Great. Hello. Good morning, everyone. Firstly, welcome to St. Louis. Thanks to those who have been able to join in person. It is hard to believe that it was three years ago already since we were all last together in Mexico City. This also marks the three-year anniversary of my spinning class career. I look forward to revisiting that chapter with some of you at 6:30 A.M. tomorrow. Hopefully, the weather in St. Louis is as kind to us as it was in Mexico City. I know it was a long flight for many. Ironically, we have people from Cape Town, where I think it was quite easy. We had people from London and from Europe, where it was quite easy. The hardest part to travel from apparently was New York yesterday.
Those that persevered through the travel disruptions, we really appreciate you being here with us in person. We have a great agenda of presentations and experiences today and tomorrow, so I am sure we will make it worth your while. Most importantly, we will have a couple of opportunities to share a beer, so we look forward to doing that. I think I have met almost everyone here today, but in case not, I am Shaun Fullalove, and I have had the privilege of leading the investor relations function here at ABI for the last five years. Michel and Fernando surprisingly have also allowed me to be the emcee for the event again, so I will do my best to keep us on track during the day. Before I invite Michel to the stage to kick us off, I just have a few housekeeping matters to mention.
Firstly, in small words up here, just a quick reminder on the legal side, this is our disclaimer, which is available on our website. Do not expect you to read all of this now, but everything we talk about today that is not a historical fact is a forward-looking statement, and these are not guarantees of future performance. As a helpful reference, you can refer to our 20-F on our website that contains a discussion of all of our risk factors, including geopolitical and economic uncertainties. For those that did not join for breakfast this morning, the bathrooms are to the right, as you exit the room. For those that did not join for spinning this morning, which is most of you, expect to see you tomorrow.
I think we still have a few spare seats still, so if you would like to do it in the stadium next door, reach out to me or Pat or Kate in my team, and we can sign you up. We also have an event WhatsApp channel, so we have evolved from the app from last time to a WhatsApp channel. If you have not signed up for that yet, there should be a QR code floating around somewhere. We are using that as a channel just to communicate about events, reminders, etc., during the next couple of days. What else? We have a planned 20-minute break, should be around 10:30 A.M. It might be slightly earlier, depending on how the agenda moves. We will have lunch around 12:15 P.M., 12:20 P.M. And then we have a short break around 3:00 P.M. just to allow you to drop bags, etc.
Then we will head to the brewery in the late afternoon for the brewery tour, dinner, and brand experience event. Of course, I know people have traveled from far, so if you need to take a break more frequently, feel free to do that. Finally, name badges. I'm not wearing mine right now, but they have a few relevant details. First one is your table number, which I think you guys are all at the right tables now, so you've figured that out this morning. The second one is going to be your brewery tour group for this afternoon. We'll leave in different vans, and then we'll split into different groups, so make sure you're in the right beer brand group for this afternoon. The third is going to be your market visit group for tomorrow. We'll split into groups then as well.
Any issues with logistics or scheduling or anything that you need to be resolved, please stop by the concierge desk right outside here on the second floor, and we can sort it out. That is it, I think, in terms of reminders and logistics. Let's get it started. With that, I'd like to invite our CEO, Michel Doukeris, to the stage to take us through the introduction. Michel, it's with you.
Please welcome to the stage, Michel Doukeris.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 2026 ABI Capital Markets Day. Thank you for those here in person and those joining us virtually. It is really exciting to come together in St. Louis, the historic home of Anheuser-Busch Brewery. It was right here, 150 years ago, that a legacy was born and the first Budweiser was brewed. Over the next few days, you will experience firsthand Anheuser-Busch's history and heritage, how we have rebalanced our portfolio to create momentum in the U.S., and our global strategy in action. You also hear from several members of our global and U.S. leadership teams. We have three objectives for our time together. First, update you on the progress we've made in our global strategy. Second, reinforce our unique leadership advantages, and even more importantly, show how we have been investing to build superior capabilities.
Lastly, share how we have transitioned from the first half of our 10-year plan, what we internally call Reset, to our next phase of growth, called Reignite. Allow me to start by recapping what we discussed during our last two meetings together. In 2021, we made a deliberate choice. We moved from inorganic to organic growth strategy. We set a long-term ambition, simplified our strategy, and we committed to consistent compounding growth. In 2023, we shared the elements to create superior value. A large and growing category, hard-earned and unique leadership advantages, replicable growth toolkits, and superior profitability. Together, these elements formed a compelling investment thesis. One that was so simple, it fit on the back of a beer coast. I hope you have some at your table. Today, we are halfway through our 10-year plan.
From the beginning, we committed to delivering consistent and compounding EBITDA growth within the range of 4%-8%. Since 2021, we have been delivering within or above this outlook every year. Just as important, we have grown our EBITDA in nominal terms from $19.2 billion in 2021 to $22.4 billion in the last 12 months. This was the result of consistent execution of our strategy across our footprint. Our net revenue increased from $54 billion in 2021 to roughly $63 billion as of the last 12 months. We are growing brand power and market share globally, and we reached all-time high volumes in 16 of our markets in the H1 of this year, including countries like Mexico, South Africa, Colombia, and India. We are digitizing and monetizing our business, scaling BEES into a superior B2B platform. BEES has achieved $60 billion in annualized GMV this year.
BEES marketplace is delivering around $5 billion in GMV, and it is becoming a meaningful incremental revenue stream. We estimate that BEES marketplace, if treated like a country, would be a top 10 contributor to EBITDA growth for us this year. We continue to optimize our business. We expanded our EBITDA margin and generated $13.9 billion in free cash flow, an increase of $4.6 billion since 2021. We have reduced our net debt ratio to below 3x . All of this results in industry leading EPS growth that has been both consistent and compounding. Despite a challenging operating environment, we have delivered in line or above the top quartile of CPGs across relevant KPIs. As I always say, we have a resilient strategy that, just like beer, is made for all occasions. Five years ago, most of our excess free cash flow was allocated to deleveraging.
Today, we have a stronger balance sheet. Our capital allocation has evolved, and we have increased our capital return to shareholders. As our leverage continues to trend down and our cash flow generation remains strong, we will further increase our capital allocation flexibility. Everything that I have shown so far is what we call above the surface, things you can see in our reported results. The biggest transformation is what we've been building under the surface. We have a very strong foundation with leadership advantages that differentiate us, an unparalleled ecosystem that give us meaningful scale, a broad, diversified footprint with meaningful market positions in large markets, a portfolio of leading and iconic mega brands, and superior profitability and cash conversion. This is the foundation on which we began to transform from inorganic to organic. Let me be clear here.
While the difference between the words is small, in reality, the transformation is way bigger. Delivering organic growth requires a different muscle, and it was one that we needed to build. We started with a simple question: What do best-in-class CPG companies do differently? We benchmarked global CPG peers, studied what capabilities separate the top quartile from the rest, and then we asked ourselves, "Where are we best in class? Where are we good but not yet great? What are the gaps we have to close?" With that clarity, we focused on building the right capabilities, those that would accelerate our transformation and strengthen our strategy. For five years, we've been consistent, investing time and resources to build and embed these capabilities into how we run our business. Today, we have the capabilities that make us more consumer centric, digitally enabled, and financially effective.
These include more actionable consumer insights, a focused and effective portfolio, a replicable mega platforms toolkit, and scaled digital platforms that give us better insights and create incremental revenue streams. We still have work to do, and we continue to benchmark, to learn, and to improve. Our ambition is to be superior across all these capabilities. You'll hear a lot about this over the next two days. In a nutshell, this is what we've been doing since 2021: delivering consistent and compounding results, reducing our leverage, and investing to build organic capabilities for growth. We are today a very different company, very different than we were just five years ago. We have an industry-leading portfolio of mega brands and mega platforms, and our markets have momentum. We have the largest and fastest growing non-alcohol beer portfolio globally.
We have been scaling up our beyond beer brands, and in this space, we are the challengers, which give us huge headroom for growth. We have a sizable and fast growing BEES marketplace business. Our free cash flow has reached an inflection point, and we have a new level of capital allocation flexibility. This is the company we have today and what we've been building under the surface. For those who know me, you know I'm a huge basketball fan. This is the Knicks winning the title. Here is one story, and it's a story of a player called Kobe Bryant. He's one of the greatest players in history, known for his obsessive preparation, discipline, and resilience.
After his team took a 2-0 lead in the 2009 NBA Finals, he was asked by a reporter why he was not happy, and he famously replied, "What's there to be happy about? Job's not finished." What's there to be happy about? Job's not finished. I tell my team the same thing. The job is not finished, and we are only getting started. 2026 marks the midway point of our 10-year plan and the first year of our next phase, Reignite. We will continue to deliver consistent compounding results while increasing investments to accelerate growth and create superior shareholder value. Before I pass it to the team, I would like to leave you with another thought. You came here knowing us a company that's best in beer.
Every day, as we continue to strengthen our capabilities, I ask myself: What does it take to be a best in class CPG company? Because that's what we aspire to be. As we go through the next two days, I would like to ask you to keep that same question in mind, and I would love to hear your feedback over a beer. What does it take to be a best in class CPG company? So thank you for joining us here today. The team worked very hard, including Shaun, to create an engaging agenda for you. Please enjoy St. Louis. I'm looking forward to our time together and, of course, a beer at the end of the day. Now, I'll hand it over to Ricardo Tadeu, our Chief Growth Officer. Thank you. Cheers.
Please welcome to the stage Ricardo Tadeu.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome again to the growth session now of our ABI Capital Markets Day. As Michel said, my name is Ricardo Tadeu. I recently completed 31 years with the company, 24 of which were spent in the field and the last seven leading global functions. Since 2022, I have been ABI's Chief Growth Officer. To be honest, the first time I saw this slide, I thought, "Can someone for the next time stop counting?" Someone stop the clock. Shaun, come on. Now my friends, on a more serious note, when I see this slide, more than thinking about my career, it makes me reflect on how important it is to experience the industry, its cycles, and different types of markets. It also reminds me what a great place ABI is to work if you are passionate about learning and, of course, about beer.
It is really, for me, a great privilege to represent this fantastic, ever-evolving organization. I say that with all my heart. There is never a year or a day like the other. As Michel mentioned in his introduction, we have just delivered the first chapter of our 10-year plan, Reset, and transition into our next phase, which is Reignite. Now we are going to address the first two elements of our strategy, lead and grow the category and digitize and monetize our ecosystem. I have three topics to cover in my introduction to the growth session. Once I have covered them, Marcel, Lucas, and Nick's presentations will follow and detail how we plan to accelerate our growth in the years to come. My first topic is the beer category itself. I will explain the current state of the beer category with a focus on our footprint, its trajectory, and opportunities.
In the second part, I will detail what growth means to ABI, as it is important to qualify what we want to achieve. In the third and final part, I will briefly outline the One ABI Way and some of our best in class capabilities that Michel mentioned to lead and grow the category. To start, I would like to share why we believe the beer and beyond beer category is a great platform to delivering our ambition to be a best in class CPG. Let us begin with the foundations of the category. Beer is made from natural ingredients and is local. It has been a part of human culture for a very long time, and it is still relevant today. Beer is so embedded in consumer lives that even in a challenging consumer environment, the category has continued to grow over the last five, 10, 15 years.
During this period, it has outperformed the CPG median and kept its participation stable. The relevance of our category can also be seen in its sheer scale. It is one of the largest profit pools among CPGs, creating value through superior margins and a deep emotional connection with consumers, as we can see in the power of beer. On top of all that, beer is estimated to grow volume and its share of alcohol in the next 10 years. Having spent more than 30 years in the beer industry, I have, of course, experienced a number of cycles, shifts in consumer trends, and seen different realities. This experience has taught me that the stage of development in each country is an important factor for assessing how to grow and the rate of growth. That is why we classify markets into three volume growth stages.
Developed markets have lower growth potential, but still offer great opportunities for specific levers, such as premium, balanced choices, and beyond beer. Emerging markets, on the other hand, are the least developed markets with long-term growth potential, mostly driven by our superior core. Developing markets, these are the ones in the middle. These are the countries that present a great opportunity of balanced growth in terms of core volume, premiumization, but also category expansion through balanced choices and beyond beer already. Now, coming back to developed markets. These markets, they have a lower rate of growth because their LDA populations are growing slowly or declining. While the Beer Industry Consumption Level, or BICL, what some of you will refer to as LDA per capita consumption, is at much higher levels already. But even very developed beer markets tend to have a higher income consumer base and clear growth levers.
