and the competitor gets fridges. We spread that over time. At the end of Q3 of this year, the weight of OXXO was 17%, 6.9% traditional off-trade went up. That is something hard to swallow and to digest.
That puts a lot of pressure on the organization to compensate that. In all transparency, it's almost impossible to compensate that completely. We lost some market share also because we have been leading price increases also in the market. It also comes with a bright future because the OXXO contract was an expensive contract, put a lot of limitations on us. We had restrictions on Six expansions. They were entitled to have the best promotion across the country. All of those issues will be gone. I do believe that it's for a better future with a much more balanced channel setup than we have today. The last wave of the mixing starts in January of 2023.
Maybe not everybody is so familiar with that. Historically, Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma, now HEINEKEN México, in many parts of the country, you work with alcohol licenses. When there is no succession, often the brewery would take over the alcohol license and would put somebody to run the place. Back in 2015, we had four different brand names across the country. We decided in 2016 to create one brand called Six. That took a few years to get that off the ground. We have closed a few stores. That's why you see a dip in 2015. Basically from 2016, the brand name Six was there and it's been growing steadily. We add like 1,000 stores a year, hitting more than 16,000 stores by the end of this year.
It is by far the most profitable channel within our network in Mexico. You see the differences between, you know, if we can migrate sales from OXXO to Six or traditional off-trade, that will definitely help the profitability going forward. You see Glup. What is Glup? It's a B2C. We do believe that we might have, I do say we might have a right to win in B2C in Mexico by building that around the network of those 6,006, 16,006. Today we have, I think the latest number I got, 300,000 consumers that we service to Glup. Every month, it's about 20,000 that get added. It's off to a good start, but too early to say how that will land. When you think portfolio in Mexico, you first think about Tecate.
Speaking about transformation, Tecate used to be a northern brand. Today, it is a nationwide brand. It's shortly behind Corona, the number two brand in Mexico. The growth of Tecate has been hampered, of course, by the OXXO mixing because of course, there was a lot of sales of Tecate in OXXO. You see the growth that we have delivered since 2010 on that brand. On the right-hand side. There is a big opportunity of further premiumization. Back in 2010, the premium segment was 1%. It's now 8%. You see the contribution of the brands. In Mexico, it is not Heineken. Mexico is also a country where highly sessionable beers are important.
Heineken has some decent base, has very high brand equity, but it doesn't translate in market share because the consumer after one beer, it shifts to a more easily drinkable beer. You see the other brands that took off, and I think I have to call out Amstel ULTRA on the top. That is a super sessionable premium beer that has been growing the category over the past years. The Mezclas that I referred earlier, also premium beers, and then Bohemia. The big bottle on the right is Silver. We launched Silver this year, three months ago in Mexico. We do believe if we can copy the success that we had in Brazil, in Mexico, we do believe that there is a lot of potential in the premium segment with finally having Heineken that will be a good fit for the Mexican palate.
Now, the importance of digitization of our sales, thanks to HiShop, after 30 days, we had Heineken Silver available in 100,000 stores in Mexico. 50,000 stores. That is typically something that would take you much more time in a previous, in a previous system where you would have the sales rep go and do the selling or the telesales. That is the strength of a HiShop. We're now today available in 150 stores. It will be a long story because we will have to explain what the Heineken Silver concept is to the Mexican. Huge sampling plan, similar to Heineken 0.0. We have learned a lot from Heineken 0.0 because a lot of people were very skeptical about the 0.0 beer.
Before Heineken 0.0, I don't think that there was one 0.0 beer in the market any of you would say, h ey, that's a good beer. That changed. That has been a success also by massive sampling. We do the same with Silver. Brazil. EUR 31 billion retail sales value, 154 million hectoliter. I've put there on purpose the growth of the premium beer market volume rather than the total market. Why? Because that is where we definitely have been driving that premiumization of the Brazilian beer market. The left-hand side shows you the kind of company we were back in 2010, where the upper dark side was Heineken and the light, green was economy. We were basically one million hectoliter Heineken with an economy portfolio.
When we acquired into the end of 2016, when we acquired Kirin, we started massively to transform the company and shift that towards a premium company. On the right, you see the weight now that we have with premium, mainstream, and economy, and that trend keeps on continuing. In terms of capacity, that is an important one. You have to think when you migrate, transform, it is about 2 L of economy for 1 L of premium in terms of capacity. There is some capacity need to be able to keep up with the growth of that premium. What is our ambition going forward? Definitely full throttle continuing what we do today with the Heineken brand. Continue to reshape our route to consumer.
We have done in 21, we did the big change of migrating the route to market from the Coca-Cola system to our system. We took Heineken and Amstel back, and we gave them other brands. We have a dual route to market, and that worked out very well. I have a slide on this afterwards. Like I mentioned earlier, intentionally returnable packaging and local sourcing. That is a bit what we are today with Heineken. We are the number one brand in value in off-trade, and we are today, with 8% market share, the third largest brand in Brazil. Skol became a below mainstream brand. That's still the largest brand, Brahma, and then Heineken.
In value, if we keep on growing, we'll probably become the second, the number two brand in value at a price point of EUR 180 and still as a small number two with about 23%-24% market share, we set the drumbeat in terms of of price increases. I think that's a very important topic because I don't think there are many countries where you're number two, that you have that brand power that allows you to drive the pricing. It's not only about Heineken, it's also Amstel. Amstel is a bit the same story as Heineken. Has high brand power, twice the market share. We do believe that the growth of Amstel is there to continue. You might ask yourself, Hey, Heineken, Amstel, what about a mainstream Brazilian brand? Devassa is not up there, but Devassa basically until 2020 was keeping up with the same growth rate as Amstel.
Slowed down a little bit now because of the high price increases that we took. We are leader in value in craft. We are leader in value with Baden-Baden, Eisenbahn Styles, Lagunitas that we produce locally, and we have a license agreement with Molson Coors, and we produce locally Blue Moon. The craft segment in Brazil is a fast-growing segment with a lot of players in there. This is what I shared with you earlier, the massive change that we did in terms of the route to market shift. When we acquired Kirin had their own direct distribution and a bunch of resellers. We reduced the resellers to the most professional ones, and we have invested in our direct distribution. We took Amstel and Heineken to us, and we have given the Coca-Cola bottlers Eisenbahn, and we launched Tiger.
I don't have a slide on Tiger, but if you would go back, Tiger launch in the Coca-Cola system is after two years a bit on the level of the Amstel launch. Fingers crossed that we can repeat the success of Tiger with Amstel. How did that turn out? I mentioned earlier the importance of returnable packaging. The reason why we wanted to have Heineken Amstel in our own route to market is because we did want to go stronger in on-trade. On-trade, returnable, premium is the most profitable combination. That was for super important, and you see the growth in terms of numerical distribution, Heineken +30%, Amstel +60%. On the right-hand side, the growth in returnable glass, +8%, +12%. Eisenbahn, on the other hand, with the Coca-Cola system, also increased in numerical distribution.
In the end, what did that deliver, the whole transformation in Brazil? We are today in ref per hectoliter, we used to be significantly below our competitor. We are today higher in ref per hectoliter, same for GP per hectoliter. In terms of profitability, we are indeed going into the right direction. We still have a long way to go, but we do believe that with the future value drivers continue to grow premium, have everything locally sourced. Some of the local sourcing starts to happen as from next year, but basically by the end of 2025, beginning of 2026, we will be completely locally sourcing. Continued penetration of RGB, you know, it's a scale business.
If we keep on having that growth, if we tick all those boxes, premiumization, local sourcing, RGB, on-trade, and we have the scale, then I do believe that Brazil is set to meet the average OP margin of the region. What do I want you to remember? That our footprint in the Americas has dramatically changed over the past years through inorganic business, inorganic business that we have well managed and that we have grown in the right direction, that we have premiumized, that we have a portfolio that goes beyond Heineken. That the Mexico and Brazil transformations are ongoing, and I think we have a lot of momentum. The, like I said, the regaining of momentum in the U.S. that will be, I believe, the biggest challenge.
We have that silver bullet, that, yeah, James and myself and everybody in the team is pretty confident that we can make that we can make that happen. I have 13 seconds to go. That was it for the Americas. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Since we just finished the Americas presentation, I couldn't avoid but commenting on the game from yesterday. Because, you know, Mexicans are quite creative, and we're discussing a little bit the options that the Mexican team has, and there are actually quite a few available. They have window versus aisle, chicken or pasta on their flight back home. On that note, on that note, we have our lunch now. If you walk through the back and take the stairs down towards the Moutzolder, we will have our lunch break there. We will reconvene to start again on the dot. Thank you very much for staying really on time at 1:30 P.M precisely. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone, welcome back after lunch. I hope you had a very good lunch, I also hope you had a very good morning. Talking to quite a few of you just now, I think it was good. It was high energy and a lot of content and insights. I'm gonna share the story about becoming the best-connected brewer and digitizing our route to consumer. We very much realize that we have not spoken a lot about what we're doing in digitizing this route to consumer. We haven't been sitting still. I hope the one thing you take away at the end of the presentation is all the good work that has happened in all our markets and the global teams pulling that together. First, a bit about me.
I started at Heineken in 1995, actually, my first job was in supply chain. I moved into finance, was amongst other, the finance director in the Netherlands, the finance director for Heineken U.K.. I was the director for on-premise and wholesale in the Netherlands when we still had the integrated wholesale company in the Netherlands, I was the managing director in Portugal, and more recently, the managing director in Heineken USA. Three years ago, I came back to the Netherlands and started on this very exciting journey to see how we can accelerate the digitalization of our company. One other small anecdote. 27 years ago, I wrote my thesis to graduate from university, I used neural networks, AI, to predict stocks. I'm not lying on the beach. I'm selling beer today. I was not very successful.
What am I talking about today? It's about how this complete transformation of our go-to-market, the way we deal with our fragmented trade customers, the small stores, the restaurants and the bars. How we boost the value of that for our customers and also for Heineken. Why it is important to move from off to online. Why, even if we have 80 OpCos that are all slightly different, we think we can do that with three archetypes. How we use data to create insights that help our customers to sell more and then help Heineken to generate more money. Last but not least, the enormous pockets of opportunity we see by digitizing this route to consumer. Before I do that, I would like to take one step back.
We want to shape the future of beer and beyond to win the hearts of our consumers. In a world that is digitizing, where consumers and customers go more and more, and more online, we have to become this best connected brewer. Our consumers require different forms of engagement online. Our customers want an experience that is seamless if they talk to us on eB2B or telesales or to sales reps. Even our own employees expect data in their fingertips. If we do not digitize our company, if we do not unlock the value of data, we will be not as relevant in the future as Heineken has been over the last 158 years. That is why we need to become the best connected brewer. As Dolf already shared this morning, it means we need to do two things.
We need to really digitally transform the front end where we have our consumers and our customers, where 75% of the value lies, where we need to win, where we compete, where we want to outperform. At the same time, after 158 years in an OpCo-centric model, we have created fragmented processes, unharmonized data, a tech landscape that is highly fragmented. We can and need to simplify the backend to save cost, but to also increase our speed and drive scalability across the globe. Both we need to do at the same time, both we will do at the same time. When we go one level deeper, there are five big activities we do. On this front end, so let's call it consumer and customer facing. One, I'll talk about now, our digital route to consumer.
Anything that has to do with digital marketing, first-party data, eB2B sales, revenue management and analytics. Lots of value capture on the outside of our business. Number two, data and analytics. Unlocking the true value of machine learning and AI on large data sets, but at the same time, making sure that the data we have internally is harmonized, is clean. There's foundational work to do. 'Cause today we use 99% internally generated data, but very quickly that becomes 99% external data, consumer data, first-party data, customer data. Then on the inside to modernize, simplify three things. One is simplification automation. This is anything inside from HR, from procurement, from finance, from supply chain.
How can we really simplify end-to-end all our processes and our technology landscape and really unlock true savings that will help to fund the journey to invest in brands and innovations and acquisitions and in D&D? Second, a secure and digital backbone. Secure for cybersecurity. In a world that becomes more and more connected, we have to make sure we keep ourselves secure. This digital backbone is a complete modernized technology architecture in Heineken. I will not talk a lot about it, today I think many of you know Heineken still has about 45 different ERP systems. Unlike many other CPGs that already 10 years ago consolidated and made it much more simple. We're on this journey to do that. Last but not least, this is not about data. This is not about technology. This is about change. This is about transformation.
This is about a different way of our sales reps working to take orders, a different way of operators in supply chain to work with digital tools, a different way of millions of our customers to interact with us. Enabling this organization to become more digital, building hubs with talent, data scientists, cybersecurity specialists, roles that we did not have five or 10 years ago in the company is really, really critical. Becoming the best connected brewer is an end-to-end holistic approach to make Heineken and its partners, consumers, customers, and vendors really, really digitally enabled. All of that we track. Every month, for every market, we track the success and the progress of this transformation. Again, we try to do that holistic. You see the five top KPIs we track on the top.
In our digital route to consumer, we also track how many first-party data records we have. We track the revenue, the number of customers, D2C value. On data-driven insights, we aim to deliver value operating profit with our analytics use cases, AI and machine learning. We also track the scalability or the quality of our data, quality records. Number three, simplification automation. We enable with technology and data a lot of the savings in Heineken, because almost every project we now do in Heineken has a Wi-Fi connection or a long cable attached. Everything has a form of technology component. We track things like savings, but also how many of our breweries have we connected to the cloud. Number four, on the digital backbone, how much standardization do we have? How much global platforms do we have? What is the cost of running this whole machine?
Number five, this enabled organization. What do our internal customers say? Our net promoter score. Do they like to work with those tools? Also, how many trainings do we do? Year to date, we did 27,000 courses online to help train, build capability with all our people in Heineken. I will talk about one today. Martin from supply chain tomorrow will talk a lot about the fantastic work our supply chain has done in the last three to four years in the connected brewery, where now 17,000 of our operators work with online tools. When I started 27 years ago, we had one computer on a packaging line with five shifts of 14 people per shift. Now we work with QR codes, with insights, with tools that make their life much easier.
Harold will briefly touch tomorrow on simplifying the landscape, building this new digital backbone. Digital route to consumer. Our strategy all starts with beliefs. First, and I think most of you will agree, we absolutely believe that in this decade, virtually all orders will move from off to online. If you believe that, there will be a few players, a few platforms that will collect a lot of orders of our customers. We need to make sure we collect those orders on our platforms, on our online platforms, because we don't want somebody else to collect billions of orders of small customers and start negotiating with us. That sounds defensive. We also want to do that because it gives us all the insights in the customers we deal with, all the transactional data that can help grow those customers.
Our second important belief is we do not believe there will be one app. Some people out there think there will be one killer app consolidating everything. We do not believe that. We also don't believe there will be 80 platforms taking orders. There will be some form of consolidation and probably in between three to five apps that do the majority of orders for all those customers. What does that mean? First and foremost, it means strong brands. Brand power is absolutely pivotal because we want to be listed on all those platforms, and the strongest brands will be listed everywhere, and they will be bought because there is consumer pull. We really need to start with strong brands, as James eloquently said this morning.
Secondly, if there are only three to five apps, there will not be one app for beer and one for sodas and one for water and one for coffee and one for wine and one for spirits and one. There will not be. They will become multi-category. All of those apps will offer next to their own category, other categories to sell. Not just products, also services. That sounds easy, but it is super hard to do. The fulfillment part of that, making sure that all those different products, all those SKUs get in the right quality at the right time to the right location, actually is super difficult. That's where Heineken has 20 years experience with our wholesale operations in Europe. Basically we are already a marketplace in Europe knowing about multi-category and knowing about fulfillment. We're moving that from off to online.
Last but not least, it's not just about protecting our business from moving from off to online. We really believe this unlocks tremendous pockets of value for our company across the globe. One, I will talk about it more reach. Digital allows us to get to pockets and customers we've never been before. We can offer customer experience and customer intimacy at scale through digital solutions. Number two, when we have these relationships, when we have these customers ordered over our platforms, we can start delivering other products, other services, sodas, wines, spirits, financial services, insurances, all kinds of things that really help those customers through their entire life cycle to help them to do their business better. Last but not least, let's not shy away from that. This is also highly effective in Heineken. Our sales reps that take orders do not take orders anymore.
They can become data-driven business consultants. They will do different things, and we can do that more efficient. Secondly, the back office we have in our whole sales organization, we need significantly less people because all the data in the back end is highly integrated and we know what's happening. This is the why. When we talk about route to consumer, what do we actually talk about when we talk about route to consumer? It's basically how we get our beer from the brewery to the consumer. Sorry, James. That is not customer-centric. How the consumer buys their beer and their brands from us. First line is modern trade. The channel where we have the Tescos, the Walmarts, the Carrefours, the Albert Heijn. Big, big customers. It's roughly 40% of Heineken's business. Already 90% of this is digitized. We call EDI, electronic data interface.
The order, the invoice, sometimes more information like that, logistics, when can I expect a truck? Already globally, 90% digitized. When I will share numbers on Heineken, we do not count that. That's different from others. We do not count that. This is a consolidated channel with a lot of buying power at the grocery stores. If we want to have data and insights, we can buy it back from Walmart or from Nielsen. It's a lot about the cost to serve optimization in that channel.
What we will talk about today, what I will talk about in the next half hour to come, is the fragmented trade, which is roughly in total 60% of our business. I show you a simplified picture, but the direct relations are where we have a direct selling relation and most often a direct logistical relation to the outlet, to small pop and mom stores. That can be little stores in Ho Chi Minh City, it can be a bar in Amsterdam around the corner. That's about 30% of the market. We have digitized already about 45% of all revenue in that channel. I show you a simplified version. In Europe, where we have wholesale, basically that's also a direct market. The brewery and the wholesale are directly going to fragmented trade. I try to keep it simple.
The more complex channel, which actually is huge, where we are really great at, it's about building relationships and partnerships, we call the indirect channel. It is mainly in emerging markets where we see that a lot. We sell to a distributor, sometimes they sell to sub-distributors, and it ends up in small pop and mom stores and in bars and in restaurants. Again, about 30% of our global revenue. You can see the level of digitization is lower at 35%. This is hard. It's not easy. It's much easier, and I will share you, in Mexico or large markets with a direct route to market where we digitize customers, where we come every single day.
Here, we need to onboard also distributors and sub-distributors, so we can collect orders over here and give them back to them and to us. It's much harder. Still today, we've already done 35%. I told you why. The beliefs. I told you what we talk about. Now, how do we look at our markets? I would love to have a very simple approach to say we do everywhere the same, but not all our OpCos are the same. It's also not true that all our 18 markets are different. Out of home, the on-trade or the on-premise. These are bars, restaurants, hotels. Most of our relationship is direct. They have similar needs. A need of a coffee corner in Milan is not very dissimilar from a coffee corner in Seville, and from a large nightlife outlet in Frankfurt is not very different from Manchester.
We really can see that as a homogenic entity. Number two is outside of Europe, direct markets. Those are more emerging, growing markets where we have a direct relationship with the point of sale, with the outlets. Number three, indirect markets. Those are small pop and mom stores with the indirect channel that I just explained to you. Three different archetypes. I will talk to you about all three of them and give you examples in any of those markets. First, let's go to Europe. One is, beer is super relevant in the on-trade. I don't think I have to explain to you the biggest, most important category. Still a lot of wet-led outlets where consumers go in to drink a beer and then have a bite.
Secondly, we are the absolute market leader in Europe, and certainly in out of home, and Søren will share more of that tomorrow in his presentation on Europe. I talked to you about the customer needs that are fairly similar, but also our wholesale company. You might have thought for years wholesale is a drag. We see it as an asset. We have 20 years of deep experience to sell multi-categories, lots of SKUs, do the fulfillment, do the sales, understand the category, have credibility at our outlets to sell all those categories to bars and restaurants in the marketplace. I'm gonna start with where it could all go. This is the U.K.. We basically have all our orders online. It says over 90%, but we are almost all 100% online. This is not talking anymore about e-revenues and normal revenues. It's all online.
It took 10 years together. 10 years ago, the first order was taken on one of our platforms. Anecdotally, that was not by somebody, a very digital savvy, mid-20s guy sitting and ordering. The first order was placed by a 70-year-old woman after 1:00 A.M. at night. I think it speaks for itself. We really made progress getting there. We started with having already all orders on telesales, so we really moved forward. Our customers, our satisfaction score, our NPS, because we do this to deliver better services and better experience to our customers. Our net promoter score increased by 38 points going to online. Also, we have full visibility. We know precisely what's happening at what outlet, when, what their issues are, what their needs are, what their categories are.
At the same time, we have significantly reduced headcount because it is just more efficient to do that. Completely other example in Europe. Italy. 10 years U.K., this is four years. We are accelerating. Already 35% online year-to-date September. Do the math where we really are in the month. This is not just beer, this is already multi-category because you know we have Partesa, the largest wholesale company in Italy. We're not just selling beer, we're already selling and shipping multi-category online. We show and prove that we can do that. Also, our customers say online, I actually like the online world.
I score your NPS higher than the offline world because I see benefits in ease of doing with you in the information that I get. The sales reps we have spend 30% less time on all kind of admin issues that they need to solve, don't need to go every single time in a car and travel and sit in a traffic jam, but can really, if we measure the time, focus on the things that really matter to build and grow our customers. Europe, we're live in 13 markets. We went from 21% online revenue, so this is the proportion of our revenue. This is the proportion of all the revenue we have in the channel that's going online over our own platforms from 21% to 38% to 58%.
Today, there's not fantastic data on this in Europe, but we believe we are the largest B2B platform in Europe, bigger than the number two, which we believe to be M-shop for Makro. Five to 10x bigger than the number two and number three brewers we have in Europe. If we add all the revenue together, we're in the top 15 of all e-commerce company in Europe, which includes Amazon, Zalando and others. We're growing. We're more than doubling the revenue this year in this channel. We continue to drive online sales. This 58% needs to go as close as possible to the 100, which is our belief. We are growing multi-category like we showed in Italy. We are adding categories in all those markets where we can.
Last but not least, again, Søren will talk about productivity in Europe tomorrow, this unlocks also great opportunities in our sales organization across the out of home in Europe to do things more efficient and at the same time more effective. Second archetype, direct markets. I'll show you two examples, Mexico and Brazil. We have, in most cases, a direct sales relation and a direct logistic relationship with outlets. The outlets, certainly in those markets, still have a relatively high drop size. I will make the difference when we go to other markets in APAC and in AMEI that are well, significantly smaller. Here, I don't have to explain that, there is intense competition, certainly in those markets. This is Mexico. I really believe Mexico is a lighthouse in Heineken.