As we refine our portfolio and innovate in the right spaces, we can take full advantage of these opportunities. Now, let's take the Netherlands, for example. In this developed market, we increased our volumes by double digits over the last decade. Our whole Europe business grew by 1% in the first half of this year, outperforming the industry. This is real proof that a developed beer market can deliver volume growth. Our very presence here in St. Louis reflects our confidence to drive revenue growth across developed markets. It may take time, but with clarity of direction and consistency in execution, we can grow. Brendan, our host, will take a deeper look at our progress in the U.S. Now, what about the less developed markets? Emerging and developing countries have 60 million new consumers entering our category every year. Much lower consumption levels and great room for expansion.
These markets are becoming more relevant each year, and this is where ABI's footprint makes a real difference. More than 60% of our volume comes from there. In these markets, mostly located in Latin America and Africa, we have leading market share positions and advanced commercial capabilities. More than 90% of our volume in these places is commercialized through BEES, and we have large-scale D2C platforms. Now, I'll share information. It may surprise you, but we have captured 98% of all beer volume growth in these regions since 2019. I repeat, 98%. That's exactly what we mean by leading and growing the category. Over the last 15 years, global beer volumes have grown at an annual rate of 0.3%, while sales have grown steadily at mid-single digits. Of course, this underlying growth is not immune to short-term disruptions caused by weather, macroeconomic conditions, and geopolitical events.
The global beer industry grew in nine and declined in six of the last 15 years, but the year-over-year variations were not extreme. Excluding COVID, annual beer volume growth ranged from -1.2% to +2.6% over this whole period. The steady long-term growth is driven by a structural tailwind from emerging and developing markets. These markets have grown at an annual rate of 1.8%, more than offsetting the decline in the developed markets. Now, when we weight each market according to its current share of our portfolio and apply the historical rates, we see annual structural growth between 0.3% and 0.5% volume. While it's impossible to predict how the industry will perform in any given year, we are confident it will grow over time in our footprint. Of course, this is only our starting point, not our ceiling.
Our objective is to outperform the category in a profitable way, taking advantage of our differentiated footprint, leadership advantages, and superior capabilities. Now let's move to the second part of the presentation and clarify what we mean by growth. While we do intend to outperform the industry, we don't intend to grow volume at any cost. As Michel just said, our growth must be consistent and compounding. Consistent growth is the ability to deliver top and bottom-line growth while demonstrating the potential to keep compounding that growth as far as anyone can imagine. This can only be accomplished by being the best curators of the category in a responsible way and by building and nurturing iconic brands that are meaningful to our consumers. To translate these intentions into metrics, growth at ABI has three distinct elements.
One, it demands reliable top-line growth, which means volume and net revenue per hectoliter. This top-line growth must flow to the bottom line. It can't be so expensive that it doesn't translate into cash flow generation. Three, it must have a long-term horizon because our goal is to compound and finish every year stronger than we started. As we aim for consistency, I want to clarify the types of growth that we don't pursue. The unhealthy growth when top-line growth doesn't flow to the bottom line, and what we call the chicken flight, when top and bottom line growth are achieved, but not consistently. For example, I think you guys may understand, when an innovation gains significant distribution before developing enough velocity. In this case, it can have some initial success, but it will be short-lived.
The main pillars of our growth model are market share growth, which demonstrates the power of our portfolio and our ability to out-execute our competitors. Revenue per hectoliter outperformance versus CPI, driven by price, mix, and additional revenue management initiatives such as discount and portfolio optimization. Innovating with a growth mindset. As we expect trends to continue evolving, opening avenues for new products, brands, specs, and even business models like D2C and D2B. With that, I conclude my second part, detailing what growth means to us and how we prepare our teams across markets to deliver consistent compounding growth. Moving to the third and final topic, I'll introduce some of our unique capabilities to lead and grow the category. Following my presentation, Marcel will cover this topic in a more comprehensive way. He'll dive deeper into the One ABI Way, our category growth framework, and our growth levers.
I'd like to start by highlighting key elements of our growth operational guide, which we call the One ABI Way. Developing the beer category in a responsible way, building our brands, and constantly refining our portfolio are our main responsibilities. As we know, one brand can't be everything to everyone in a credible way. That's why our job is to craft a strong portfolio to better serve our consumers and customers. Through our portfolio strategy included in the One ABI Way, we identify and select our mega brands and become more precise in allocating brand resources. It may sound easy to copy the idea and name any large, big legacy brand a mega brand, but our model is based on an algorithm that balances scale, profitability, growth potential, and a clear alignment with a mega trend.
It is this true combination that turns true mega brands into powerful drivers of profitable growth with highly superior ROI. This is important because not every company has true mega brands. The One ABI Way also includes our connections and mega platforms. It may seem easy to become a big sponsor or hire popular influencers, but it is much harder to execute them in a singular way when a true mega brand can connect through a passion point using real-time insights and technology to reach the hearts, minds, and mouths of our consumers. That is why mega platforms are much more than sponsorships. What we just saw in the latest FIFA World Cup was a great example of how our mega brand, Michelob ULTRA, associated with a mega platform, led the digital conversation and was launched in several countries, sowing the seeds of growth for years to come.
This is just one of many examples, including Corona Cero and the Olympic Games, and Stella Artois and tennis. The main point here is that we have a very successful playbook. Through this focused approach, we reduced from 500 to 50 the number of brands with relevant support, increased investments in our mega brands, and reached our all-time high brand power in Q2 2026, according to Kantar. Importantly, we are seeing this brand power growth translate into market share. In Brazil, for example, our internal analysis shows that we gained 200 basis points of volume share at the same relative price index. This was a consequence of a stronger portfolio. At the global level, we see the same dynamic. Our portfolio gained 40 basis points of market share at comparable relative price points over the same period.
This means consumers are attributing more value to our portfolio during their weekly visits to their local store. I don't think it can get more tangible than this. Building on the strength of our portfolio, we are also unleashing our digital capabilities to drive growth. Let me highlight some of them. Through our D2C platforms, we connect with consumers at scale, deepen our understanding of their needs, and turn those insights into more relevant innovation and more powerful brands. With BEES, we are helping our customers to grow and taking our revenue management to the next level. By tailoring offers to every individual customer, we can optimize discounts and measure the incrementality of each investment we make. Through BEES AI, we are driving a more profitable mix by ensuring the right brands, packs, and price points for each market and consumer occasion.
Putting all this together, our revenue management has become more precise, fully data-driven, and connected to the true value of our portfolio. This has been a great enabler of our growth ambitions. Over the last three and five years, we have consistently outperformed our peers, delivering net revenue per hectoliter well above other brewers and the median of CPGs. The first half of this year was no different. Our net revenue per hectoliter grew more than two percentage points ahead of our peers while we also outperformed in beer volume. In an environment where consumers are under pressure, we are very proud to earn our growth through the improvement of our portfolio, our unique revenue management capabilities, and the value we bring through innovations. In the end, it is all about compounding growth and building a company that gets stronger every year. With that, I conclude my introduction.
We covered three topics. One, the beer category is a big, loved, profitable, growing category, and we have a unique leadership position and an advantage footprint. Two, growth for us must be consistent and compounding. Top line that flows to the bottom line and it is long term oriented. Three, our superior capabilities will position us to continue outperforming the industry in the years to come.
Our next three speakers will take you now inside this strategy. First, Marcel Marcondes on how we lead and grow the category, followed by Lucas Herscovici on D2C and why it is now a real competitive advantage, and closing with Nick Caton on digitize and monetize. He will show how BEES keeps compounding and how it is helping us become a best in class CPG. Thank you so much for your attention, and now I would like to invite Marcel to the stage. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage Marcel Marcondes.
Thank you, Michel. Thank you, Ricardo. Great chat. Hello, everyone. It is a big pleasure to be here. I am Marcel Marcondes, Chief Marketing Officer and a proud ABI owner for more than 20 years. I actually started my career at Unilever, and after many years in beauty, mainly haircare, after many years selling shampoos, I decided it would be a good trade to go to beer. At ABI, I had both marketing and sales jobs in Brazil before I moved to the U.S. 12 years ago, where I served as the head of our global brands, CMO of North America, and President of our Beyond Beer business. Now, for the last five years, I have the privilege of serving as a global CMO. My job today is the following. You heard earlier from Michel about the why, the strategic direction.
Ricardo just spoke about the what, the growth principles. My job is to talk about the how. How to lead and grow the category. This is when the rubber hits the road. We are going to get together into a little more details to give you a real inside view. Also, we are going to hear from some of my colleagues through video. The structure of the presentations will follow the same framework we use every single day, and it is split in those three parts.
Our consumer-centric capabilities, our missions to grow the category, and the levers to lead the category. Let us go. Let us get started. On capabilities, you know very well that ABI was built using a powerful inorganic strategy, leading the consolidation of the industry until it became the undisputed leader. But now, as you heard from Michel, our strategy is focused on consistent compounding growth.
We spent a few years working to build new capabilities and also wiring the whole company in new ways of working. We call it the One ABI Way. The One ABI Way goes from category and consumer understanding all the way to sustainable value creation, and this is what guides the work of our entire commercial teams. Now I am going to share with you a few highlights of how it works. On category understanding, we built a very unique system that tracks participation, occasions, and service for the whole industry in 32 markets, representing 95% of our revenues. We have quarterly readings on an industry level, company level, and brand level, also with very specific cuts by consumer cohort.
That system gives us the ability to identify gaps and opportunities in a very granular level, and that is a game changer in our process as it becomes the starting point of every commercial plan. In other words, it gives us intentionality in every move we make. Consumer understanding. Here, the whole point is to go way beyond research and to really understand real consumer behavior. For that, we have our consumer hours program. Because just like pilots must have flight hours to fly an airplane, we also require all commercial leaders to dedicate time for direct consumer engagement. By the way, last week we achieved 50,000 consumer hours across our senior leadership. That is equivalent of years of consumer learnings.
Now AI is turning this capability into a real consumer intelligence, because all that consumer knowledge combined with our proprietary data is becoming quickly actionable as it enables us to build digital consumer twins and create synthetic consumer audiences. This new capability was developed in partnership with MIT, and it gives all our teams much faster ways to test insights and innovation ideas, reducing testing times from weeks to just minutes. All in all, this mix gives our leadership the best of analytical power combined with human intimacy. The third is portfolio strategy, and for a CPG that owns 500 brands, that is key. So I am going to talk a little bit more about it. Our approach is based on the mega brands and mega platforms.
As Ricardo just said, this is a transformational capability to drive growth, because mega brands gives us focus as we clusterize our brands according to their strategic roles in every single market. As a consequence of that, we are reducing the amount of brands with meaningful support from 500 to 50, the ones with both scaling potential and healthy growth rates. Those are the mega brands, around five per market. After a few years working like this, mega brands now represents 60% of our volumes, and they are also punching above their weight on investments.
So that puts momentum on our favor. Moreover, that focus allows us to invest behind bigger and more global platforms to activate the mega brands. Those are the mega platforms. We have built an unparalleled calendar with the most culturally relevant platforms in sports, music, travel, streaming, and more, always aligned with the positioning of our brands. Let's take a quick look at what we have for this year and beyond.
Super Bowl 60 is underway. We turn now to the Winter Olympics from Milan, to the mountains of Italy.
Brazil.
Perfect Serve, brought to you by Stella Artois.
After four years, the wait is over. Here is the World Cup.
Messi!
Michelob ULTRA set out to create a trophy worthy of this historic moment.
The greatest comeback in NBA playoff history. The New York Knicks are NBA champions.
Madland Music Festival, let's go. We bring you something unforgettable.
FIFA Women's World Cup Brazil.
These are the champions. We are proud as a team. The champions.
I like this job. Now it is very, very important to note that mega platforms, as Ricardo said, are much more than just sponsorships. They have to represent three big elements, passion points consumers love, big beer occasions, and they have to allow us to have huge commercial integration, all at scale. Let us see FIFA World Cup as an example. This is how it works in real life. On media, as the official partners, we have priority to get all the best placements. We maximize reach. On product, we have exclusive limited edition packs that drive velocity. On trade, our status as official partners allows us to build disproportionate displays, resulting in extra shelf space. Experiential brings everything together, creating moments where people socialize with our beers in their hands. Finally, digital connects our brands with culture.