I also believe outside of Heineken, how you create an end-to-end digital ecosystem in the route to consume. First of all, this is not New York or London of Amsterdam. This is Mexico, an emerging market still. If I may say, 85% in the first nine months of all orders are online. That is significant in percentage. That's amazing if you do the math in how much EUR that is we do of our own apps over HiShop. Secondly, because we have so much data, we're now deploying what we call AIDA. AIDA is an AI engine that basically does product recommendation. It does churn analysis. We see is a customer more prone to leave or to stay. We do sales route optimization. We do where do you go and what do you tell?
We tested that in six zones in Mexico, because every product we launch, we first test, we prove the value, and then we scale. We tested in six zones in Mexico. It is now available in 90% of the market in Mexico. 90% of our customers, 150,000 online use this, and it proves to have a 3% uplift in volume in the test group. Interesting, because it also optimized the route of our sales force. It saves, at the same time, 30,000 tons of CO2. It works on all the angles. Number two is shelf image recognition.
We have our customers, 40,000 of them in Mexico, making pictures, taking their phone, I left it over there, taking a picture of a fridge, where with AI, we look at the fridge and say, What's in the fridge? How should you optimize your planogram? We need Tecate Light in the left top corner. We want Indio in the right top corner. We want Heineken 0.0 In the middle, and a 12-pack of Dos Equis at the bottom. It really increased the execution power of our organization, and it helps to replenish and make sure that our own share availability is as high as possible. Our customers love it. They give us a very high rating on the App Store.
They really like how we interact with them, and that is super important that we do things better than anybody else in the marketplace. Now, sorry, and I clicked incidentally, we're also moving, as Marc said, into GLUP. GLUP is our D2C company that we use the 16,000 stores. We have the six stores in Mexico, and basically we built a rapid delivery company. We guarantee to deliver in an hour. The average time is 29 minutes. A couple of months back, well, actually, James and I were together in Mexico looking at the marketplace. I said, I want to test these things. Because the team always tells us that they are fantastic, and in this case, they are fantastic. I ordered two six-packs of Heineken 0.0 And a bag of crisps. In six minutes, it was delivered.
Not only in six minutes, I got a sample can of Amstel Seltzer in the pack. This is not only about generating revenue, this is also helping us to drive new innovation like Marc was talking about. This gives us an enormous amount of first-party data that the commercial teams can use for innovations and for marketing optimization. Mexico, really end-to-end example of what we do, and I would fully agree with Marc, we're not over at par. I think we're really doing a great job in Mexico. Brazil, other large market. We are today at 40% online revenue, but a different story. The deal Marc talked about with KOF taking Heineken Amstel in-house and Eisenbahn and Tiger to the Coca-Cola network. We first did that.
Basically going from 0% to 40%, which is year-to-date, again, think about what the last month numbers are. We basically did this in one year, 15 months. Real fast, and again, in a huge market with a huge revenue. Again, we have fairly happy customers, and not a few. We have 40,000 reviews. You can check that online. And also here, we see that our average basket, so it's not just about selling the same from offline to online, we manage, by the way we do it, to increase our average basket size to our customers. The thing we also do in Brazil is really using e-retail. It's a fast-growing channel in Brazil, and we have almost double the fair share in market share on those e-retail customers than we have offline.
We have a 25% share in the offline business and almost 50% in the online business in the e-retail channel. Direct markets, we classify seven of our markets as direct markets. We range from 1%-60% in that archetype online. We will continue, as I say, to go from on to offline to, in the end, get to that 100%. Also, there, we need to move to multi-category, but we do not have 20 years of experience in wholesaling in America. We will do this careful, we'll do this intentional, and we really will test and learn before we scale. Last but not least, completely new value pockets. The stuff you saw on AI, shelf image recognition for execution, product recommendation, all these things are working over there. Last archetype. I need a bit of water.
Sorry for that. These are our indirect markets. These are markets that most of the time have rapid growth still in the beer category. Beer is really growing fast. There are big customers, but there is an enormous tail of very, very small customers, and a lot of them we do not cover in a market because they're too small and they were too expensive to go to. We have an enormous opportunity with digital to reach to outlets that we've never been able to go before. Two examples. First, Nigeria. Roland talked about the whole case that we did in Nigeria. We really got grip of the market by making sure that our sales reps, our telesales, our contact center, but also eB2B all work together to get all the information of the customers. Today, it's an absolute number.
77% NPS we have now on that online platform, which is huge. We do something different in Nigeria. In Nigeria, the level of digitization of the market, of our consumers, of our customers is maybe not the same as everywhere in the world. We start by doing what we call assisted orders. Our sales reps go to outlets and help them to order. It takes five to eight visits, normally in most markets we see, to really create adoption. My team will not like it when I say it, but the technology and the app is easy. The adoption of the customer, the change we need to do with our own sales reps is the most important thing. Already, we massively increase the number of what they do themselves.
Over time, in the next year and a half, you will see that all of this will absolutely be done by our own sales reps. One other interesting thing, by the way, live in many markets in Heineken, I show it here, is loyalty apps. It is loyalty points for trade marketing activations, promotions, new innovations for reordering that we do. The customers that use that, on average, they have a higher basket size because we can drive trade activation programs, new innovations, and have them order that. Here, what I said, in those markets, it's really important to increase our coverage, to go to point of sales, to go to outlets where we never were able to go before because it was unaffordable. The same is pretty much the case in Vietnam. In Vietnam, we're now year-to-date September, half our online revenue.
Sorry, half our revenue in the fragmented trade is taken over our own platform in Vietnam called DAT HANG. Recently, I was in Vietnam, and you go to outlets, and they show you the phone, and they have seven apps on their phone, seven apps today where they order from. It is really critical for us to when we have this adoption curve, we go to an outlet, spend five to eight visits to get on our platform to keep them. 89% retention rate. That is enormous. Super important. Shows the loyalty, shows the appreciation for what we are able to do. Again, a super high net promoter score, what our customers say about our apps. The third one is the graph that Jacco showed.
Jacco showed, if you remember correctly, we only cover around a little bit less than half the market directly, and our brands are available in 55% of the market. 45%, we're not available. We're super strong in the south and the east of Vietnam, but much weaker in the north. What this really helps is to start increasing penetration in more rural areas and in the north. We've already done so. We increased the total coverage from 20-25 by 35%, and we believe there's more. By the way, we do not believe we will get to a 100% distribution because at a certain moment, the cost of the last point of sale will be very expensive.
We'll test how far we go, and actually we're working with partners, other platforms like VinShop in Vietnam to really help sell products also on their platforms. Again, having strong brands is really important because they want our brands. They want Heineken and they want Tiger. Indirect markets, 50 markets live. Already over half the revenue is online. We continue to drive expansion. We continue here actually to really drive and focus on coverage expansion at the lowest possible cost. Three archetypes. In all fairness, the vast majority of this we built locally with our local teams. We built really good local solutions. We onboarded locally. About a year ago we said we need to do this much more intentionally.
We have now built a central team that is now around 600 people, on top of the people that work in the marketplace, that really drive this globally. First, it's about the transformation, the changes, the adoption at customer level, at retail level, distributor level, and for our own salespeople. Really important to do that. Secondly, we start to really scale the backend, the technology, the data, the insights. I talked to you about the AI engine in Mexico that starts in six regions in Mexico to test. We're now at 90% of Mexico, and the next markets are ready to go in Latin America and in Europe. The same is, I showed my Majara, the loyalty program in Nigeria. We tested in Nigeria, and we can now copy-paste to other markets.
It's really important that we start coordinating the journey to help accelerate, to build that capability, to get technology, to get insights, to do faster, cheaper, better overall. That ends, I think I'm gonna be early on time, with where we wanna go. We, on the left-hand side, we have made, I think, tremendous progress. In the first nine months of the year, EUR 6 billion of GMV. We have communicated to all of you, I think it's been a year and a half ago, a number of EUR 10 billion revenue on e-business. That number was actually a kind of an internal metric we had. We called it BTV, e-business transaction value. We are gonna move to the more generally accepted outside acronym GMV, which also all the other e-commerce companies follow, and that is the new target for us.
The new ambition, I have to say, for us, is gonna be EUR 15 billion. Some of the EUR 15 billion, from EUR 10 billion-EUR 15 billion, about half is a definition change. The other half is really because we believe we're going faster, we have more confidence that we'll get to that number. We want to be the leading player in this digital route to consumer. We really believe this is a complete transformation of our route to market in fragmented trade. This will unlock value pockets. It's not just an onto offline. It's not only defensive, making sure that nobody else consolidate all the orders. There's a massive opportunity in product recommendation, category optimization, stickiness of consumer, loyalties of consumer, as I hopefully have shown. This is an opportunity to get to more coverage, more market share, more categories, more services outside of products.
This will give us enormous amount of data that we can mine and use for internal use, for innovations, for how do we go with trade promotions to our customers, also really to help our outlets. If you're Albert Heijn or Carrefour, you have thousands of stores, you can optimize your category. If you're an Italian restaurant here in Amsterdam, you have only your Italian restaurant. We can help them to say there are 600 other Italian restaurants in North Holland, we can help you to say you should stock Moretti 0.0, and we can even tell them, actually Fettuccine with ink squid will really help you to increase your turnover. It's not a joke, it's happening. What we do is we focus first and foremost on customer satisfaction. On every slide, you've seen NPS scores.
On some slides, you've seen our EPS scores. It is really important that we bring our customer base on board because in the end, that's where I start. It starts with that level of customer centricity. We need to fund this journey, so we are becoming every single day more efficient and more effective to drive productivity in our sales and back-office organization. To summarize, the world is moving from off to online. In fragmented trade, a little bit more than 40% of all our revenue is already online. In modern trade, 90% is online, and we do not add that to the EUR 15 billion of GMV that I just shared with you. We have three archetypes. In Europe, I believe we have an absolute right to win.
We have strong brands, we have high market share, the relevance of beer is really important, and we have 20 years of experience in selling a marketplace, selling multi-category in our wholesale operation. In our indirect markets, we have fantastic relationships and partnerships with all those distributors and sub-distributors. We also work with others. We have a track record of having good partnerships during the years. The long-standing one, APB, that was on the list, I think a case in point. We really can do that. In direct markets, we talked about Mexico and Brazil. I hope you agree with me, we may not have talked enough about it, but we really made a step up where in Mexico, we're absolutely there and ahead. In Brazil, we first solve the route to market physically.
It does not make any sense to digitize a route to market where you still want to make physical changes. We've done so. We're over 40% in online sales. Data and insights. This creates tremendous amount of data at consumer, customer, shopper, distributor level that we mine, that we use. Churn rates, product recommendation, loyalty programs, shelf image recognition. These things are now traveling across the world. Last but not least, the new value pockets. We have an ability to grow and go where we've never been able to go before, to increase our coverage. In markets where we never had multi-category, to offer multi-category. To offer services where we've never been in the business, and to really create value for our customers and for Heineken.
Our route to consumer and digitizing our route to consumer will boost the value and the relationship we have for our consumers and customers, and absolutely also for Heineken. Thank you very much.
The green one. Hello, good afternoon. Let's see. Introductions. I'm Yolanda Talamo. I'm the head of the people organization, and I am the last presentation of today before we move to Q&A. I've been in Heineken for six years, and I started being the head of the people function in the Americas region. Before that, I had a very long career in Procter & Gamble, where I had several roles, most of them in the people function across local, global, and regional responsibilities. I later on moved to SABMiller, where I worked for about five years, and then more recently, last six years in Heineken. I am Venezuelan, born and raised in Caracas, and I'm a psychologist. Somebody asked me if I'm psychologist of the ET. The reality is that I'm not.