After all, those platforms are naturally what people are talking about. All in all, this massive commercial integration is how we set the bar for the mega platforms. With all the efforts connected to the same program at global scale, we naturally get much better ROIs compared to a regular media-only approach. In other words, we become much more effective. We track effectiveness against our peers. We use the Effie Index, the leading effectiveness entity. We used to be here in 2019, and now since 2022, we have been there. That is progress and consistency. Most importantly, working like this, now we own eight out of the top 10 most valuable beer brands in the world, and our portfolio now has $22 billion brands. Actually expecting Cutwater Spirits to join that list very soon. This is how we are moving from being advertisers to becoming full experience providers.
This is how we turn our brands and our scale into real competitive advantage. All right, now let us move to innovation. You are all going to see a lot of innovation boosting our plans here these days, and they are all consequence of a new process for consistent growth. It starts with portfolio health, where innovation now becomes accountable for the health of our SKUs, aiming to optimize the good ones and enlist the ones with no added value. Guys, we already reduced 25% of all our SKUs in the last years. Second is pack and price. Revenue management is fully integrated with marketing, so packaging is more than ever treated as real innovation, focused on addressing consumer participation and also new occasions. Then comes brand superiority, where we now test our mega brands versus competitors every year to make sure they are always superior.
We do that because it is proven. Superior brands always overperform non-superior ones, that is a key discipline for a company that owns iconic brands. Finally, we have the new to the world propositions, where we are developing the next generation of beers for the next generation of consumers. To launch those innovations, we use our DTC business that Lucas will talk to us about as a very unique launchpad, because that way we are able to seed fast and also get first reactions directly from consumers before we decide to scale up. All in all, by working like this, we currently have both the number one and the number two innovations in the majority of our key markets, and our innovation business already delivers more than $6 billion per year. Stay tuned. Later today, you are all going to have a very immersive experience on what is to come.
At this point, after category, consumers, portfolio, and innovation, we are ready with the planning cycle. Now we move into the capabilities for execution. Next is connections and creativity. There is a lot in there, but I am going to highlight two programs. First one is Creative X, which is a process we use to train our teams globally on how to ask for creativity, judge creativity, and have external assessments to constantly raise the bar, always with one same mindset, using creativity to solve business and consumer problems.
Very important to say that nobody at ABI gets rewarded for awards. I believe it is telling that we moved from winning just two lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in 2016 to winning 200 lions in the last five years, becoming the first company in history to be awarded the Creative Marketer of the Year three times, in 2022, 2023, and 2026. Most importantly, that way, our brand portfolio just reached its all-time high scores in brand power, led by our mega brands. In a highly digitized world, I also need to talk about DraftLine.
DraftLine is our global in-house agency with offices in 13 countries, working to connect creativity with data and technology to drive personalization at scale. At DraftLine, we take a very analytical and detailed approach to audience segmentation. Then we use AI to serve millions of different consumers with personalized, tailor-made content at scale. Also, at DraftLine, we have a global newsroom routine, just like a publisher, where we track all social media conversation across 200 markets, speaking 24 languages, and then we decide when and whether our brands should join in real time.
That process makes us move fast, with the agility to see a moment going viral during the Olympics at 11:00 P.M. and having it incorporated into our global Corona campaign the very next day. Or when Michel is there cheering and seeing the Knicks winning the NBA, and we have that iconic moment becoming a Michelob ULTRA campaign in just a few hours. By working like this, we are not only improving significantly our efficiency, but we also make our brands relevant in culture. We even track the share of social media engagements in all big cultural moments, especially our mega platforms. Our brands have been consistently leading all of them on a global basis. I can tell you, those capabilities represent a big competitive advantage in the world as it is today.
From there, we move to trade marketing, where we have been improving our capabilities as well to evolve from driving availability to also building premium brands and expanding consumption occasions. You all can expect to see much more of this, transforming airport spaces into true Corona oases that immerse travelers in the brand world the moment they walk in. Or off-trade shelves that actually make you feel like you are at the beach, making people stop in their tracks and feel the Corona vibe as they shop. Or interactive displays that double as brand merch stores, and much more. After all, we all believe that trade marketing is called trade marketing for a reason. We are treating that very seriously. Finally, we have value creation, of course. This is when we bring all those capabilities together in one central intelligence to drive consistent compounding growth.
As Ricardo mentioned, this is all about top and bottom-line growth together with long-term brand building. In the end, we need to make sure that everything we do lands in that place. This is why we created the One ABI Way hub, because it works as one source of truth for the whole organization, bringing together all the data points from those seven pillars, also using AI for both automation and optimization. It makes a big difference. Let us take a look.
To lead and grow the category, we organized our capabilities behind seven pillars, each with its own set of data and KPIs. This much complexity requires intelligence and discipline, so we built one platform to deliver it, the One ABI Way. Through the platform, commercial teams assess everything from POS reports in the category pillar, through consumer insights, in-market execution, all the way to consistent compounding growth KPIs in the value creation pillar. Leaders are using it globally in more than 40 markets. All of this is optimized by our AI assistant. AI can deliver insights across category reports, consumer signals, and value creation drivers. Through AI, we can do in seconds what would have taken us hours. One company, one operating model, one platform. The One ABI Way.
All right, this was the first part of our conversation, all of our consumer-centric capabilities. After years of development and big investments, ABI is now working as a top consumer-centric CPG to drive consistent compounding growth. So far, so good? Let us now move to the second part of our conversation, which is exactly how we use those capabilities to grow the category, to grow the pie. After all, I know that we all read a lot of different and sometimes conflicting headlines about the industry. It is very important to have solid data and intentional plans to make an impact. By the way, what a great industry this is.
I always tell people that it's a privilege to work with something that is made with natural ingredients, that is brewed locally, and that participates in people's lives in moments like this, when friends and family get together to have a great time, to build memories. Guys, I never forget I started my career selling shampoos. The point here is that everything starts with building a strong category perception, and timing could not be better. Consumers are consistently showing us they want moderation and socialization, and that's exactly what beer stands for. This is why we started to track the power of the category, just like we do with our brands. Based on the key attributes that influence perception, we built a full calendar to celebrate beer.
For example, during FIFA World Cup, we had Cheers to Bars, a massive mobilization to invite consumers to socialize and watch the games there. Also last month, we celebrated International Beer Day, reminding consumers of the positive role that beer plays in their lives. Let's take a quick look at Cheers to Beer.
Please welcome our very own Kaylen.
Cheers to beer. Guys, as we work like this and track the category power, we see not only that beer is clearly the strongest category in the industry, but also that it is growing power. That goes hand in hand with beer consistently gaining share of alcohol, according to IWSR. We know that category perception is just the beginning. As leaders, we need to go much deeper in the work to actually grow the pie. Let me introduce you to the beer consumption pyramid. We split legal drinking age consumers into groups that do not drink beer, that drink every six months, every month, and every week. Our plan is based on three consumer missions: to grow the weekly drinkers, which we call beer lovers, to address the barriers of infrequent drinkers, and to position beer to win in more occasions.
Let's double-click in each of them. Growing beer lovers. The key element here is the following. Consumers need to socialize. That is what they want, and with moderation, so they can socialize for longer. Given that is exactly why beer exists, by design, our mega platforms always invite consumers to get together. Here is a clear example, the Olympics. That is the biggest event in the world, but beer had never been allowed as a global partner. In 2024, the IOC understood our proposal for socialization and moderation, and Corona became the first beer in history to become a global Olympic partner with Michelob ULTRA in the U.S. That was a big move for the whole category, but also a big demonstration of consumer behavior when they socialize. Look at that picture. That is Winter Olympics earlier this year. Everybody said it would be challenging.
It was super cold, and people would not want to drink cold beer. Look at what happened. If we were not there, all those people would have gone to the other line. But we were there, and Corona had 57% share of all beverages sold in the venues. Guys, we sold more Corona than water. Case in point, social moments shape consumer behavior. That was a tough example. That was winter. You all saw what happened at the World Cup during summer. Same message from consumers, same lines, same performance. This time, even selling more than soda and chicken tenders combined. They were even collecting cups from other people. Again, those social moments are shaping consumer behavior. But don't take it from me. Let us hear directly from them.
If there is one thing this World Cup taught me, is that clearly, we are not too busy to grab a drink during the week. I saw all of you on the stories every single day outside, having drinks during the week. So don't tell me, "Oh, I am too busy on a Wednesday to go grab a beer." I am not falling for it anymore.
Smart guy. This is why we made huge investments to evolve from having in our calendar only one global event every four years to now having at least two of the largest events in the world every single year, because this is how we grow beer lovers. Now let us talk about addressing the barriers, or should I say, the opportunities of infrequent drinkers. After analyzing participation data, we have three cohorts here. Budget-conscious drinkers, female drinkers, and LDA drinkers.
They are all very different and therefore have different barriers to be addressed. Budget-conscious drinkers are actually the biggest opportunity to be addressed because they represent almost one-third of the beer volumes. They are the typical beer drinkers, and the clear barrier for them is affordability. As you know, we face all-time low consumer sentiment. That plus the constraints on disposable income makes affordability become the number one reason to reduce consumption.
We know that working minutes to buy beer is a key metric to watch there, and data is showing us huge opportunities to make beer more affordable, especially in developing markets. To address that, you are going to see a lot of packaging innovations, both with smaller formats for lower out-of-pocket, as well as larger formats to deliver more for less. Now, female drinkers. Women historically have lower alcohol participation compared to men. Our data show that many of them are sweet seekers. They prefer sweet over bitter. Also, fitness is an increasing priority for many of them, and this is why we will double down on two areas. On beer, women have higher participation levels with our balanced choices brands like Stella Artois Pure Gold, low calories, gluten free, or Michelob ULTRA, low carbs, low calories.
By the way, Michelob ULTRA will bring female drinkers to the spotlight next year as Brazil hosts the FIFA Women's World Cup. Now, on the beyond beer side, women actually over-index versus men, as they engage with those sweeter and high-end propositions like Brutal Fruit, usually shifting from wine and spirits. Brutal Fruit, for example, has 4x more women participation, with 84% incrementality to the business. It is a no-brainer. And finally, LDAs. LDAs represent 10% of the industry, and they are a naturally more complex group that needs to be addressed in different angles. From the product angle, they have a wider taste profile, and this is why we developed flavored beers. Here in the U.S., this is what happened when we brought Busch Light Apple to the market. Internationally, our global proposition is Flying Fish, and that is what happened when we launched it in Belgium.
But pay attention to this number: 50% of those consumers are new to the category. Also for beyond beer, we invested in brands like BeatBox and BeatBox exactly because they have strong flavor profiles. As a consequence, they not only have very strong results, but also 2x higher participation amongst LDAs. But this game is not just about flavors. LDAs frequently choose beer during live experiences, for example, especially concerts. Beer plays a very important role there. As they want to socialize for longer, they often alternate alc and non-alc beer to enjoy the full experience. And this is why we joined forces with Live Nation, the global leaders in live music. We are becoming their preferred partners and turning them into a true channel to connect with LDAs. Let us take a quick look.
In the U.K., we are already seeing what happens when we bring the full partnership, and we are just getting started. Now it is about taking what is working and scaling it around the world.
Friends, working like this, things are changing. This year, we have seen beer growing participation with LDAs, and ABI over-performing the industry. IWSR just released a study showing that the consumption gap between Gen Z and general population is now negligible. In the end, it is always all about socialization. Now let us cover the third consumer mission to grow the category, to expand beer occasions. Understanding occasions is key, given that consumers have different needs in different moments, and that brings great opportunities. Here we also decided to prioritize three occasions based on growth and winning ability. First one is watching sports.
This occasion is big, growing, and it is a natural choice for beer. All big sports events are reaching record viewership levels, and we have massive synergies with our mega platforms. This is why today, ABI is one of the biggest players across any industry in this territory. Now, with the addition of Champions League next year, we will have not only another global moment for watching sports on weekdays, but also from Tuesdays to Thursdays, 10 months per year. On this one, there is someone that knows it much better than me. David, what would you say about Champions League?
Thanks, Marcel. I am really sorry that I cannot be with you today. Champions League will always be very special to me, and it gave me one of the best moments of my career. It represents the pinnacle of European club football, with the most passionate fans week in and week out. I think that heritage and tradition is a perfect fit with Stella. We have obviously already done some incredible work together over the past few years, and I think that we can really create something special with the Champions League partnership. I cannot wait to get started. Have a great day, everyone, and cheers.
Cheers, David. Thank you. Second occasion is casual meals. This is another big occasion, but here beer underperforms versus other beverages. This is a massive opportunity for the non-alcohol propositions because they can occupy that space of the adult refreshment choice. Because after big investments in brewing technology, today we deliver high-quality non-alc beers with full flavor, different flavors, low carbs, low calories, and even with electrolytes and protein. So we are seeing an increasing number of adults substituting soft drinks or other beverages for non-alc beers during meals. That is changing the industry, and it opens a huge addressable market for beer. The third occasion is home gatherings. First, because of COVID, and now constraints on disposable income. Consumers are still choosing many times to socialize at home, and the biggest driver of choice here is convenience for hosting.
This is why, for beer, we are expanding our PerfectDraft machines, led by Stella, and also our direct-to-consumer brands like Zé Delivery and TaDa Delivery, which by the way, are growing 11% users just this year. On beyond beer, Cutwater Spirits, for example, is a brand designed for hosting because it delivers the convenience of a real high-quality cocktail that is ready to drink. This is why Cutwater Spirits is growing triple digits, and it is now the fastest-growing spirit brand in the U.S. Lastly, we did another unprecedented partnership for the in-home occasion, Netflix. With almost 1 billion viewers, Netflix is both an occasion on its own and also a very strategic partner to shape the industry, given its impact and influence in culture. Through our partnership, we match their shows to our brands and work together to authentically integrate and promote the shows.
Only this year, our brands will be present in more than 300 titles, addressing different consumer groups and different occasions. Also, for a few big titles, we are together literally co-producing content in a way that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish what is advertising from what is just another episode. Let's see a quick example from the recently launched "The Gentlemen," Season 2. If you watched it, you will understand what I am talking about.
Please be seated. The next bidding is just about to begin. Lot 72. This is no bull. This is a cathedral muscle. Ladies and gentlemen, Norman! Very well, then. 1.5 million from the gentleman at the front. Any more? For any more, 3 million from the back. Anybody else?
A refresher for our friend, perhaps.
Courtesy of the Duke.
Bid has been withdrawn. Going once. Going twice. Gone to the Duke of Halstead.
Never corner a bull, David.
Never corner a bull, David. All right, so that was the second part of our conversation, how to grow the category. In summary, I share their efforts to drive category perception, together with very intentional moves to address our three consumer missions: to grow beer lovers, to address the barriers of infrequent drinkers, and to expand beer occasions. Now let's go to the third and final part of our conversation today, how to lead the category. Because after growing the pie, let's talk about how to win a larger slice of it. This is our category expansion model. As markets develop, there is a growing level of relevance in four levers: superior core, premiumization, balanced choices, and beyond beer. The way we work is to develop replicable solutions to lead each of them at scale. Let's start with superior core. Core brands are the base of the industry.
We are leaders in core and we are gaining share. Our replicable model is based on superiority, affordability, and local pride. Because our core brands carry the colors and the values of their nations, they are big icons of local culture and must always make consumers proud. Let us now hear from Felipe Ambra, our Marketing VP in Mexico, and see our superior core brands in action.
Let us do it, Marcel. Hello, everyone. It is a pleasure to be here. When we talk about leading the beer category, it starts with one simple belief. A healthy core is the strongest engine of sustainable growth. In Mexico, our core portfolio does more than drive our business. It helps grow the entire beer category. As Marcel mentioned, our approach is based on three connected elements. Superior brands igniting local pride with affordability. Together, they provide a powerful value equation. Brands that consumers truly love because they offer the best liquid, the most appealing positioning at the right price, and in the right pack formats. In Mexico, we have two iconic brands, Corona and Victoria. Corona embodies the ambition and progress of Mexico, the spirit of Mexicans who keep moving forward and conquering the world.
This comes to life on campaigns and platforms like Corona's 100th anniversary, highlighting the extra that has defined the brand for a century. A mindset that continues to ignite Mexican ambition today, and a concept that naturally evolved into our FIFA World Cup platform. Victoria plays a complementary role. While Corona represents Mexico's future, Victoria honors Mexico's roots. From Día de Muertos to the rituals that inspired Victoria Limón y Sal. The brand keeps Mexican traditions relevant for new generations. But strong brands alone are not enough. Consumers participate in the category when they perceive the value is right. That is why we have built a comprehensive price and pack architecture. From affordable entry packs to larger multi-serve formats that deliver better value for each offering. Every pack has a role. Every price point has a consumer. And every occasion has an offering.
By balancing brand strength and affordability, we create sustainable growth for both our brands and the category. Ultimately, core superiority is about maintaining the right balance, superior brands with deep cultural relevance, the right affordability architecture, and consistent investment behind our portfolio. When consumers love and can afford our brands, the entire category grows. That is the power of core superiority in Mexico. Corona and Victoria are not only iconic and superior brands, we believe they will be long-term value-creating assets. Thank you.
Thank you, Felipe. Now let's move to premium. Premium continues to be the biggest volume opportunity for the industry in absolute terms. After all, beer is an affordable luxury, and the mix of premium improves year-over-year. We are leaders in premium, and we are gaining share. Our replicable toolkit here is the following. Instead of having one brand trying to be everything to everyone, we are strategically leveraging the power of our global brands, having each one of them positioned to address each of the four consumer motivations to drink beer. Corona is all about relaxation, Stella to elevate the moment, ULTRA for an active lifestyle, and Budweiser, the energy for the celebrations. That complementarity across brands is hard to beat because each of them authentically owns their territories. Playing like this, our global brands are consistently leading premium growth.
Now let's hear from Richard Oppy, our global president for premiumization.
It is a privilege to lead the premium company at ABI. As Marcel just mentioned, we have a powerful premium portfolio organized around the consumer need states. Starting with Corona, which is all about relaxing and unwinding. Corona is the most powerful beer brand in the world and the number one volume growth driver for ABI, even commanding a 25% price premium to its key competitor. Corona has been recognized as the most valuable beer brand in the world for three consecutive years. Behind this success is a simple formula, consistency. Corona reminds people what this is living is all about, an invitation to disconnect from routine and reconnect with nature. Talking about nature, Corona is brewed with 100% natural ingredients and has one of the most distinctive assets in the category, the iconic lime ritual.
Corona owns the summer season, activating Corona Sunsets Sessions globally, including Copacabana, which hosts the biggest beach concert in the world. This Corona mindset translates to all seasons throughout the year, as we demonstrated through the successful Winter Olympics activation. Stella Artois is the brand that elevates the moment. With more than 600 years of brewing heritage and an uncompromising commitment to quality, Stella Artois is crafted to the highest standards, transforming everyday occasions into moments that are truly worth more. As a leader in premiumization within the on-trade channel, Stella Artois is renowned for its iconic perfect serve ritual. Served in its iconic chalice, it delivers a distinctive and elevated experience that reinforces the brand's premium credentials and makes every moment feel more special.
To accelerate momentum, we are continuing to activate Stella through its tennis platform, including Wimbledon and Roland-Garros, and we could not be more excited about our latest mega platform with enormous reach, and that is the UEFA Champions League, beginning in July 2027. This prestigious European football competition of the highest quality will partner with our European beer of the highest quality, which has a taste worthy of champions. At the same time, our partnership with Netflix is helping us connect with new consumers in a meaningful way, increasing the brand's cultural relevance. Michelob ULTRA is the superior light beer with low carbs and low calories, leading the balanced choice need state and addressing the growing consumer demand for products that fit an active and social lifestyle. The proposition has already been proven in the U.S., where Michelob ULTRA is the number one beer brand by volume.
In 2026, we used the FIFA World Cup as a launchpad to expand Michelob ULTRA across the Americas, and it is working. Today 45% of Michelob ULTRA's volume growth comes from outside the U.S. To accelerate momentum, we are investing behind superior platforms like the FIFA Men's and Women's World Cup, PGA Golf, the NBA, and an exciting new global running platform launching in 2027, allowing the brand to connect with consumers through their passions and grow participation. And finally, Budweiser leads the build energy need state and is the brand at the heart of celebrations. Whether it is a personal achievement, a shared victory, or a cultural moment, when it comes to celebrating, one thing remains true, this calls for a Bud. To strengthen this positioning, we are doubling down on one of the most powerful celebration passion points, music.
Through iconic partnerships with some of the biggest artists in the world, as well as activations at festivals like Tomorrowland, Lollapalooza, and key Live Nation venues, Budweiser is shaping culture and strengthening our relevance with the next generation of LDA drinkers. In closing, we have a powerful and complimentary portfolio of premium brands that are delivering exceptional results, reinforcing the strength and momentum of our premium company.
All right. Thank you, Oppy. Now let us move to balanced choices, the third growth lever. Guys, here we are literally building the next generation of beers for the next generation of consumers. Our balanced choices portfolio includes non-alc beer and also the beers with full taste and low stats. On the non-alc beer segment, we have been growing 3x faster than the industry, led by Corona Zero globally, Michelob ULTRA Zero in the U.S., and a pipeline with styles, flavors, and next generation beers with electrolytes and protein. In parallel to that, we continue to develop our beers with full taste and low stats, like low carbs, low calories, gluten-free, and sugar-free propositions, all of them with significant growth rates. We are leaders in balanced choices, and we are gaining share.
This portfolio already represents 11% of our total business, but we strongly believe this is just the beginning because these propositions are changing the industry. With strong brands boosted by pioneer innovation, we are literally working to lead the future of the category. Let's now see that process in action with Dani Waks, our Marketing VP in Brazil.
Thank you, Marcel. Excited to talk about the next generation of beers. As we have just seen, balanced choices is a combination of two segments, non-alcohol and low stats. In Brazil, this is not a niche anymore. On the contrary, balanced choices is becoming the next major transformation of the beer market, responsible for a big, big part of its growth. Let's start with non-alc. This is a segment that has been growing way above the industry over the last years, and one in which we are the leaders here in Brazil. We have a portfolio of brands in different price segments. We have Brahma Zero, Skol Zero Zero, which is the first zero alcohol, zero sugar beer on the market, Bud Zero, and Corona Cero.
We must continue to normalize the consumption of zero beers, close the gap in pack and distribution to expand its occasions, and build non-alc intentionally with meals to make sure it is seen as the best option in the adult refreshment space. We are also pushing non-alc into the next generation of beer. We just launched Spaten Pro, the first beer with protein in Brazil. Now, let's talk about full taste, low stat beers. This is a space that includes low gluten, lower carbs, lower calories. It is a segment in which we also lead here in Brazil, and it is growing even faster than non-alc. There are two brands here that capture the essence of the segment. The first one is Stella Artois Pure Gold. All the flavor of Stella Artois, gluten-free, and with 18% fewer calories than the regular Stella Artois.
It is so successful that it already represents half of Stella Artois' volume, growing at over 100% CAGR from its launch to 2025. Stella Artois Pure Gold is a great example of a full flavor, lower calories beer. Now, let's talk about Michelob ULTRA. 80% less carbs than regular beers with a great and refreshing taste that Brazilians love. As a matter of fact, it is the brand in our portfolio with the fastest growth, and we are expanding capacity, developing new pack formats, and investing a lot in experiential, like the World Cup and the running platform, which is huge in Brazil. To sum up, three important messages. Number one, balanced choices is already a reality in Brazil and a massive engine of growth. Number two, we need a full portfolio of different brands and liquid propositions tailored to different consumer needs and spaces.
And number three, we must bet big behind the space, be it in experiential, trade, packs, and distribution. When all of these elements come together, we can turn a powerful consumer trend into a category growth lever, building the next generation of beer for the next generation of LDA consumers.
Thank you very much, Dani. So now, to close our growth levers, let's cover beyond beer. This segment is also shaping the industry and steadily growing participation because it addresses those 20% of drinkers that are sweet seekers. Also, beyond beer is profitable and very incremental. But just like every great opportunity, beyond beer comes with a caveat that we learned after wins and mistakes over the years. This is a world for pure-play brands, not for line extensions. On Beyond Beer, we are not leaders. We're actually the challengers as we expand our footprint. But we're growing 37% revenues and gaining share very rapidly. Here in the U.S., for example, we are already the fastest growing spirit company based on our Beyond Beer sales, and we're ready for more.
After years of learning how to play this game, we now have six pure-play brands with proven performance and lots of momentum. They are ready for expansion. We're talking about Brutal Fruit, Flying Fish, NÜTRL, Cutwater Spirits, BeatBox, and BeatBox. The more we simplify the portfolio and expand those brands, the more we grow. You're going to hear a lot about this in the U.S. presentation. So now let's hear from a region that proves Beyond Beer is an opportunity everywhere. Let's hear from Leanne, our marketing VP in Africa.