I am gonna cover today, our 6th pillar in our strategic priorities, which is about unlocking the full potential of our people and the organization. To do this, I will speak about four themes that I will then bring down into a bit of details. The first topic will be share with you the evolution and how we have moved our organization from entrepreneurial culture and operating model from where we were back in 2020 to be able to actually meet the needs and the requirements of the business, our key customers, consumers, but also the organization. How we have evolved our talent management practices and our capability building to be strategic levers of our EverGreen transformation.
We will also talk about how we have stepped up our performance management process to make it much more tied to a disciplined culture of performance. Lastly, I will talk about how we have moved the EverGreen transformation from strategy into action, bringing it to life at a global level across all the markets where we operate. As I said, I represent people function, last of our priorities, and I will talk about four topics today. The first one is operating model. I will move to people, from there to performance management, and lastly, I will talk about EverGreen transformation and how I brought that to life, how we have brought it to life. In the center, you will see our culture, which was really the glue that brings all the pieces together, and I will also talk about that.
Moving into operating model. One of the great strengths of our business is our people. I don't know if you have heard about the expression that we have green blood that pumps through our green hearts. That is Heineken pretty much. When we talk about the magic of Heineken, what we refer to is to our people and the culture we have built in the last 158 years. When we are thinking about what we need to succeed in bringing our EverGreen transformation to life, one of the most important things that we have done is to really look to understand what are the things that have built this great company and what are the things that we want to preserve.
We wanna make sure, and this is what we've done, that we recognize what are those great things that we have done in the past, also recognize what are the things that we may need to change, adapt, and evolve as we do this. Dolf talked this morning about the seasons that we have been through and some of the challenges and disruption that we have faced and that we may face in the future. Our intent is to build a future fit organization that can deal with these challenges as we evolve and as we leverage from the strengths that we have.
We have recognized, and what you can see on the slide, four important shifts that we will that we believe that are critical to really bring EverGreen to life, and we will actually meet by unlocking the full potential of the people in the organization. The first of those shift is, as Dolf was explaining in the morning, move to a much more networked business. Moving from siloed OpCos that were much more disconnected and not working jointly into a networked approach where we see high connectivity and everyone really working connected and sharing. We want to move to a disciplined entrepreneurship, and I will talk a bit more about that. We also wanna move from siloed capability building to a much more strategic capability approach, one that makes sense and really meets the needs of the business.
We have also moved from selective talent management to broad-based talent management. I will talk about all these shifts in a minute. Moving still along within operating model, and just to make this a bit more specific. The way we were operating several OpCos around the world, not really speaking to each other in the way that we wanted to. There was some communication going on, but we were truly missing the benefits of working in a network. The benefits of working in a network is really driving much more scale. It's really seeing much more share learning reapplying benchmark at a consistent and much faster pace. We were not seeing that. Now we try to see that more and more. Also driving disciplined entrepreneurship.
Moving from that culture of entrepreneurship that was part of the Heineken of more that, siloed approach, and to coming together to also see much more, scale. At the same time, recognizing, as Dolf was saying this morning, that there will be places and systems and processes in the back office where we will need to do some smart harmonization and to bring much more standardization as we recognize it. In those cases, as he also said this morning, we won't ask a lot of questions. We will just do it. One of the things that we are convinced that we want to preserve is also that local strength and the magic that happens in our opcos by the closeness that it brings to key customers and consumers.
What I tried to tell you is, what is the balance of keeping those strengths that have been part of Heineken in the last years, but how we want to evolve our operating model to be one that is much more connected, and as a consequence, drive much more benefit. As I move along and talk about people, the first element in our in the four points that I want to discuss today. One of the elements that we are very, very proud of is our levels of engagement. We consider that we have right now outstanding employee engagement. We have several touchpoints with the organization throughout the year. We do this through pulse surveys, but we also do this by our annual climate survey. These are the results of our 2022 engagement survey.
What you can see here, we are full of pride because what we see is that we have growth on each one of these elements, not just when we compare to 2021, but also when we compare with the high performance norm. This is composed by the top quartile companies on which we compare to across industries, across the world, over a base of about 17 million employees from different companies in the world. When you see measures like a high pride to work for Heineken at 91%, when we see employee engagement at 86% or even performance enablement and at high 82%, it's quite remarkable. Why this is so important, if you think about performance engagement, what that really talks about is that level of emotional connection that the Heineken employee feels with the company. It's levels of satisfaction.
It's how much they would recommend the company to someone else. It's their intent to stay. This is what the employees are telling us. When you think about performance enablement, and it becomes very, very important when we talk about the EverGreen transformation, it's really about space and empowerment to make decisions. This is what we're being told. It's about having the right conditions, the tools, the information, the data to work. It's about having the right levels of training. This is what our employees are telling us. When you think about direction and alignment, how much do I understand the objective setting? How much does my work connect to the broader vision of the company? We are extremely proud of these results. Of course, we're restless. We will make sure that we keep them or continue to grow.
At the same time, very, very important, we celebrate the roles of our leaders around the world in driving these results. It's not something that the ET does. It's something that our leaders around the world are actually promoting by the work, this is the group that enables all the great work that you saw shared by the regional presidents earlier today. One of the important priorities that we have set for ourselves within the space of people is making a choice on diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have set ourselves an ambition of reaching 40% of women in senior manager positions by 2030. What you will see in the graph on the left side is that we have been progressing. We started at a very, I would have to say, not in a great place.
If I look to this data, 10 years ago, we were about 10%, 11% of women in senior manager roles. What we have seen over the last 10 years, 11 years, is that we have grown first at a bit of a slower pace, that we have accelerated growth now much more because we have done very specific interventions. We want to make sure that we reach 30% by 2025 and then get to that point of 40% by 2030. A few of the initiatives that we have done that I find important to mention, and I'm only calling out female at senior manager level, but we're also making some important calls when it comes to cultural diversity, also making sure that we have the right representation of what we call regional nationals, nationalities in our management teams around the world.
We're also making sure that we drive the right level of effort on making sure we can provide an inclusive environment for people to work in, a culture of belonging where everybody can be themselves when they come to Heineken to work. Big efforts there. In the space of women, more particularly, we have done a few interventions. We look at the full space of since we recruit our people and how we are making sure that we have fair and representative representation of women in the slates of candidates that we interview, for instance. We look around all the way at the steps of someone in the organization, how they've arrived at Heineken, how they are onboarded, how they grow, how they are promoted, how are they developed.
We're doing some very specific interventions in middle management where we see there are women, and you can see it there in the pyramid, very transparently sharing our pyramid, and still some work that we have to do in the lower levels. We are doing some very specific support and development actions and ensuring that our women have the tools that they need, training that they need to be able to grow and to see some additional career progression in their in the company. We have just recently launched a program that is called Women Interactive Networks, where we are covering 100 women per year at mid-level career to make sure that we also level the playing field for our women in the company, so we can see much more growth.
This has become a very important area for us, where we see actually a lot of work going on at a global level. Just to share a very specific example, this is women in sales in Cambodia. Cambodia had a very low start. They had 12% of women in the sales function. As I was telling you before, in the lower base of the pyramid is where we have the majority of employees in sales, distribution, and supply chain. Here's where we struggle the most to have an acceptable number of women in these functions. Cambodia is one of these examples. They started at a low 12%, and only in two years, they've been able to bring that number up to 20%.
Let me show you a video where our Cambodian organization is sharing what they have done.
Rising competitors in a crowded beer market like Cambodia is threatening our brand positioning. The need for diverse workforce is more important than ever. We realized if we make Heineken more inclusive, we can re-level the playing field between females and males, reignite the collective power of creativity, enabling them to innovate and shape for a better Cambodia and better connections to our customers. Now, let's check out our video to find out how we increased our females in sales in job grade 15 and above positions to 32% and across all job grades to 20%. Enjoy.
It's a great example from Cambodia. I have to say that it was difficult to choose. There are a lot of examples in our OpCos of our organizations bringing to life very nice examples of how women are being given right, fair, and more equitable opportunities across our company. We still, as you saw in the last graph, we have room to go. We are at a 27% now in October of 2022, and we wanna make sure we reach that 30% and later on that 40%. If I move along, another very important intervention that we have set in the people space is to make sure that we identify a systemic way to really identify but also develop our future leaders.
It's not that we were not doing a good job before, but one of the things we did is that we looked at the entire employee life cycle and all the moments that matter within an employee's career. We realized that there were some things to be done and to be improved and evolved in that specific Base. Starting specifically, when we plan, what are our talent needs aligned to business challenges and priorities? Workforce planning and different specific interventions. A lot's being done there. Then when you think about assessing, acquiring, making sure that we engage and develop our employees. Very specific interventions along each one of those moments that matter, ending with measurement.
Not just measurement of the quality of our process, which we also do to make sure that we keep ourselves tight and always improving, but also making sure that we measure our own employees on performance and on potential, so we can make sure that we support them in the right way, and at the same time, we are driving this culture of performance. In the same space of driving a more systematic way to identify and develop our talents, we have done three very important things that have actually been critical to move the needle in the right direction. The first one is that we have developed a new potential model. It's our new Heineken potential model. We used to use a model that was off the shelf, and it was great. It worked for many, many years.
Given we are in the midst of EverGreen transformation, we decided to create our own model. It's really. We're just in the process of launching it, so it's still not 100% out there. This will give us the certainty that when we are assessing our employees, but it's also planning their development, we will do it in a much more accurate and effective way. The other thing we have done is to create global assessment centers. This has been actually, I would say, an evolution of how we did it. We had many good practices in the regions, but every region was doing a bit of a different thing. We brought all the best practices together to create one global harmonized approach to assessment centers. We also developed very specific profiles by function and for general managers.
We have one definition of talent at a global level now. We take our top talents through these assessment centers, which help us plan much better their careers going forward. Lastly, when it comes about development of leaders, we have segmented the organization in Heineken by levels and by audiences. By doing this, it has allowed us to really identify what are the different needs that these audiences have in the different moments of their careers. By that, we have tailor-made design, specific development interventions at all levels for our leadership development. We have already kicked off a few. As I said, the WIN programs for our women. We also kicked off one that we call Accelerate.
That is a regional intervention for top talents. We also launched a program, or relaunched a program that we stopped during COVID and now we completely revamped called HIMAC , which we do with the IMD institution in Switzerland, also tailored to 80 leaders per year across the globe, and they come together and meet there to really focus on what are the key things that we want to make sure we drive their development. Not to forget at the bottom of the pyramid, very specific training and revamping of everything we can pull from LinkedIn, and at the same time, really connected to our Heineken behaviors, which become extremely important, specifically tied to performance management. The other space, and you saw that on the shifts, that we have done is to do much more consistency and intentional scaled approach to capabilities.
Capability building is another area where we were doing a bit in a siloed way. We were doing it around the world in different moments, in different ways, different approaches and frameworks. We identified one way to do it. We created a global framework, you will see it in the bottom of the slide. Specifically, a strategic capability playbook, which has been deployed around the world tied to very specific priority capabilities that we have also defined that are critical and needed to be able to deliver our EverGreen strategy. You will see them here, the first one being cost consciousness, the second about revenue margin growth. Talent management is our number third capability, transformation and change, and decarbonization of the business.
We will focus on these capabilities following a global framework, one consistent approach, to make sure that we reach much more people in a consistent way, and we can embed new knowledge and skills in a faster and more effective way. Moving to topic number three, performance. We talked about stepping up our performance culture. What have we done here? There's a few things that I find important. The first portion has to do with alignment. We have clarity on our strategic priorities. We have also clarity about the Green Diamond of what we want to measure, and that's the starting point. When we think about performance management, we set objectives. The what objectives are tied to EverGreen.
You can tie them back not just to our key strategic priorities, but the way we measure them through the diamond. We have also make sure that we tie along that process, strengthening annual plans, strategic plan with our key financial cycle, tracking through our EverGreen dashboard on a monthly and a quarterly basis to drive discipline, and we do this at a global level. We have also stepped up at differentiation. We find it extremely important that we can measure our employees tied to specific performance objectives, and we can drive those differences in understanding who are the top talents. I have included here two metrics that show how we are progressing on performance culture. 86% of our employees believe that the managers clearly communicate performance expectations.
It's a very high metric, the understanding of expectations is there. 82% of the people feel that they are held accountable for their performance. Both metrics increased versus last year, you can see there in three points. This gives us the sense that we are definitely progressing in the right direction, and we see that the alignment that we want to see in performance management tied to our key priorities is there. We don't wanna stop there. Alignment is very important, but we also wanna ramp up intentionality. What do we mean by that? On one hand, there's three things that we want to do. The first is enhance accountability. Accountability, clarity of accountability is all about objective setting.
If our people understand clearly what they are expected to deliver through clarity of objective setting, we will see that the results just flow from them. As I was saying, we set objectives specifically tied to our EverGreen priorities, and they are connected to the Diamond and tracked through our dashboard, but we also connect them to our Heineken behaviors, which we consider critical to create and sustain our culture. The second element we have done is focusing on differentiation, as I was saying. It is very important for us that we are able to distinguish who are our top talents, and we wanna make sure that we leverage our performance management approach to do that. The third, but not least, is development culture.
This is one thing where we want to go back to, and we wanna make sure that every individual who works in Heineken has a development plan. They know what they need to work on to be much more effective, and they know what is ahead of them in terms of career development. That will also inform the need for leadership development, what I was talking before. Everything starts to be much more connected than it was in the past. Now, performance management has to be integrated to remuneration. We have made sure both our short-term incentive and our long-term incentives are aligned to the delivery of EverGreen, our ambition for superior and balanced growth. We have also added a change. We have made a change to our long-term incentive approach, and this is adding ESG targets.
Starting next year, and this has been approved by the AGM this year, we will measure three ESG targets. We will measured carbon reduction in production, we will measure water efficiency, and we will measure our progress versus female representation at senior management level. Those specific ambitions that I shared on female, you saw them there. Stacey will share tomorrow a bit more details about carbon reduction and water efficiency. The other important piece is that we have as part of a performance management individual objectives. We have also aligned for a senior manager community two important objectives, and we have made sure that everybody reports on those objectives. The first one is gross cost saving, and the second is gross profit margin.
These are two additional objectives that we have set for the senior manager community. And we see results already tied to that. It drives much more consistency. Moving to the last portion. When you think about each one of the three, we talked about people, we talked about operating model, we talked about interventions on people. We talked about performance management, and the last piece is EverGreen transformation. It's impossible to think about setting up a new global strategy without really ensuring that we are able to land high-level strategic choices into the organization in a way that it really drives alignment, that they're understood, and the way that people can reflect them in their objectives. This is what EverGreen transformation and bringing it to life has meant for us.
We've done a few things in this space, and there's also some key metrics that you see on the slide that I wanna mention. We have created a transformation function. I have another slide that would explain that a bit in more detail, which is really about boosting EverGreen and the delivery of their results, specifically through capability building. We have also created much more discipline in how we prioritize the work we do. For that, we have come up with top 25 global priorities that are also orchestrated and synchronized in a way where we can make sure we're leveraging the right level of resources. We also have created, as I said, clear alignment and a clear line of sight between individual objectives, OpCo objectives, to the broader ambition of the company.
A few metrics here that I have to say are quite good and strong. 99% of the top leaders in the company recognize and understand how EverGreen translates into their objectives. If you think about the general colleagues across the organization at a global level, 84% of them also understand the same thing, how their work is tied to EverGreen. You see lots of alignment, which is the starting point to right performance. Eighty-two percent of our employees understand key elements of direction setting, which have to do with our dream and our purpose, but they also recognize and understand how it comes together with our values and our behaviors. These are very strong metrics, and we see all of them growing versus last year. We have also established new ways of working. Two new things that we have created.
I mentioned the transform function to what we call the transform network. It is really a network of employees who come together to operationalize EverGreen and bring it to life in the regions and then as a consequence in the OpCos. The bigger focus of this organization is to really work on bringing those capabilities to life in the harmonious way that I was sharing before. They're also charged up with the responsibility of driving much more sharing, learning, and reapplying across the OpCo. Two very important things, plus what you can read in the slide, which is all about orchestrating top priorities across the company and making sure that we work less driven by silos in a much more network organization.
The other way of working is the creation of a body that we call Program Board. The Program Board is extremely important because it's the one that will help us recognize the value out of the initiatives that we have agreed that will make it to the top 25. It's about tracking the business case. It is about ensuring that the value that we have committed on each one of those initiatives is there, it's pooled, it's tracked. We also make sure that resource allocation is done in the right way. We look at interdependencies across the projects at a global level just to make sure that all those things beyond having set a priority that needs to happen so we can see the projects moving forward are actually taking place. Last but not least, when you think about employee mobilization, we can create an amazing strategy.
We can have a great plan in all these interventions. If we are not able to mobilize the organization to create that engagement, to create that, I would say, motivation and pull from the organization, we would not have done our job well. The last piece of how everything connects in, in, in the right way after driving the right level of alignment, after making sure that people feel connected and understand how their work is tied to EverGreen, is really to create a rhythm of communication and, let's say, touch points with what we're trying to do. We do that, and we do that in many ways. I just mentioned a few here on the slide. We have an organization that we call the top 150.
It's made out of the top leaders of the organization. We call it the Forum. With that group, we meet virtually six times per year, and we meet once face-to-face. These are moments to align, to check how we're doing and tracking versus our EverGreen dashboard financial objectives. We also use it to recognize and celebrate the great work the organization is doing. We also do six virtual global town halls. The ET with Dolf, we come together six times a year to also do the same thing with the global organization. This drives a lot of engagement. People at the end have the opportunity to actually ask real questions live, which we answer in the moment. At the same time, the OpCos drive their own specific moments of engagement. They create town halls, they create their moments.
There's a lot going on at the same time. Last but not least, we have also created a way to ensure there's much more alignment. Having just what we call functional and OpCo one-pagers. These are strategic one-pagers that we follow exactly the same consistent format to make sure that we can all understand. They drive the right level of priority. This is another way that when we communicate through using the same and consistent approach, you can see that the understanding and the consistency really drives much more embedment of what we try to do across the different levels in the organization. Last but not least, evolving the magic of Heineken. I started my presentation saying that when we refer to the magic of Heineken, we are talking about our people and the great culture that we have built together.
This is who we are. When we talk about the magic of Heineken, it's really the description of the type of organization that we are and what the people in Heineken come together to deliver, how we work, what we do, how we make decisions. I have called out a few things here. I will say that this list is not restrictive to how we describe our culture, but it does include a few things that I find extremely important. It's really a no-nonsense, deliver-the-goods type of focus. You speak to anyone in Heineken, and it's really about let's make sure we deliver. If we made a commitment, we wanna make sure that we deliver in the best way we can. The culture is transparent. There's respect. There's trust among people. We're bold and courageous, and we also try to be creative.
As you saw, outstanding employee engagement, that when you are leading a transformation the size of the EverGreen transformation, you wanna make sure that your employee engagement is strong, and we have seen that it is for us. Speed, agility and external focus, horizontal learning across the network. I talked about that as well. Stronger and more diverse pipeline supported by rigorous performance management. This is Heineken, and this is who we are. Lastly, just my last slide, going back to what I at the beginning committed that I would deliver. It's really about shifting a disciplined entrepreneurship and making sure that we have a future-ready organization to do that. Good afternoon.
Fantastic. Well, thank you very much to all our presenters of today. I would actually ask them if they can now join us. We're gonna start our Q&A session. Just give us a minute while we set up here some chairs, some tables for them. Probably a couple of words before we start. We do have some people that are gonna be walking around with microphones. If you want to ask a question, please raise your hand, and somebody with a microphone will come to you. I'll be basically asking who could ask the next question. Please keep your questions to one, maybe two, but that's it, so that more people can, of course, answer questions.
We do have the capability to take questions also from the audience that is watching us online. If you want to ask a question, please drop us a note. We have people monitoring online, and we will voice over that question if we need to do that. We will time for around 45 minutes for that. Please join us here. Do we have the microphones ready? Okay. We do have quite some hands raised. I just don't see any microphones yet to help us to see who could. There we are. Thank you. Hey, Olivier, since you're here.
Thank you, Federico. Olivier Nicolaï, Goldman Sachs. I will stick to two questions then. Just for the U.S., first of all, you mentioned Silver in the presentation. A long time ago, Heineken management was quite excited about the launch of Heineken Light. What did you learn from the difficulties you faced with Heineken Light, and why do you think it's not going to apply to Silver? That's the first question. Then just on Nigeria, you showed us, Ronald, a really good chart on the profit pool in Nigeria. Do you think we've reached a trough there and different players are going to be more, let's say, focused on the profit pool going forward? Thank you.
I can take the Heineken Light one, which was in 2005, which was a very promising launch, 500,000 hectoliter in year one. It went rapidly down the drain because we had not listened to the consumer, and we had made a Heineken Light beer that was not an American Light. It was made listening to the brewers of Heineken, so too hoppy and not fitting the palate of the American consumer. What we did now with Heineken Silver was really making a Heineken Silver for the Northern American consumer. That's a huge difference. That concept was tested against reference in the market and outperformed the reference in the market.
Yeah. Nigeria. It's okay?
Yes.
First, I would like to repeat that Nigeria is still a huge potential for the future. 220 million people, GDP growth. Short term, when you see the reason of the decline was two reason, the economic situation and fierce competition. Economic situation, when you know the nature of the economy in Nigeria, we don't believe that short term you left a huge improvement. The second things is the competition. It's very clear that we receive signals from the competitors that for the last year, the past year, they've been following our price increase.
Conclusion, a little bit less fierce competition.
Simon?
Thanks. Simon Hales from Citi. I'll try two as well then, please. Obviously you've talked a lot about the superior top-line growth this morning. We've seen it historically. You've articulated how you expect to, you know, continue to show it across all your regions. You flagged in the statement last night that that would be more of a balance between volume and price and mix. We've talked a lot about premiumization specifically this morning, it feels to me. Is premiumization gonna become a bigger part of those midterm objectives to sustain that superior growth? I'm just misreading the amount of time we've spent on those premiumization trends this morning. That was the first one.
Secondly, just coming back to Silver very briefly, how do I think about the sort of price reference of the brand around the world? Is it always priced at the same point? Is that price reference relative to the Heineken main brand, or does it vary market to market? Where will it price in the U.S., if you can talk about that without being competitively sensitive at this stage?