Thank you, Marcel. It's 100% true, 20%-30% of alcohol consumers are sweet seekers, regardless of market maturity. In Africa, that's why we anchor Beyond Beer in our global segmentation, backing pure-play brands that can win today while building the portfolio of the future. I'm incredibly proud of what we're seeing from two Beyond Beer brands born here in South Africa, the leading brands in our global, flavorful, and refreshing segment. Flying Fish is our crisp, refreshing, lemon-flavored premium beer made for LDA to 24 consumers seeking more flavor. As a pure-play brand, it gives us permission to connect in fresh ways and bring new excitement into the category. We've done exactly this with surprisingly good sets. Leaning into our passion point of DJ sets and music streaming, we launched experiences in unexpected locations across SA.
Halloween has given us the perfect moment to really show up differently with a limited edition passion fruit and lemon release. Brutal Fruit elevates everyday occasions, bringing women together to enjoy a glass of fruity, sparkling refreshment. Some recent innovations have set out to do exactly that. Brutal Fruit L'Orange Rossa strengthens our leadership in spritz. Our elegant new Brutal Fruit brand luxe sharing bottle enhances the moment. Following encouraging results, Brutal Fruit Non-alcoholic is now scaling nationally, bringing an alcohol-free choice to the category that still feels social and really special. In Party Mix MXD, South Africa's 2025 Innovation of the Year, shows the size of the opportunity in our build energy social occasions. You can count on Africa to keep building Beyond Beer brands with distinctiveness, boldness, and real consumer relevance, creating a future with more occasions, more growth, and more cheers. Thank you.
Thank you, Leanne. All right, everybody. That was the third part of our conversation, how to lead the category. This is all about the four growth levers, and our job is very clear: to deploy replicable models and lead all of them. As you can see on the screen, we have a lot of momentum. We're very ambitious, but also very humble. We know there is still a lot to be done. With that, we conclude our session today on how to lead and grow the category. I really hope you all enjoyed this real inside view of everything we're brewing for the future. In summary, we covered today our consumer-centric capabilities, the One ABI Way, wiring the entire company to behave as a top CPG, driving consistent compounding growth.
We covered how to grow the category, driving category perception by executing three consumer missions, growing beer lovers, addressing infrequent drinkers, and expanding beer occasions. Then we covered how to lead the category, using replicable models to lead each of the four growth levers that shape the industry. There is still a lot to do, but we are very confident that now we have the brands, the capabilities, and a very intentional plan to deliver our strategy to lead and grow this amazing category. Thank you all for your time, and see you all at the immersion area. Thank you very much.
Please welcome back, Shaun Fullalove.
Thanks, Marcel and team. I know that was a long session. Something else you have to get used to, given the format of this presentation, is my last name being said multiple times. It has taken me 42 years to get used to it, so we are all in this together, I think. Hopefully it becomes normal by the end of the session. We covered a lot of ground there. I think I know everyone had long travels in here, so we are going to take a short break now. I think we are going to take 20 minutes, so let us try and be back in seats around 10:00, 11:00, 10:30. You should be able to grab some coffee outside, maybe a Phorm Energy outside. For those on the webcast stream, we will see you in 20 minutes. Great.
[Break]
Please welcome to the stage, Lucas Herscovici.
Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be with all of you today. I'm Lucas Herscovici, Chief Direct to Consumer Officer for ABI. I joined this company 25 years ago as a global management trainee back in Argentina. After starting my career in sales, I later moved to marketing, embarked on several international assignments in global headquarters and the North America zone. I moved to U.S. 18 years ago here, to St. Louis. I'm honored to be part of the SLT since 2018, first as Chief Non-Alcohol Officer, and later as Chief Sales Officer. Now, for the past four years, I had the privilege of serving of Chief Direct to Consumer Officer.
D2C is at the frontier of pillars one and two of our strategy, and my job today is to show you how D2C is becoming more and more an unmatched competitive advantage to accelerate ABI's organic growth to lead and grow the category. I will use the same framework shared by Marcel to show you how D2C augments each of these three pillars, creating a unique competitive advantage for ABI. First, I'll show you how D2C is improving our consumer-centric capabilities by scaling best-in-class digital products and becoming a powerful tool for insights generation. Then, I'll show how D2C is also becoming a unique platform to grow the category through brand building and occasions development. Finally, I'll show you how D2C is helping us to lead the category by becoming an innovation lab for new product development. Now, let's go through each of them.
Supporting our consumer-centric capabilities, we have scaled our best-in-class digital products across key markets under three digital mega brands, Zé, TaDa, and PerfectDraft. For developing markets, our value proposition is focused on delivering cold beer in less than 30 minutes at supermarket prices. Zé Delivery is our brand in Brazil, which we replicated to the rest of the world under the brand TaDa. For developed markets, our proposition is called PerfectDraft, which is like an espresso but for beers. Consumers get to enjoy the draft beer experience at home from over 40 different beer brands, buying their kegs online or in physical stores. Both propositions leverage the breadth of ABI's physical, brand, and experiential assets, making them key differentiators versus other players. These products have scale, and they are growing consistently.
In the first half of 2026, net revenue grew 9%, active consumers 11%, and we have over 4 million consumers that are already enrolled in our rewards programs. As shown in the chart on the right, online beer sales have grown 5x faster in our D2C markets versus our non-D2C markets. This important difference proves that scaling best-in-class digital products is developing the beer category. Now, let us move to insights generation, a key foundation of organic growth companies and of our One ABI Way. Our experience has shown that having D2C creates a unique capability versus other CPG companies in three different ways. First, using real-time first-party data helps us detect demand two to five weeks ahead of other CPGs that usually rely on sell-in data. This gives us a better pulse of the market, helping us make commercial decisions that are more efficient and effective.
Next, we use D2C as our crystal ball to understand consumers through proprietary research and highly granular data, whereas CPGs usually rely on external research and aggregate data. Lastly, we use our data and personalized product algorithms to act as an innovation accelerator, whereas CPGs usually use broader tools that lead to slower and more expensive innovation. D2C insights also increase our consumer understanding and help us build stronger brands. Research companies provide an important foundation for understanding brand loyalty across the market. We complement that perspective with our D2C first-party data, surveying consumers every week at greater scale. That gives us a more frequent and granular view of brand loyalty KPIs, including monthly insight at zip code level, while allowing us to connect what consumers say with their actual purchase behavior.
For example, in H1, brand retention, one of our brand interaction KPIs, reached 62% for Stella Artois family and 73% for Michelob ULTRA, compared with 52% for the average of our competition. This shows the power and momentum we have with these two premium brands in Brazil. We are now making consumer insights accessible at scale. Our insights hub in Brazil combines a simple chat-based interface with qual and quant research tools, allowing colleagues to explore multiple data sources and run their own research using AI. This tool also makes the consumer hours, mentioned by Marcel, more efficient and effective, allowing us to engage one-to-one with the right consumers and understand challenges and opportunities in greater depth. Let us watch a video that brings this to life. Well, now let us take a look at how D2C contributes to grow the category by building brands and developing occasions.
As Marcel shared, there are three occasions we are prioritizing: watching sports, casual meals, and gathering at home. Let us see some examples on how D2C is helping develop each of them. Through our D2C data, we know that watching football at home represents a meaningful occasion, with growing monthly frequency and a strong weekend role. Our D2C platform allows us to know team fandom of each user and their purchase behavior during football games. Based on this capability, and Brahma's partnership with most football clubs in the country, we developed a big national always-on 360 activation program that has been growing consistently for the past two years. Let us watch a video to learn more about it.
A few years ago, a new business model revolutionized football in Brazil. SAF, the Anonymous Society of Football, that allowed clubs to become companies. SAF quickly became a desire among Brazilian fans. Brahma, supporter of more than 20 clubs and with access to millions of fans through our delivery app, Zé Delivery, decided to create our own SAF, turning every fan into a supporter. Brahma presents SABB, the Anonymous Society of Brahma. Zé Delivery became the perfect platform to connect with fans. You just had to order Brahma through our app, and 10% of the order goes to the team you choose to support, for your club to use however it wants. In other words, you help your team. Yes, that is right. You help your team by drinking beer.
With SABB's power and Zé Delivery's smart data, every match became a beer occasion customized to each fan according to their preferences, their club, the match day, and the Brahma they prefer to drink while watching their game. The results were huge. Over 560,000 fans turned into new supporters, over $6 million in incremental revenue, over 30% increase in average order value, and that was how Brahma transformed each customer into a business fan.
Based on the success in Brazil, we are now scaling this idea to Mexico through a program called Club Corona that is enabled by TaDa. Consumers scan unique codes under bottle crowns, earn points, and redeem rewards. The program is built around returnable glass bottles and is expanding nationwide. Key partners such as OXXO, Tigres in America extend its reach across retail, soccer clubs, and the 12 teams that are participating. Gamification keeps consumers engaged through match time bonuses and result predictions, connecting our brands, consumers, and retailers with a full digital ecosystem. Now let us talk about casual meals. It is a sizable occasion, but decreasing versus last year. The occasion is concentrated on weekends, where Stella Artois is among the key brands.
Based on these insights, we launched Stella Artois Thursdays to create an additional weekday moment for Stella Artois Pure Gold, activated across Zé Delivery, Netflix, influencers, and offline. On Thursdays, thanks to the activation of this program, Stella Artois Pure Gold now accounts for around 60% of Stella Artois GMV, and participation is up 90% versus last year. In-home gathering is also a meaningful occasion, and PerfectDraft is a great proposition to activate it in Europe. PerfectDraft in the U.K. continues to expand its reach, with active households growing 18% versus last year and volumes growing double digits for 24 consecutive months. As you can see on that beautiful image, we have leveraged our partnerships with David Beckham and FIFA World Cup to activate this occasion with excellent results. Finally, let's see how D2C plays an important role as an innovation lab, enabling ABI to lead the category.
D2C impact on leading the category is visible across the growth levers shared by Marcel, where D2C over-indexes in every one of them. As you can see on the slide, D2C is significantly over-represented in beer lovers' past seven-day participation, as well as mix for returnable glass bottles, premium brands, balanced choices, and beyond beer. Additionally, D2C also helps accelerate innovation. At pre-seed, we rapidly test concepts with real consumer feedback. We did it with Vicky Chelada in Colombia, where consumer response did not show potential, helping us avoid investing further in launching the product. At Seed, we identified momentum 10x faster than we used to do with traditional research. In Peru, Tada Insights helped us develop Mike's Mango Hot, which we then tested through D2C before a broader rollout, helping make August the strongest RTD sales month in Peru in six years.
At scale, we trial products nearly 60x cheaper through targeted sampling. For example, in Q2 this year, we reached 240,000 targeted consumers with Michelob ULTRA trial program in Brazil. We estimate this would have cost $19 million through a traditional non-targeted sampling program versus only $300,000 spent through Zé Delivery to reach consumers in a personalized way. Our ecosystem data can also influence online to offline execution via integration of D2C with BEES. As we saw before, D2C data shows us what consumers are buying and which brands they love. Zé Delivery data then enriches BEES algorithms to identify a retailer where Stella Artois Pure Gold is missing despite local consumer demand and loyalty. The opportunity then appears as a suggested order in the BEES seller app and as a personalized task for the BDR, the business development rep.
This closes the loop from consumer signal to retailer action, helping Stella Artois Pure Gold gain distribution and consequently, market share. Now let me close with the key takeaways from today. First, our best-in-class digital products have scale and are delivering consistent growth in key markets. Second, they generate insights capabilities that are very hard for other CPGs to replicate. Third, D2C is enabling us to build brands and occasions that are growing the category. Finally, D2C serves as an innovation lab for faster, cheaper, and more targeted learnings. What you saw today is just the tip of the iceberg of what D2C is. Let me share with you a closing video that showcases the full power of D2C within the ABI ecosystem, creating industry-leading capabilities that we are very proud of. Let's watch the video.
Thank you for your time today. Later today, I invite you to visit our booth to learn more about our D2C brands and experience freshly poured Stella Artois and Corona Cero from our PerfectDraft machines. Now, I hand it over to Nick to talk about BEES. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage, Nick Caton.
All right. Good morning, everyone. Three years ago, I had the opportunity to stand in front of many of you and talk about BEES and the transformation we had begun in how we connect with millions of retailers around the world. Since then, we've made substantial progress. Today, I'm excited to share with you how far that journey has taken us. First, a quick introduction. I'm Nick Caton, Chief B2B Officer at ABI. My 14 years at ABI have taken me to Asia Pacific, North America, and our global headquarters, working across different parts of the business, from sales and finance to technology. For the past four years, I've had the privilege of leading BEES. During that time, I've seen BEES grow from a transformation within ABI into something with a much bolder ambition. At BEES, we are digitizing the world's B2B transactions.
We do this to create value for everyone in the ecosystem. More value for retailers through easier access to the leading brands and products they need. More value for suppliers through direct, always-on digital connections that leverage AI to identify opportunities for growth, and more value for communities through more small businesses thriving. Today, to help you understand the journey we have been on and the opportunity we have ahead, I'll share with you how we are addressing retailer needs, the value we are delivering for ABI, the best-in-class capabilities we've developed, and as a consequence, how we are expanding our addressable market. Let me start where it all began, our retailers. ABI serves millions of retailers around the world across different channels, countries, and routes to market. Serving them means being close to the day-to-day reality of running their businesses.
That proximity has given us a deep understanding of what these businesses need to thrive and of the barriers that can hold them back. Historically, in traditional trade, the relationship with a supplier depended heavily on a brief visit from a sales rep. A few minutes a week determined what retailers could buy and therefore what they had available to sell. While technology was transforming many aspects of their lives, it was not transforming their businesses. In an age of rapidly advancing technology, many of those retailers were simply left out. This wasn't only a traditional trade problem. Modern trade retailers faced many of the same frustrations, just in a different form. Although key accounts had access to digital tools, much of that infrastructure that connected them with their suppliers had been built decades ago.
In both small neighborhood stores and large modern trade operations, the way retailers and suppliers worked together created friction that made it harder for both of them to grow.
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If we run out of stock midweek, it's difficult to get in stock, and it's a problem because your fridges is not packed.
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When I'm placing an order, I don't feel that I'm getting the best prices and the best deals for my business.
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I don't think that I'm getting the level of support that my business needs.
With BEES, we are transforming our route to market through a global platform powered by data and AI. We are fundamentally changing how we serve retailers and how we execute our commercial strategy. That transformation is already well underway at scale. Today, BEES is live in 30 markets with more than 4 million retailers, generating approximately $60 billion in gross merchandise value through the platform every year. What enables that scale is a common platform and data foundation built to support every market, channel, and user we serve. BEES connects every retailer touchpoint across the route to market through a suite of purpose-built front-end applications for retailers, sales reps, delivery drivers, and customer service agents. Different applications purpose-built for different users, all powered by the same platform and intelligence.
Ordering, sales visits, customer service, and delivery all generate data, giving us a richer and more complete view of every retailer and how best to serve them. We do this with BEES AI, our embedded intelligence layer. It processes data at scale, turning it into insights that shape more personalized experiences. Because each interaction informs the next, we can continuously improve how we serve retailers and unlock growth. One of the clearest things we've learned is that digitization doesn't make our relationships with retailers less personal. Done well, it makes those relationships stronger. We see it in the way retailers engage with us today, ordering on their terms, spending much more time with us, and reporting higher satisfaction. BEES gives retailers more control over when and how they do business with us.
Today, over one-third of orders are placed outside of business hours, giving retailers the flexibility to order when it works for them, rather than depending on the timing of a sales rep visit. Greater convenience has led to greater engagement. BEES adds 30 minutes of direct interaction with our retailers every week. We have reinforced that engagement through Club B, our rewards program, giving retailers more reasons to participate, and rewarding them for doing so. Today, over 3 million retailers are active Club B members. Ultimately, we see this strength reflected in greater satisfaction. Since we began implementing BEES, retailer NPS has increased by more than 45 points, reaching 71. I have shared so far how we have fundamentally transformed our relationship with our retailers. I hope you see that we did not just digitize those relationships. We made them stronger.
I would like to share how by serving our retailers better, we have created value for ABI at scale. First, BEES enables us to sell more profitably. By empowering our retailers to place orders themselves, we can refocus our sales force on opportunities that create the most value for each retailer. That makes every visit more focused and more productive. BEES enables each sales rep to serve 15% more stores, while our frontline cost as a percent of net revenue has declined by a third. Productivity extends beyond sales. Better visibility and planning help us use our logistics network more efficiently. Today, our deliveries are 15% more productive. We have improved our financial operations as well. With data and AI helping us manage credit risk more effectively, bad debt has declined by 27%.
Taken together, BEES is clearly making our route to market more efficient, but efficiency is not the primary goal. The biggest value that BEES creates is growth. Let me highlight Brazil as a case example. Before BEES, we served around 750,000 buyers in Brazil. Today, we serve 1.3 million. We now have direct connections with retailers who may have been indirectly served in the past, which enables better channel management and more effective revenue management. Because these retailers are directly connected, we can engage with them more frequently and more effectively. Through digital communications, personalized shopping recommendations, and tailored promotions, we can surface the products and opportunities most relevant to each retailer. That has helped us increase the number of products we sell with approximately 20% more SKUs per buyer in Brazil. In addition, BEES also supports growth through smarter commercial investment.
With Club B, instead of relying on broad-based discounts, we can personalize points offers for each retailer, and that investment works harder. Club B points offers generate 35% higher ROI than regular promotions. Importantly, the growth that we have experienced in SKUs and buyers came in service of our commercial strategy. Let me show you how. The increase in SKUs and buyers led to a strong increase in our multiple points of distribution in Brazil. This measures the availability of our products in the market. Importantly, our share of distribution also grew. So not only are we growing the distribution of our products, we are growing our share of shelf as well. With BEES, our growth in distribution focuses on the products that have the best fit with our retailers and the most consumer demand. As a consequence, this distribution growth translates directly into market share growth.
As this example in Brazil shows, BEES enables us to reach more retailers with more products and reinforce our commercial strategy. We do this not only in Brazil, but globally. We use BEES as a global platform to enable our mega brand and mega platform strategies. BEES helps us translate our commercial strategy into execution at the individual retailer level. A great example is Corona Cero at the Paris Olympics. BEES gave us the infrastructure to take this new mega platform, execute across markets, and build the availability of Corona Cero globally. Through the platform, we could activate retailers quickly, put the right offers and incentives in front of them, and give our frontline clear actions to drive execution. In just six months, Corona Cero doubled its global footprint, reaching 30 markets around the world. We simply could not have executed that quickly and that effectively without BEES.
Similarly, BEES supported the execution of Michelob ULTRA for the FIFA World Cup. Our ambition was clear: use the World Cup mega platform to accelerate Michelob ULTRA's growth. That meant turning one global strategy into thousands of retailer-level activations and sales rep executional objectives. For retailers, we personalized the shopping experience, surfacing Michelob ULTRA through relevant recommendations, offers, and incentives. For our sales reps, BEES Force translated that same strategy into retailer-specific actions, helping them prioritize where to expand distribution, what to sell, and what to execute in store. Rather than executing one campaign the same way everywhere, we could execute one strategy, but with greater precision, retailer by retailer. The results were significant. For example, in Latin America, distribution grew 250%, with volume growing 200%. This is the advantage that BEES gives ABI.
The ability to turn our commercial strategy into execution with greater speed, precision, and scale. I've showed so far how BEES generates value for retailers and for ABI. I'd like to now share with you some of the leading capabilities that we've built into the BEES platform. With the speed of technology and AI advancement today, our capabilities are accelerating, and I'm excited to share with you some of what makes BEES best in class. BEES Scale creates a virtuous cycle that is becoming ever more powerful. BEES generates proprietary data from the way retailers buy and the way our teams serve them. BEES AI turns that data into insights about what each retailer needs and where the next best opportunity is. But the real differentiator is what happens next.
Because BEES is so deeply embedded throughout our route to market, those insights can immediately shape what we do, what we recommend, what we offer, and where our teams focus. More usage creates more data, more data strengthens our AI, better AI produces sharper insights, and better insights drive better action. Today, this cycle operates at global scale. That scale comes from how deeply we've embedded BEES AI across the retailer journey. BEES AI identifies opportunities from what we know about each retailer based on their interactions in the platform and the commercial priorities we want to execute. For the retailer, that means an experience built around them. In BEES Customer, the products we recommend, the orders we suggest, the promotions and Club B offers we surface, and the communications they receive are all tailored for what is most relevant to that individual retailer's business.
Personalization goes beyond what they buy. Retailers can select the delivery timing that works best for them and the best way to pay for their order, including with access to credit. For the sales rep, BEES Force makes the visit just as personalized. It prioritizes the opportunities that matter most in each retailer and guides the rep towards the actions most likely to create value in each and every store. Today, BEES AI powers more than 25 billion of these personalized touchpoints every year. Let me show you what that looks like.
BEES AI makes commercial data actionable at scale. Ask a question, and it turns data into insight and insight into action. From country to region, to retailer. Revealing where growth is happening and where opportunity remains. Identifying an opportunity is only the start. The real value is knowing where and how to act. BEES AI instantly identifies which retailers show strong affinity for the brand and have not been activated yet. Behind every retailer is a much deeper picture. See how sales are evolving from volume and category mix to the SKUs gaining or losing ground. Understand execution in store, from visits and tasks to deliveries and order fulfillment. See how the retailer engages digitally from browsing and carts to orders, offers, and untapped digital opportunities, and see what has happened most recently. From purchases and visits to completed tasks and changes in assortment.
BEES AI uses these signals to determine the best action to take next to unlock that growth opportunity. It turns that action into a ready-to-execute plan sent straight to frontline teams for execution through BEES Force. From question to opportunity to action.
Every retailer is different, so every interaction is, too. Consider, for example, three stores in Colombia, in the same region of Colombia. Even in the same neighborhood, they can have very different shoppers, purchase patterns, and growth opportunities. BEES AI uses those differences to shape what each retailer sees in BEES Customer and the objectives for each sales rep in BEES Force. The commercial strategy is consistent, but the execution is adapted to each and every retailer. On the left, the first retailer has never purchased Michelob ULTRA before. BEES AI identified that Michelob ULTRA would be a good fit for this retailer. So we can share an activation directly in BEES Customer and reinforce it with a sales rep task to explain the brand value proposition and support a first purchase.
In the middle, by contrast, this retailer already purchases Michelob ULTRA and is a Club B Black member, one of our most engaged rewards program members. In this retailer, our objective is to ensure we grow the volume of Michelob ULTRA, leveraging points-based offers and supported again by sales rep execution. In cases where a retailer does not have an affinity for Michelob ULTRA, as in the retailer on the far right, our activations are focused on other strong brands in the portfolio. In this case, Águila. As I hope is clear, our online activations are fully personalized to the opportunities for each retailer. Even within the same sales rep route, the objectives and the importance of each objective is fully personalized. Our deployment of BEES AI is industry-leading in terms of both sophistication and scale.
By better serving our retailers and by enabling our consumers to have greater access to our portfolio, ABI consistently outperforms in our most digitally mature markets. Our volume grows faster, our revenue management is more effective, and total net revenue outpaces. In addition to these results, there are three main reasons that give us confidence that BEES is best in class. The first is adoption. Technology only becomes an advantage when it is adopted at scale, and BEES has reached greater scale than all other B2B platforms combined. Second, BEES brings the route to market together in one connected AI-powered ecosystem. Each product is purpose-built for the users it serves, with BEES AI turning our data into the decisions that matter most. So BEES doesn't just connect the route to market, it makes every part of it smarter and more effective.
BEES is the most advanced AI-powered product ecosystem in CPG. Third, and perhaps the strongest validation of what we have built, is that other leading companies are choosing to deploy BEES in their routes to market. Today, we work with both the world's largest consumer goods companies and iconic local companies. Our partnerships represent around $5 billion in annualized GMV and are growing rapidly. BEES has the broadest and deepest partnerships of any B2B CPG platform. As a result, the capabilities we built to transform our own route to market are now creating value across a much broader ecosystem. I've shown so far how BEES addresses retailer needs, creates value for ABI, and has built best-in-class capabilities. But those capabilities are now expanding beyond our own business.