Shall I have a crack at premiumization to start with? It's a great question, and we did talk about it a lot, and the reason for that is because that's where a lot of the action in the market is, and that's where you see a lot of the growth pockets. I'd like to refer back to that chart which showed the absolute volume growth of the growth pockets in developed markets, are bigger than the combined growth in emerging markets, which on its own is also very good. Also a lot of the pockets of growth in emerging markets, we looked at South Africa, is in premium. Is it premiumization for its own sake? A little bit, but it's also where the action is, and that will allow us to add value to our mix.
It'll allow us to grow at higher gross profit per hectoliter and get that virtuous investment circle going even faster as well. It is deliberate. It's deliberate because of its growth and its profitability, it's actually an example of superior balanced growth in its own right.
The pricing, do you want to comment on that, Marc? Can we already comment on that or no?
I won't comment on the U.S., but I can comment on Mexico. In Mexico, it's launched at price parity with Heineken Original.
Which is the same thing in APAC. Yeah.
Great. It's Tristan van Strien from Redburn Partners. Two questions from me as well. First, Ronald, you didn't cover it, just the back end of your transformation. I was a bit surprised to hear there is still a lot of work to be done, 'cause I recall in 2018 and 2019, a lot of discussions about Base replacing JDF words, SAP for S/4HANA. I guess it hasn't all happened. What needs to be done and what are the risks as you go through this transformation? 'Cause there are always risks in these things. Second, it sounds like we all have to ask about Silver. You're launching Heineken Silver in India, a very high alcohol ABV market. You know, how is your thinking about that?
I'm a bit surprised 'cause mild beer is so small in India at the moment, or is this the opportunity to maybe bring it back into the market?
Let me start on the back end. We have finished these programs you talk about. Base, 27 markets, mainly in APAC, some in AME and in the Caribbean are live. That was an end-to-end transformation, standard process, technology, and data. We deliberately started there a few years back to go to smaller and we thought easier markets to change all the business processes and to align. We are now finishing SharpEx. You've heard about that, which is a SAP for all the people, a SIFIN implementation in Europe, which was much more complex. 23 markets in Europe, and we just went live with the last three markets. That also gives us the confidence that we know how to do that, because these are, again, these are not technology deployments. These are real business change in markets.
We need to make sure we face that, and we face that in the right way. These things are stepping stones towards our new modular, much more modern architecture that also will lead to productivity gains. I hope Harold will come back to that tomorrow morning.
Yeah. With regard to your question on Heineken Silver in India, indeed, traditionally the strong segment is an important segment in India. couple of years ago, United Breweries launched Kingfisher Ultra, which is doing very well, really appealing to a new generation of urban consumers that are coming in year after year. Also here in India, we have an opportunity to premiumize that occasion with Heineken Silver. We believe definitely that there's also a market for that in a beer market that traditionally is more skewed towards the strong end.
Robert Jan?
Yes. Hi. Good afternoon. My name is Robert Jan Vos, ABN AMRO. My first question is for Marc. You mentioned that Heineken Silver is the big bet for next year, and you also mentioned the $100 million investment behind it. You also discussed some issues that held back growth in the U.S. and freight tariffs and the supply chain issues. What are your views on that for 2023? I would assume this should improve next year versus 2022. Can you comment on that, please?
The crisis on the ocean freight was mainly Q2, Q3. This is now resolved. We would not have announced the launch of Heineken Silver if we would not have the guarantees from the carriers that it would be back to normal. The prices are still above the prices, the historic prices, I would say. In terms of availability of carriers, that's back to normal.
That should be better.
Yeah.
Okay, thank you. My second question is for Dolf. I think in your introduction, you said, I hope I'm paraphrasing correctly, but you said that in the past, you may have stepped a bit too strongly on the brake with marketing in order to meet your operating profit target. That comment suggests that you see a kind of optimal marketing budget as a percentage of sales. How far are you below that currently, and to what level do you expect that to increase?
Very good. Thank you, Robert Jan. One clarifying part on the ocean freight to the U.S. Because of hedging, the real impact is actually really landing next year financially. Because for this year, we were still protected by the hedge prices of late last year. There's really two parts, the disruption out of stocks, we really believe that's now behind us. That should not hold us back next year. The financial impact is really still quite severe next year. Although more recently, we are starting tariffs starting to go down. On the marketing and selling as percentage of revenue, nobody knows what is the right number. You know, if you look to L'Oréal, it's 30%+, and they have beautiful 70%+ gross margins.
If you look to the Spirit companies, they're in the 16%-18% range, they have gross margins in the sixties. The brewers have gross margins in the 50, 55 kind of range, I think we are more low teens. Because of COVID, of course, and all the price increases, that's now hovering around that 10% mark. I don't know scientifically what's the right number. I really believe as the category boundaries are blurring, competition is much broader than your traditional beer companies, that we will have to find a way to structurally, consistently increase our marketing selling as percentages of revenue.
We don't have an endpoint, but that's why the productivity is so incredibly important, and not just one or two years in the crisis, but structurally to at least have the ability to continuously start taking that percentage up. The thing that culturally we're trying to change is that there was a lot of leeway and freedom with local management teams that if they were struggling to hit their operating profit target, to just stop spending marketing selling in Q4. That we really want to eliminate because it's not strategic, it's not sustainable. It actually affects the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing spend. That we think we have addressed by making it conditional. Your operating profit bonus target is conditional on your marketing selling.
The beginning of this year, everybody was still, You know, are they really serious about this? I think they found out by now that we're serious about it. That addresses the behavioral component. What's more important, and Hubert is gonna speak about that tomorrow, is to get that flywheel going. That ultimately, you have, you know, you have superior growth, you take more productivity out. Part of that, you reinvest. Your gross margin starts growing, more growth, more productivity. That's the flywheel that we're trying to really ignite. We were not happy how the growth wheel was, in a way, moving the wrong way between 2016 and 2019. Of course, now it's all a bit hard to see through because COVID and, you know, all the different components.
We're firmly committed, and this is really at the heart of EverGreen, to get that flywheel going and heading in the right direction. I don't know where it's gonna end, but it better be, you know, structurally starting to go above 10% and creeping up year-over-year. That's what, you know, we would aim for.
Laboy.
Sorry. Thank you.
Oh, you're good.
I'm Carlos Laboy from HSBC. There's so many good operating questions to ask, but I have to ask Yolanda. Yolanda, you know, we heard today about purpose, values, strategy. To move the strategy into action, you need to codify the behaviors that define the success of the next generation of leadership. I was curious, how were they codified, first of all?
Mm-hmm.
Really, how are those behaviors differently from the behaviors that define success for the last generation of leadership?
Mm-hmm.
How do you use this to drive culture? Maybe that second question is for Dolf as well. We don't get any of this without that behavior codification being really clear across the entire organization.
Should I give it a, l et me start, and then I pass it on to Dolf. It's a great question. As part of the work that we have done recently is that we have looked at the behaviors that we need to drive the culture. As I talked about developing a new potential model, how we do assessment centers, we also created a whole new set of what we call the Heineken behaviors for all. They apply for everyone in the organization, and they are divided in four pillars. The first of them being shape, deliver, develop, and connect. These are the four pillars. If you think about shaping, it's all about shaping the strategy. It's about thinking consumers and customers first. It's about taking courageous and bold moves. Deliver is all about bringing it to life. That's how we...
I talked about Deliver being one of the biggest behaviors, observable behaviors that we see in Heineken. You move there from Develop. Develop becomes extremely important because we will hold our leaders accountable for development of the people in the organization. Connect is really about coming together with empathy, coming together to create the right space.
Based on those four pillars, we have created eight behaviors. Additionally, we have created three levels within those set of eight behaviors, and they tackle all the different levels in the organization. When you think about how we have moved from designing them, how we move to delivering them and making sure that everybody understands them, they're part of performance management as well in the how, so they're measured in performance management, not just from an expectation standpoint, but an assessment standpoint, and that's how we bring it to life. When you think about leadership development and that pyramid that I show with different specific, the different audiences and how we have segmented the organization, each one of those different segments, We bring the behaviors to life in a different way, depending on the level of the audience.
Very good. Thanks, Yola. By the way, Yola and team did an amazing job at actually indeed operationalizing the purpose values to these behaviors at different organizational levels, tying it to end-of-year calibration, assessment centers, 360 degrees.
Yeah.
I really feel that we are building the kind of structures to start moving the behaviors. When I think about the behaviors we want to sustain versus the behaviors we really want to jump-start, and within those four buckets and the deliver results. It's very good at Heineken. There is a pragmatic, no-nonsense culture. We call it deliver the goods. When you promise something, you do it. That's what we want to preserve, that no-nonsense execution kind of focus. The shape was less developed. To be really kind of forward-thinking, shaping future strategies, making big, bold, courageous moves, there was a bit of an incremental culture in that sense. We are really addressing that through how we assess, evaluate, promote people, but also in how we design our strategy process.
For example, we realized that the way we were doing annual planning process versus strategic planning process, that our strategic planning process was basically a rolling annual process. It was just, you know, extrapolating it rather than really thinking bold, full potential, and then work your way back. That's on sustain, protect the deliver culture and really strengthen more the shaping, the courageous culture. That's why also we added courage as one of the four values. On the other side of things, between connect and develop, what we need to protect is connect. A we are we culture, a very people-oriented culture. You see it reflected in those engagement levels, the green blots. That is something that as we are dialing up performance management, we don't want it to come to the detriment of that.
We were less of a develop culture. For example, we were historically not a feedback culture because we like to be nice. There was also quite some harmony. Sometimes, you know, giving each other feedback, you know, affects that. What we're really trying to build is, hey, you can have that feedback conversation, you can have that constructive kind of conflict conversation without affecting the we nature of the building. So we're really boosting shape and develop. We call it having the real conversations and being comfortable in having the real conversations. We as a team need to role model that. We fully realize that. While preserving our no-nonsense deliver culture and our kind of connect people culture.
Thanks, Carlos.
Hi, it's Laurence Whyatt here at Barclays. A couple for Ronald on the digital piece, if that's okay, particularly around Latin America. There are a number of companies launching digital apps in the marketplace at the moment, and a few of those already are selling third-party products as well, potentially giving them a bit of advantage. We know ABI has, I think, around 100 partners on theirs. I think Unilever are doing something similar, and we also have the soft drinks companies potentially launching apps. You mentioned people are only gonna have, say, three to five apps that they're going to use. What makes you so confident that Heineken's gonna be one of those? I suppose, why did you not consider partnering with one of the existing app operators to perhaps shortcut your route?
Secondly, what's the key reasons that customers are not going digital? Are there any key barriers that are more challenging than others?
Yeah. I propose I'll give it a first go, but I would also like Marc to lean in from the markets themselves. Yeah, there's an explosion of players in market, not just in Latin America, also in Southeast Asia, as I was explaining. Why do we think we have a right to win, and why do we do it ourselves? That starts with really knowing our customers and having very, very strong customer relationships. It starts with that. It starts with the credibility of doing it. It's not just a technical solution and building a platform or an app. You saw the scores on the app. That is not just about the technology, obviously. That is about the relationship we have, the services we offer, the insights we create.
I truly believe that if you look at what Heineken excelled in the past, I said we want to become the best-connected brewer. Actually, we are great at those connections. We have the strong brands we have with our consumers, the relationships our sales rep had with all those outlets, that's the starting point. It is, in that sense, much easier for us than for new incumbents to the marketplace. There are not great examples in B2B. There are not great examples in B2B of outside players that have built significant positions in the world. That is, that's one. We're absolutely open to partnering. We, in multiple markets we look at working with other people where it makes sense from a geographical point of view, from a category point of view. Actually what we believe in and we can do.
It's a choice we make, we make market by market. That's a bit of an 1B question I think you were asking. The last part, why are people not onboarding on the app? A lot has to do with the adoption, being digital native or not, also seeing the value there. Like we said in in Nigeria, we really have to help bring our people on board. They're not most necessarily the normal people. We have created personas of outlet owners of customers, and those personas are not, this is a restaurant and this is a wetland, a pub. No. Those personas have to do with how digital native those people are.
Like I said, the lady in the U.K., literally the first order, a 71-year-old lady at 1:00 A.M. at night, it says something about her. Probably she did online banking for years already. There is a different re-- and that will take time. We talk a lot about digital transformation. I am not a big believer anymore that overnight it all changes. It is a gradual process that will accelerate over time, and it requires change. Nothing else than that to onboard and create an option. Mark-
Yeah.
Maybe specifically because Brazil and Mexico.
Yeah. I can give a few more color. We speak with some other parties, and we have in some regions pilots also going on. The app that you were referring to with 100 suppliers on is today back to 60, so they have major problems. I think Ronald also shared we have twice the market share on the modern trade.
E-retail
E-retail. There is reason for that. Because those large modern trade players, they are not so happy with the initiative of Bees. We take a little bit of more time. We speak with different kind of potential partners, and we do that in a harmonized way. It's not in isolation the Americas, it's something that in the end is every time it kind of goes to Dolf to make sure that we would not make a stupid deal in the Americas that conflicts with another deal in other region. But we take our time. I think it's not head down, and it will not happen overnight. I fully agree with that.
Sanjeet Aujla from Credit Suisse. Question for James first. You spoke quite a bit about beer still being under-penetrated in certain consumer occasions. As you try and tap into that and think about innovation, so far a lot of innovation you've spoken about today is line extending existing brands. When you look across the portfolios, is there enough to sweat still out of those existing brands, you know, to leverage them into those occasions? Or does Heineken need to start developing new brands from scratch as well? Or do you go out and try and acquire? You know, how do you think about that innovation road ahead?
It's an interesting question. We've got more than 300 brands, so we've got quite a few to choose from. What we're looking at by and large is what is the right proposition for the right consumer spaces that we go after. We choose the proposition first, and then have we got a brand to suit it? If we haven't, then there are other choices to look at. I don't believe in overextending brands. I think brands should have tramlines for where they go, where they don't go. That's why, again, you saw in one of the countries where we looked at re-engineering our portfolio and getting those brands positioned in the right spaces very well and very clearly is so important. That's why this insight that we've generated is gonna help us.
There isn't a sort of cookie-cutter answer to the question. Our brands do have power, can extend, particularly once repositioned. We look at the consumer space first and then work back.
Just one for Marc, just on Mexico. I think you've started a pilot there with Coke FEMSA, I think in the south of the country. Can you just talk a little bit about how that's shaping up, what you're trying to achieve and how far that can potentially go if the pilot's successful?
Well, that's a very early start. We indeed have a pilot in the south of Mexico with FEMSA. At this stage, I can't comment. I mean, it is a important strategic pilot, and the outcome will depend on the benefits of both parties. It should be win-win. Today I can't comment. We just started the pilot.
What's maybe good to add to that is that as Heineken, we don't believe it's gonna be a cookie-cutter approach where we just take one dominant way and we force that through the throat of all our OpCos, wherever you are. Yeah. Already we differentiate strongly between the archetypes and even within the archetypes and even within countries we are learning. Like in Vietnam.
Yeah.
We're learning that in terms of digitizing the right consumer in the north versus in the south, in the on trade versus the off trade, there may be different ways of going about it. In one channel we want to really own it because we are sufficiently large to do so. In another channel you may say, I'm gonna be part of somebody else's platform. You're really gonna start customizing it more to the needs in that particular market. If Mexico being a case in point, in the north, we probably don't need it, but some parts in the center and the south, the Cokes network will really complement and give us additional reach and service level that standalone will be difficult. We are indeed really kind of looking into all those kind of things.
You may also maybe say that as a culture and how we work together, we are good in joint ventures. We're good in partnering with others, which is a bit of a strategic asset, because that's not easy. We all know it's hard to partner between proud global companies, but this is something that we do in many places around the world. That's why I like how the team is going about it. Let's not rush into one way, but let's really find our way what is the most compelling, and learn very fast alongside. Yeah.
Hi, guys. Thanks for the presentations. I'm Edward Mundy from Jefferies. Dolf, one question for you, first of all, on superior growth. You've talked about superior and balanced growth with a better balance in volume and value. Philosophically, is that purely so that you can convert your top line into better growth margins and therefore drive margins? Or do you think this also is enabler of more superior growth? I.e., could you actually drive stronger growth as you take more price and premiumize and are more assertive on that side of the equation? The second question. I mean, you talked Dolf, you talked about, you know, playing Champions League, you need to attack and both defend.
You know, given we've got, I guess, the regional heads for a lot of the attacking, parts of the business, you know, do you feel that that message has got through to your troops, that if you're able to defend and cut costs, that will then release more money to be able to reinvest in growth and attack more effectively? That's perhaps a question for each of the three regional heads there.
Very good. You guys have two minutes to think about it. By the way, very good, eh, to have it come from-
Yeah
the regional presidents, because they need to bring this to life in the day-to-day, and that's the creative tension between driving top line and delivering the productivity. On superior balanced growth, why do we feel this important? Beer is the most capital-intense FMCG category. What we were finding is that the organization was so incentivized, literally and culturally, to drive volume, that there is a lot of places where that is a financially not sustainable way of going about it. For example, in Africa, you really need to think hard because your WACC is super high, it's often mid double digits, to implement CapEx projects is significantly more expensive in Nigeria than it is in Vietnam, for example.
We really felt if we just unleashed this company continuously on volume, volume, the amount of CapEx that you need to put in and the impact that has on your economic profit, that was not the path that we want to go down. Indeed, making this shift from a more volume-driven to a more balanced driven is really because we're in such a capital-intensive business. Part of EverGreen is also to start paying more attention to return on capital efficiency, capital turnover. We are deliberately not yet putting a number on that because we feel we need to learn a lot. We are putting the right language, metrics in place. Harold will speak to that. But that's really with that in mind. That means that we are looking for a superior growth with a better constitution.
Whether that ultimately leads to a higher OFT, we will see. That's why also deliberately, we're not putting a number, a revenue number on that, because we're still really learning how is that all gonna work out. While we hold ourselves accountable, we always want to be in the top group in terms of top line growth. We don't want to become overly focused on pricing, killing the volume growth, and really dropping the revenue growth. That is very clearly not where we want to be. We really are learning, okay, how do we get this? How do we boost the revenue management? How do you manage all the trade-offs that you will have to make along the way? Yeah. Great to hear from you guys on growth and productivity.
Evergreen is a multiyear journey. It was actually kickstarted in the midst of the COVID crisis. The pillar that we started Evergreen with was actually the Cost pillar. That was on one side to protect the organization. On the other side, it was to fuel the growth. This is really a muscle that we have been exercising over the last 2.5 years, especially when we were in the process of, if I speak for APAC, of looking at different countries with a V-shaped, U-shaped, and L-shaped recovery. Especially for the L-shaped markets, we had to do some significant restructuring.
I think as we now are, well, in our COVID recovery phase, yeah, this is a muscle that we need to continue to exercise, because we need the fuel for our growth engine. That is the balance that we are currently finding. Top line, I think in APAC, we very much have a history of revenue, absolute revenue growth predominantly driven by volume. In the current market, circumstances, that's a little bit more volume and pricing. What I believe is a big, big mix opportunity that I spoke about this morning.
Roland.
What is the shift? In my region, we have the growth. When you see, due to the volatility and the environment and the low net revenue per liter, we have been always focused on the cost. What is very new is the brand power. Higher brand power allowing you to gain market share, but also ability to price up your brands. That is very new for the region. The cost agenda was always there, the productivity.
What is new, reduce even more your cost in order to finance and to very fuel your growth and to support your brands. In Africa, Middle East, we have been tendency that's what Dolf described to say to deliver the goods, cut your ETL, BTL, and this one is the big shift now. We are really continuing to reduce the cost, to reduce the capital intensity. Let's be sure that you are fueling the growth. You can see already that we're increasing our brand power in all of the markets a lot.
Yeah. I do want to also give my little flavor on your question because you mentioned is a kind of almost a waiver for what you call the attacking regions. I can be very clear on that. All of the regions we have to contribute to the growth savings targets that we set globally. On a monthly basis, I was referring, you know, the ranking, you know, which region sells the most Heineken. There is a same kind of follow-up by region on a monthly basis on growth savings. There isn't any waiver. Everybody needs to deliver to the growth savings targets that we set globally. Yeah.
Maybe on that note, you may have picked up on it in the presentation of Yolanda on our kind of bonus targets. We didn't want to rock the boat too much on our kind of the STIs that are most visible, revenue, cash flow, operating profit, market share, but every manager in the company has 30% individual targets. That in the past people could do with it what they wanted. What we have set for our top 1,000 leaders, every single one gets a growth savings target, and everyone gets a growth margin target. That's very new. Again, it's not just chasing volume and delivering your profit whatever way. Every senior manager in the company have...
Now we are going into the third year of having a growth savings target, and everybody has a growth margin target to bring that awareness about are you putting in enough pricing. I love what Roland said, because long term, your pricing power equals your brand power. Your brand power, you know, is to a large extent driven by your ability to invest in marketing and selling. I think slowly but surely the co-organization is starting to connect the dots, and it's really tied into our STIs and how we subtly but importantly evolve them. Yeah. Thanks. Who's next?
Andrea.
Andrea Pistacchi from Bank of America here. Two questions. The first one on soft drinks. Through the presentations today, you haven't talked about soft drinks. Clearly, there's a lot of opportunity in beer, but as the lines between categories become more blurred, some of the other brewers looking increasingly at the soft drinks space. It'll be interesting to hear your thoughts about soft drinks and how it interacts with beer. The second question, I don't know if it's appropriate for today, possibly for tomorrow. If not today, we can deal with it tomorrow. On the distribution business in Europe, which has typically been a low margin but a strategic business for you're talking about the digitalization of the route to consumer.
Interested in how this and potential efficiencies can, is improving and can improve the profitability of that EUR 1.5 billion of distribution third-party sales in Europe.
Very good. Let me speak to soft drinks and then maybe, Ronald, you can speak to Europe. On soft drinks, we have a couple of important markets. For example, in Central Africa, where we have the Coca-Cola license, we have in Haiti, we have the Pepsi lines, CCU is partnering. We have many markets where we have the bottling rights on either Coke or Pepsi. Typically, I think the mental model has been where there's relative lower per capita beer and soft drinks, it really makes sense to share your logistical platform. So, t hat we don't see change.
Now to really go into bottling in a more major way, actually, at the bottling margins typically are lower than beer margins, so I'm not so sure that we would be too keen to do that at a systemic scale. It would be really done market by market because it makes sense for the local circumstances, so to say. From a EB to B collaboration point of view, I think we're really intrigued. Back to Sanjeet's question, we're really kind of, you know, doing the experiment with Coca-Cola in Mexico, and there may be ways also in higher per capita to collaborate. But I'm not sure you want to be the bottler itself, but for sure, more innovative, creative ways of sharing distribution platforms. We'll see how that evolves. Yeah.
I'll pick up the second. By the way, we have a joint venture with Coca-Cola in Romania.
Yeah.