Years of deploying and scaling BEES have validated a platform that can operate across different countries, channels, and routes to market, and that enables a massive opportunity, expanding our addressable market. We define our total addressable market as all underserved B2B transactions around the world. These are transactions still held back by fragmented routes to market, disconnected systems, and limited access to data technology and AI. These are exactly the challenges that BEES addresses. Our marketplace business is scaling rapidly, but the evolution of that growth is just as important as its scale. We established the marketplace through our 1P model, using our route to market to sell partner products. Increasingly, growth is coming from the 3P model, where partners use BEES to digitize their own routes to market. Today, 3P represents more than half of the marketplace GMV, and as you can see, it is growing rapidly.
As 3P becomes a larger share of the business, our growth shifts towards a more asset light, higher margin model. Let me explain in more detail how these models work. In 1P, ABI buys and resells partner products through our established route to market. For partners, that means immediate access to our retailer network, expanding their distribution and helping them reach more customers without having to build that route to market themselves. For us, it broadens the assortment we offer and offers retailers. It allows us to monetize our logistics capabilities where the returns are attractive. In 3P, partners implement BEES within their existing route to market, using our platform to digitize and improve the way they serve their customers while continuing to operate their own supply and logistics network.
That allows partners to benefit from the same digital capabilities we've proven at ABI, while allowing BEES to monetize its platform through a more capital light, higher margin model. In both models, both 1P and 3P, we offer value-added services, from digital advertising and sponsored placements to rewards, analytics, and financial services. These services give partners more ways to influence demand, target their investment, and improve execution while creating additional revenue streams for BEES. Across all of this, the principle is the same. We grow by creating value for the entire ecosystem. For retailers, that means greater access to leading brands with more convenience. Once our retailers gain access to 3P products in BEES, we see them purchase 2.5x more SKUs through BEES. For suppliers, it means stronger brand execution and more opportunities to grow.
On average, our partners grow their SKUs per retailer by 15% after launching BEES. For communities, it means more small businesses thriving. Today, we have over 4 million retailers and 2,000 distributors leveraging the BEES ecosystem. This win-win-win value proposition is why leading companies are choosing to scale with us. Let's see an example.
As you all know, Nestlé is a very large company, selling in around 185 countries across multiple channels. For several years now, Nestlé has been working with BEES, building a partnership to transform how we serve one of these channels, fragmented trade retailers. This channel presents an exciting growth opportunity for Nestlé, particularly in developing markets. Developing markets are over 40% of our group sales and growing strongly. Over the past few years, we have launched BEES in 13 countries, including very large markets for us, such as Brazil and the Philippines. At Nestlé, we are focused on how AI can help us unlock growth, not just efficiency. So our approach with BEES is not to replace our sales reps calling small retailers. Our approach is to leverage AI to amplify the sales teams to better serve small retailers and to engage directly with them 24/7.
Beyond the digitalization of order capturing activities, AI helps our teams make better personal recommendations, promotions, and communications, identify new selling opportunities, and serve customers more effectively. This is driving tangible commercial results. BEES is helping us to enhance distribution and visibility for our brands in fragmented trade, enlarging our direct coverage, driving broader assortment, and ultimately sales and volume growth. We have seen that the stores using BEES are growing faster than the ones not using it. Nestlé's assortment grows faster in these stores, so it's a win-win. Nestlé partnership with BEES combines a proven best-in-industry B2B platform with our strong go-to-market capabilities in developing markets. While we have already reached significant scale, we believe we are still early in the journey with BEES, and there is much more to come.
Thank you, Jordi, and the entire Nestlé team for the partnership and the trust that you've placed in BEES. It's a privilege to extend the capabilities of BEES to an iconic global company like Nestlé. We're proud of what we've built together, and we share the belief that there is still much more opportunity ahead. Having proven BEES at global scale with ABI and now another CPG in Nestlé, we are confident that BEES can further extend to new industries and new channels. Let's see an example.
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I would also like to thank Rodrigo and Rogério and the L'Oréal and Okajima teams for their ambition and their partnership. Together, we are bringing BEES into the pharmacy channel. As you can see, although it is a new industry and a different route to market, the underlying opportunity is the same. Connecting brands, distributors and retailers through one digital platform. For L'Oréal, BEES creates direct digital influence at the retailer level, using targeted offers, communications and recommendations to shape purchase decisions. Because L'Oréal can now interact directly with its retailers with personalized offers, it can more effectively drive conversion and improve its revenue management capabilities. For distributors like Okajima, BEES helps them unlock growth, improve operational efficiency, and serve their retailers more effectively.
Now, what we've built together is a strong proof point, a proof point that BEES can travel beyond the immediate industries and channels where it began. We believe there is much more value we can unlock. The opportunity ahead goes beyond the transaction itself, including value-added services like advertising, campaigns, sponsored placements, and rewards offers. These digital commercial levers give partners more direct, targeted ways to reach retailers and influence demand. Our advanced capabilities in data, insights, and image recognition help partners understand what is happening in their market and execute more effectively. With payments and credit, we can address financial friction that can otherwise make it harder for retailers and suppliers to do business. These services create more value and incrementality for our partners while also creating new revenue streams for BEES. Let's hear what one of our partners has to say about these capabilities.
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I'd like to thank Martin and the entire PepsiCo Brazil team for showing how BEES can help build brands with retailers digitally and engage them in more relevant and effective ways. As the platform evolves, the digital assets and capabilities we've built can create novel and unexpected new revenue opportunities. Club B is a good example. As we expanded the catalog of products retailers could redeem with their points, we saw significant increase in the redemption of electronic goods. That business has now reached some material scale with very attractive redemption margins. The capabilities we've built to create more value for retailers are also now opening entirely new sources of profitability for BEES. As we continue to scale the platform, we continue to find new ways to create value. The more scale and relevance that BEES reaches, the more opportunities we generate.
Looking ahead, we truly believe there is a massive opportunity to build further scale. Today, BEES transacts approximately $60 billion of gross merchandise value annually, and we know there is a much bigger opportunity ahead. If you look at just the markets where BEES has the strongest product market fit today, Latin America and Africa, and consider immediately adjacent categories like beverages and snacks, the addressable market in 2030 can expand to nearly $300 billion. Now, if you consider additional categories that are already available on BEES, like food, dairy, personal care, and household products, the addressable market in 2030 can more than double to approximately $600 billion. Now, if you expand further to categories that we are starting to offer on BEES, like health and electronics, the addressable market grows to nearly $1 trillion in Latin America and Africa alone.
Against that opportunity, the $60 billion in annualized GMV that BEES transacts today represents only a fraction of the market we are capable of transforming. BEES is strategically positioned to win because it combines two advantages. First, an end-to-end technology ecosystem that no other supplier has built. Second, the retailer reach, distributor relationships, and decades of route to market experience that others cannot easily replicate. That combination gives BEES the ability to win. BEES is high growth, profitable, and cash accretive today. As we expand into new markets, scale with more partners, and develop new revenue streams, we are building from an already profitable foundation, which is becoming increasingly meaningful to ABI. BEES Marketplace is already ABI's number seven contributor to EBITDA growth globally and growing at high pace. Importantly, the composition of that growth continues to improve.
As the capital-light 3P model and value-added services become a larger and larger part of BEES, the highest margin components of the business grow fastest. I would like to leave you now with four things that I hope you take away from today. First, BEES gives us a best-in-class capability to translate our commercial strategy into execution with greater speed, precision, and scale. Second, what we have built creates an opportunity far beyond our own business. BEES expands our addressable market to new geographies, channels, and industries. Third, that opportunity is already translating into growth. Our marketplace is scaling rapidly with a proven 3P model that allows us to grow in an increasingly capital-light, higher margin way. Fourth, BEES is profitable, cash accretive, and BEES Marketplace is already the seventh largest contributor to ABI's EBITDA growth.
We started BEES by solving real problems for our retailers and transforming our own route to market. In doing so, we built something much bigger, a best-in-class capability that strengthens ABI today and gives us a platform to capture an enormous opportunity ahead. That is why we believe BEES can play a role in digitizing the world's B2B transactions, creating more value for retailers, suppliers, and communities as we do it. Thank you for your time today, and I encourage you to stop by the BEES immersion space and experience for yourself many of the capabilities I have shared with you today. Cheers.
Please welcome to the stage David Almeida.
Good morning. My name is David Almeida, and it's good to be in St. Louis, a city where I had the pleasure to live for seven years, and it is the hometown of one of my children. But more importantly, a city that's been part of who we are as a company for over 160 years. I joined this company 28 years ago, and I've had the privilege of working in multiple zones and functions, and today I lead the strategy and technology functions. Over the next 20 minutes, I plan to show you how AB InBev has developed best-in-class tech, data, and AI capabilities, and how we're already leveraging those capabilities at scale to create value, and how we'll do even more going forward. You've just seen BEES and DTC from Nick and Lucas.
They are the visible face of our digital strategy, best-in-class platforms that our customers and consumers touch every day. These platforms directly support our strategy to lead and grow the category and are big levers for digitizing and monetizing our ecosystem. AB InBev's digital capabilities extend well beyond them. Behind the digital storefronts sits a global enterprise backbone, a set of global systems that run commercial, finance, supply chain, and people the same way in every market. That helps us optimize our business at scale. Finally, we've developed advanced analytics capabilities that deliver enhanced decision-making to both our front-end applications and our enterprise systems in near real time. This advanced analytics capability is the focus of my presentation. But before we dive into a real example of how AI delivers material value to ABI today, it's important to understand the context in which this capability was developed.
We've been investing significantly in our technology capabilities with intentionality since 2019. Before 2019, technology in this company looked like much of the industry, fragmented systems, manual processes, limited visibility across our zones, and the cyber risk that comes with all of that. Fragmentation meant duplicated costs and very little that could scale globally. From 2019 to 2023, we transformed our technology capabilities. We modernized our infrastructure, we moved our workloads to the cloud, and we launched our global enterprise platforms, SAP S/4HANA, Workday, o9, and others. We launched and scaled BEES. We made major investments in our data and analytics capabilities, including our growth analytics center in Bangalore and building our enterprise data platform, BrewDat. This was a period of concentrated investment. Since 2023, we've been scaling what we built, focused on few global platforms that could be best in class and leveraged globally.
This is the phase of reuse and value realization. Earlier this year, we asked Bain & Company and Microsoft to independently benchmark us against CPG peers. They scored us 1.2x the peer set on technology maturity and even higher on efficiency because of our scale and our strategy of standardization on global platforms. That is the economic point. Because the foundations exist, each additional market should need less incremental investment than the original build. Our strategy is build once, deploy repeatedly, improve globally. Within technology, analytics is where we are furthest ahead on the benchmark, 1.3x the CPG peer set, and the reason is simple. We built the foundations before we built the products, people, data, and global platforms. First, people. We built our own teams, data engineers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, and they work as one development flywheel. Data foundations feed data science.
Engineering turns models into products, and everything is embedded where decisions are made. In a world where intelligence is a competitive advantage, our data, our models, and our intelligence stays ours. This is a strategic choice, and it will matter more every year. Second, data. We built BrewDat, one trusted governed data platform designed for analytics and AI. In 2021, 29% of our data assets sat in one place. Today, 95% live in BrewDat, one version of the truth for every zone and every function. AI is only as good as the data underneath it. When that data is connected, insights reaches a decision faster. Third, global platforms. In 2021, 48% of our technology spend went to global platforms. Today, that number is 92%. Standardized high-performance platforms are the surface area that brings intelligence to the user directly at the point of decision.
Ten years of consistent investment have built a global portfolio of analytics products woven into how we run this company, how we make beer, supply, logistics, procurement, how we grow it, how we sell it, including our most prominent use case, BEES AI and personalization, which Nick has just covered. Then there is GenAI, the newest and potentially most promising iteration of AI.
It is early days in the application of this new technology, but just as we did with AI, we are building the foundations for what may come while staying laser focused on creating value. From the brewery to the shelf, there is intelligence in the decisions we make. Now, there is a lot of talk about AI. So instead of talking, I would rather show you real use cases and demos of where AI is integrated at the point of decision, sometimes invisibly, and already generating substantial value for ABI.
Let me show you three of them, three real problems, three advanced AI products, and the results they created for our business, starting with Logistics.ai. First, the logistics machine that moves our beer. We run one of the largest networks in consumer goods, so better intelligence here means more coordinated, more efficient decisions in every market. The opportunity sits in three places: transport, where swings in volume and freight prices drive cost; warehouse, where SKU complexity leaves room to build pallets more efficiently; and the last mile, where route, fleet, and distribution planning can work better together. Logistics.ai captures that opportunity by embedding intelligence in the logistics platforms you already run. It is delivering $50 million of value and a 6% improvement in cases per trip. Let me show you a quick video.