We share the same platform. We share the same distribution. We share the same. Indeed, we are learning, we're experimenting, and I think we do what is right depending on those, on those circumstances. For wholesale Europe, and to some extent, Søren tomorrow will come back to productivity gains in Europe. One, yes, the return of sales of wholesale is not low, but the capital deployed is very low. It is sometimes even negative. We have markets where our working capital is negative in wholesale, so there's multiple ways to look at that business. Secondly, I think wholesale is now. We say it's. We have the biggest marketplace in Europe. It was physical. It's slowly but surely becoming an online marketplace.
The teams of Søren in every single market are making a massive drive, as I showed in Italy, to really bring that online, which helps us also to sell a broader category services over time.
Are there opportunities for further optimization? Absolutely. The team of Søren, and in all the markets are on top of that, not just in wholesale, but in all of out of home, all on trade in total, both in, let's call it, the feet on the street that do different activities and more efficient, as well as the back offices, where we're looking at.
Trevor.
Trevor Stirling, Bernstein. First question, I guess, for Marc. Like, I think if I heard you right, you're considering building a canning factory in Mexico.
Yes.
With hindsight, if you could go back in time, would you still dispose of Empaque?
No. Back then, we had a famous hunt for cash program, and that Empaque factory was indeed sold back then at a good price to be part of that hunt for cash. With hindsight, we would not have sold it. No, I don't think so. But it is what it is. We are going to build a new factory in the north of Mexico, next to our brewery in Meoqui.
Second question, I guess, for Yolanda and Dolf. Thinking of gender balance across the organization, and clearly it's gonna vary by function, and I could be wrong, but my impression has always been historically, country general managers is where the worst. I guess, put another way, how do you get more Maggie Timoney's?
That's a great question. I did mention that we have declared several interventions in the space of diversity and equity and inclusion. One of them is increase the number of females, leaders across the organization. The other one is to also increase what we call the cultural diversity measured by regional representation. It's two things that we try to make sure that. The senior managers in female really includes all the general managers as well, which really try to create promotion from within and have a stronger internal pipeline. When I show the pyramid and I show the growth that we are trying to drive, the intent is we are able to feed into the higher levels of the organization to ensure that we can identify those Maggie Timoney's.
We find very important as well that we have a balanced representation of nationalities and culture everywhere where we operate. We have also set a target of reaching 65% of regional nationals in all the management teams in all the regions. We are also seeing actually quite progress. All the regions, the three regions, but not Europe. In Europe, we have a different challenge, which is bring people outside of Europe. In the three remaining regions, we are already over 60% towards achieving the 65%. We believe that by actually tackling both, we should be able to see an increased level of cultural diversity and women in our top positions.
Yeah. The, in the top 150, 50% of that group turned over between 2019 and today. There was a lot. By the way, 80%, 90% organic internal promotions. The weight of females doubled. It was arguably, 2019 is not that long ago. It was low teens, it's now low twenties. We're heading in the right direction. The top 150 is basically half country managers, half functional leaders. Now in the functional leaders, we're probably already heading to the 30%. With the country managers, it's significantly lower. It starts by starting to appoint female candidates for the entry-level general manager position. We have Mao in Sri Lanka. We have Nadia in Serbia, in Bulgaria.
Hangzhou.
Now in the Bahamas.
Bahamas.
We're starting to appoint much more entry-level so that. You need to fill it from the bottom up. We won't hire a lot of people in regional president or GM roles from the outside, because that's. You really need to have a feel for the company, the culture, the way of working. The only way is to really bottom-up make it work and accelerate. One thing to clarify, which is important because it came up during lunch with another conversation, that we are firmly committed to diversity and inclusion. After a lot of debates, we put a number on the gender target of 30%, but it needs to be merit-based. I don't ever want one of our female colleagues to feel she need to defend, you know, No, I'm here because of merit, because they are there for merit.
It's all about equality of opportunity, but ultimately, the best person wins. And including sometimes that may disappoint the organization because out of multi-gender candidates, we pick the man because he's in that particular case, the best candidate. I feel proud that we are basically doubling the rate at which it is going up. It was going up by 1% a year. It's going up by 2% a year. If you continue that, we will hit the 40% by 2030. It's really important that you maintain the integrity that is merit-based. And if you overdo it, you start getting concerns around that. Yeah.
Thank you.
Hi, it's Mitch Collett from Deutsche Bank over here. I've got one question for Dolf. The focus on being a bit less volume growth driven, but bearing in mind the EUR 400 million of annual cost savings you're targeting beyond 2023. Dolf, can you comment on what you see as the optimal mix of revenue versus margin contribution to organic operating profit growth? I appreciate you're not going to want to be drawn on a margin target, but you used to talk about 17% as being a North Star at some point in the future. Does growing profit ahead of sales mean that that aspiration might potentially come back into play at some point in the future?
I learned my lesson. You know. On my first press conference, I made the mistake of putting that 17% margin, Boy, I regretted it. No, what's really important is what we call the quality of our growth, the shape of our P&L, that is really the shift that we're making. That we are superior growth, but indeed quality growth with a bigger component of pricing. That really depends on where inflation is gonna pan out in the world, that we don't know. Historically, if you would get 2.5%, 3% pricing, it was fantastic. It was probably globally in line with CPI. We don't know where that's gonna go, and that's why we're refraining from putting a number on it. The direction...
By the way, we also don't want to suggest that we're walking away from volume growth. We love volume growth. Also in a capital-intensive business, you'd also do need a volume growth. It's about quality of revenue growth. We'll see how it pan out depending on where inflation rates in the world pan out. We fully subscribe to the rationale that you need to make sure your branding profit grows faster than your revenue. We're also acknowledging that in the period 2015-2019, we have not been delivering that. It was partly because our fixed costs were structurally every year growing faster than our revenue. That needs to stop. That really needs to stop. I think that is really starting to be firmly aligned in the ways of working and the expectations that we are setting.
We are doing it right now without having volume leverage because we are coming out. Basically this year, our volume will be a couple percent above 2019 level. We will deliver. Let me speak for the half year because otherwise I say something on the full year. On the half year, we were delivering EUR 400 million incremental operating profit on basically flat volumes versus 2019. Without operating leverage, we're delivering that EUR 400 million. That is because of the incredible hard work done both by the regional presidents and the functional chiefs. What we want is that to become the new normal, just being part of playing Champions League, and that's why we are committing open-ended to that EUR 400 million a year.
We believe that EUR 400 million a year, provided that you have good pricing, because then there's less gross margin slippage you need to compensate with your saving. Provided we have good pricing, EUR 400 million should be enough to end continuously up our investments, whether it's in digital technology, marketing and selling, sustainability, decarbonize, and make sure that we have operating leverage going forward. We will see how it exactly pans out. There's too many unknowns, too many assumptions you would have to make that we rather don't box ourselves in on that. Thanks, Mitch.
James Edwardes Jones from RBC. Dolf, you've talked a lot about the need to be more selective around your capital expenditure and the capital intensity. Does that apply to M&A as well? How big a part of your plans is M&A likely to be compared to what we've seen over the last 10-15 years?
Yes, as it should, and it has been. I do feel if, I'm incredibly proud of the work done by Jean-François and the leadership at the time. I think the organization has been very bold but also very disciplined on our M&A. Basically every single acquisition, we have delivered the business case, you know, after capital charge and what have you. Going forward, what is really different from the time that Jean-François became CEO is the company is more than double the size, and the remaining targets out there are probably smaller. The net impact that acquisition will have for us the next 10 years, by definition, will be smaller than it was the last 10 years.
That's why in the way we are planning leading the organization, we want it to be all about driving it organically, and then the acquisition is the gravy on top of. That's how we are thinking about it. When we're doing our strategic plan, it's all about the organic performance of the, of the OpCos, and then separately with our strategy and business development team, we look at the M&A. Yeah. I really feel that. I don't think consolidation is ending. It will continue, but the net impact by nature will be smaller than it used to, in the past. Therefore, we need to take responsibility and really up our game on the organic part.
We're gonna take one last question today. Tomorrow, we will have more time for Q&A.
Hey, guys. Thank you for having me. This is Greg with Evercore. On the B2B side of the business, you know, like, how do you go about educating the customers you're going to that this offering is there as something that, you know, they can use? Then once they sign up, how do you educate them about what they can actually do with it? You know, like how they can drive a lot of the benefits that you know, talked us through earlier. Thanks.
I guess that's one for me. I'm gonna take a market I didn't show today, Spain. For quite a long time, we struggled in Spain because. Actually it was our feeling and the feeling of the market that it was difficult to digitize in Spain because the market was not ready for that. A lot of other digital products, also online banking are actually lower in terms of penetration than the rest of the world. We had good sessions with the local leadership over there. They completely changed the approach, including like leaflets, online leaflets, but education. Remarkable to see today, and I don't know the number by heart, so maybe Søren can say that tomorrow when we're there. It's one of the fastest-growing markets today in Europe. Why?
The unlock was first in the mindset of our people that the country is not ready for that. Secondly, by really making it simple, they had to create adoption again at the point of sale. I think the guys have done a remarkable job. Explaining what it is, how to use it, and over time, there will be more features being rolled out because you basically start at the start with
Foundational work with taking an order online. Why would I take an order online? Because except for us disturbing your business on Tuesday morning between 9:00 A.M and 12:00 A.M because we can buy or because we pick up the phone and call you at the moment that it suits you can place that order at 1:00 A.M., in the morning, when you close your business. You can walk in your cell. It's convenient. Taking them through, and I think this is a really good example. Southern Europe was much slower than Northern Europe. U.K. started 10 years ago, and it really was about a mindset change for ourselves, education and support material for our customers, really creating an end-to-end adoption plan. I think they've done a hell of a job, yeah.
We're requested to add one more last question.
Hi. Rosanna Avery from Aberdeen. I had a question about female consumers, and I suppose that stat that you put up at the beginning, James, about the 20% higher, the way that it lands with men than with women. What would that statistic look like if we looked at it 10 years ago? Where are most of those? If we could talk in, I suppose, a broad generalization about recruitment of female consumers, is that a lot of that coming from 0.0? That will obviously be a range across the different regions. Also, I suppose interested to know whether you think those consumers in general are more fickle and where you're sort of taking the share of throat from. Is that people new into the category and how long they stay in the category and with you for.
It's a good question. I don't give you a misleading number 'cause I haven't got it in my mind. I don't think it would've changed materially. part of the reason for that is I think we've have, certainly in developed markets, not until recent years, been refreshing the consumers at the younger end, as well as we intend to and have been in recent times. It's certainly true that 0.0 has helped that. It's certainly true that Heineken Silver has helped that. It's certainly true that some of our other propositions have helped that. we do expect that to accelerate. I talked this morning about what we loosely called beyond beer, which is more flavors, sweeter, perception of functional benefits, sometimes perception of natural, sometimes perception of lighter.
I think there's so much opportunity in that space to broaden the target, broaden consumer appeal. I also think there's so much opportunity in the flavor profile. As I said, 90% of beer is lager and tastes. You can taste the difference, but you have to look for it sometimes. Again, I think we. As we look at consumer back rather than product out, we start to see massive new opportunities for us. You've named a couple there.
I think we're gonna taste some of them right now.
Exactly.
downstairs, right?
Give us some feedback.
Federico.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, first, I'm going to close the session for our, the people that have been, following us online. We thank you very much, for your interest in Heineken, and please join us tomorrow as of 9:00 A.M., as we will resume the, yeah, the webcast. So thank you very much.