Every beer we sell makes the same journey. It leaves one of 200+ breweries, travels to a distribution center, gets built onto a pallet, and goes out on a truck to the point of sale. Three legs. Each one of them carries cost. Logistics.ai is our global analytics product for that journey. One layer, embedded in the platforms our supply chain teams already use. On the first leg, it replans loads on the day of execution and benchmarks what every route should cost. In the warehouse, it builds the pallet plan inside the warehouse management system. On the last mile, it decides how we route, how big the fleet should be, and when to deliver the load. Take that last leg. It is the most complex. Thousands of drops a day, and the decisions that drive its cost have always been made in different places.
Last Mile Intelligence, embedded in the B-way platform, gets the right product to the right customer at the right time. Last Mile has three components. Territory planning optimizes delivery days across warehouses, balancing loads, adapting to demand, and using pricing to ease peak congestion. Fleet optimization determines the ideal fleet mix to minimize costs, maintain service levels. Routing optimization, continuously generating routes that balance distance, capacity, service, and cost. Three decisions, one engine, one set of data. That is Logistics.ai, improving our asset efficiency and total productivity.
Those are real trucks, real pallets, real savings. Second, Watchtower. Managing our commercial investments through smarter resource allocation is one of the biggest value opportunities in our business. 30+ countries, 15+ brands in each of them, 100+ variables, 52 weeks. That is more than 15 million decisions a year steering our sales and marketing spend. Every one of them faces the same three questions: What drove last month's results? Where should the next million dollars go? What will it take for us to hit our target? No planner, no team, however experienced, can answer all those questions. Watchtower does. Every brand, every market, every time, the same way. It attributes what drove the result: commercial investments, price, execution, or external factors. Then it optimizes where the next dollar earns the most within real budget and portfolio constraints.
In its first six markets, it influenced roughly $600 million of decisions and created approximately $35 million of value. It is now rolling out to 30+ markets. Our ambition is simple, and I think unprecedented in our industry. Every commercial decision grounded in science. Let me show you what that looks like on the ground.
Every year, commercial teams across ABI make thousands of decisions. What drove our performance? How do we get the most from every sales and marketing dollar? What will it take to hit our growth ambitions? That is where Watchtower comes in. Watchtower is ABI's global commercial resource allocation platform, built to turn performance attribution into better investment decisions. It brings together two connected capabilities. Historical decomposition shows what drove performance. Resource allocation uses those insights to recommend where to invest next, from hindsight to action. Let's follow a trade director in Brazil who wants to analyze three main trade investment levers: incentive program, on-trade materials, and off-trade materials for brand A and brand B. They select investment lines and move to the table. in Q1 this year, the team invested 15% less than last year, but generated more MACO. ROI was 30% higher year-over-year.
Two things drove this. First, investment in incentive program went up, and they carry a higher ROI. Second, investment in trade materials came down. They carry a lower ROI. The result, a better ROI across both investment lines. To go deeper, the trade director opens the saturation curves with both brands side by side. Green zone means every additional Brazilian real invested returns more than one real. Blue zone means total investment is still profitable, but the next Brazilian real earns less than one. Orange zone means overall ROI is below one. Brand A sits in the orange zone. Brand B, by contrast, is still in the green. There is room to invest more while keeping marginal ROI above one. To understand regional performance, switching to grid view shows seven curves, one per region. Region 2 and Region 3 are investing above the optimal level.
Region 5 and Region 7 still have headroom while keeping marginal ROI above one. Knowing where to invest is half the answer. Now, how much to invest? In the optimization tab, the trade director creates a new plan. Maximize MACO, set the total spend, and upload constraints and starting investments, defining what Watchtower can and can't optimize as per line item and market. The recommendation is clear. Shift spend from brand A to brand B. Move budget from on-trade to off-trade materials, and by region, invest more in Region 5 and Region 6. Pull back in the Region 2 and Region 3. Every move traces back to the saturation curves. More where the next Brazilian real still pays back, less where it doesn't. This is Watchtower.
I love that example. It is a real product used by more than 150 of our colleagues who make commercial investment decisions across our company. Third, and finally, the place where every consumer decision ends, the beer shelf. A well-organized beer shelf is worth 6%-8% of category growth. Most shelves aren't well organized. 80% of volume comes from 21% of SKUs, yet the biggest brands are usually underrepresented on the shelf. One in three shoppers walks out empty-handed. That is lost revenue for us and for our retail partners. CatExpert.ai models each store across 200+ variables. So a suburban supermarket and an urban convenience store each get the right answer. It then resolves more than 15 million SKU shelf combinations into a single executable planogram. Where it is live, it can deliver 2% net revenue uplift and 40 basis points of share.
Because it grows the whole category, retailers ask for it. It makes us a better partner, not just a bigger supplier. We currently cover more than $2.5 billion of net revenue and estimate that we will cover $7 billion by 2030. Let's look at the quick video here.
Introducing CatExpert.ai. This category management analytical product is powered by a proprietary algorithm to optimize the assortment, space, and layout at the shelf. It defines the optimal assortment for each store, the optimal placement for each product on the shelf with diamond positioning, pack size flow, and shopper traffic flow, the optimal space every SKU should occupy. Created for our industry, CatExpert.ai equips our teams with insights to make data-driven decisions to drive our strategy, focusing on what makes the difference. An intuitive AI platform that turns natural language into code. Easy to use, fast to execute, scalable. The 3D feature makes planogram design immersive, minimizing costly in-store errors and speeding up decision-making and buy-in from retailers. Ready to be executed at the store. Smarter shelves, stronger brands, bigger impact. CatExpert.ai, the future of category management.
What matters is where the value comes from, growing the whole category for the retailer, the shopper, and us. That's why it scales. Let me bring together what you've just seen. Around $30 billion. That's the scale of business decisions our analytic products inform every single year. Decisions made with intelligence, not just instinct. These products are embedded in our daily workflows, used by thousands of people who may never think of themselves as using analytics at all, and it doesn't stop at decisions. Our portfolio of global products is creating meaningful value. That's what our data and analytics capability makes possible. That's how our company runs today, and we're early in this journey. The path ahead is clear, and it's disciplined. We scale what's proven. You've seen the pattern. Six markets become 30, and the same playbook runs across our whole portfolio. The products exist.
Now we multiply the footprint of these products across markets, and we accelerate GenAI selectively. GenAI does not reset the technology. It increases the value of the foundations we've already built, the data and the platforms. In GenAI, we've chosen four areas to focus our investment and energy. One, decision co-pilots embedded in our products so insights arrive faster. Two, agentic automation of the repetitive service and transactional work. That's the lowest hanging fruit. Three, AI agents that make our own engineers faster at building and testing. Four, end-to-end process reinvention, where our digital twins are already reshaping cross-functional work in Mexico, Canada, and China. Let me take you deeper into one area Marcel touched on earlier, how we're using GenAI to better understand our consumers and drive growth.
In our category, new ideas can accelerate growth, new products, new occasions, new ways to reach people. Every good idea starts with one question: What do consumers actually want? Today, finding that out takes weeks of research for every single idea. Brew House transforms that. An AI innovation brewery. First, it listens. Thousands of real conversations, social media, videos, news, are read and sorted by what people are actually talking about. Then it informs topics people are starting to care about. It then watches which of those are growing week by week and picks out the ones rising fastest while they are still small. Coffee and sugar, spotted before anyone else notices. From that one signal, it creates 300 product ideas, each with a plan for how to sell it. Now, the test. Every idea goes to a panel of 10,000 synthetic consumers.
Think of them as digital stand-ins for real people spread across the kinds of consumers we sell to. Each one is built from what we already know, years of consumer studies, shopping behavior, past product tests, plus what is happening right now, trends, and how people behave online. So they respond the way real consumers would to the idea, the packaging, the price. They explain why. Not just a score, a reason. It writes the questions, asks all 10,000 and sorts the results, 900 versions become 10, and we check their answers against real research we have already done and put real people in front of the biggest decisions. Next, the top three ranked. Each one opens as a full file, the design, the notes, the evidence. It explains why it thinks this idea will work, and every claim points back to real market data.
Then a person makes the call. Brew House helps us decide. Once we approve and the idea is ready to go, a small signal, now a real product on its way. What used to take weeks now takes hours. Faster, efficient, more certain. For new products, for marketing, for sales. Catch the signal early. Brew what is next.
That is not a demo. It is a real use case of how we are transforming our business using GenAI. Let me conclude. Here is what I would like you to remember. Five things. One, we lead CPG peers in technology capabilities, and we did it more efficiently. Two, we turned data and analytics into operating products embedded in how we run the business. Three, these products inform around $30 billion of business decisions every year and deliver meaningful value for our business. Four, the job is not done.
We have a clear path forward, taking proven products to more markets. Five, GenAI expands the opportunity from decisions to impact. 28 years ago, I joined a company that ran on experience and instinct. Today, it runs on experience, instinct, and intelligence. The next decade belongs to the companies that combine all three. Thank you. Here is to a future with more cheers.
Please welcome back, Shaun Fullalove.
Okay, thanks to Lucas, Nick, and David for those presentations. First session this morning, we covered the lead and grow part of the strategy. These three sessions here, we covered most, I think, of the digitize and monetize section. We are going to head to a lunch break shortly. We are going to make it slightly extended today to give you a chance to interact with some of the BEES and the D2C booths that we have outside on the terrace. One reminder for those that do want to spin, apparently we have three, four bikes left. I am personally willing to sacrifice mine if there is a fifth that wants to do it. If you would like to, please register at the desk outside you on the right. One of Fernando's only feedbacks to me for the capital markets day was to make sure that the food is excellent.
I hope the food lives up to everyone's standards outside. Enjoy the lunch, take some time to browse through the booths, interact with some of the products and technology, and we will see you back here at 1:00 P.M.
[Break]
Please welcome to the stage Brendan Whitworth.
All right. This is the coveted post-lunch presentation, which will be me and my presentation versus you and your digestion. My name is Brendan Whitworth, and I am the CEO of Anheuser-Busch in the North America zone. I have been in this position since 2021, and I joined ABI in 2013. I started in our global office before joining the U.S. business as a region vice president in 2015. I also ran our trade marketing organization and was our chief sales officer prior to my current role. It is an absolute pleasure to host you in St. Louis and share a little bit about the U.S. business. Anheuser-Busch has been around for over 165 years, and it all started right here. This year marks the 150th anniversary of Budweiser, our flagship beer brand that led to the growth of our broad and diverse portfolio.
While St. Louis houses the history of this great American institution, and it remains a vital location in our company's network today, our business now looks different than it did centuries ago. It even looks different than it did a decade ago. While we have been historically known as the world's largest and, very humbly, best brewer of lagers and ales, we are now one of the top and the fastest-growing spirits company and an emerging player in energy drinks. This obviously is not by mistake. It is the outcome of a deliberate strategy, purposeful investment, and sustained execution over recent years. It is also the outcome of deeply understanding the consumer and using our capabilities to generate new adjacent businesses that expand our addressable market. We know that growth is not uniform across the industry.
While there are certain pockets that are in decline, there are also pockets of growth. For years, we have viewed the industry and the consumer through the lens of total alcohol and built our portfolio solutions around it. Even as cyclical macro factors pressure our industry, and CPG more broadly, this approach has better positioned us to win and continue making progress in rebalancing our portfolio. While the St. Louis Brewery first made Budweiser 150 years ago, we have invested in its capability and its capacity to make spirits-based brands like NÜTRL and Cutwater at scale today. We have done the same in other strategically placed breweries in Los Angeles, outside Atlanta, and upstate New York.
Before I go any further into greater details of where we have been focused for the past few years, I would like to take a step back and consider the strengths and attractiveness of the U.S. market. The U.S. is a developed market with the world's largest profit pool for global CPGs and stable cash flow generation in hard currency. The U.S. also typically exports trends and brands to other parts of the world. This is true for our industry and many other industries. If we are successful building brands in the U.S., there is a good chance that they can be successful elsewhere in the business. I think that Michelob ULTRA is a pretty good example of that. The U.S. is also an ecosystem of strong and well-resourced partners, like our wholesalers and our retailers, that help bring our products to consumers every single day.
As I mentioned, our addressable market today is total alcohol. That means that we compete in an almost $190 billion industry with 6% growth over the last five years. While we are just getting started in energy, and we have much more to prove, it could bring an additional $25 billion to our addressable market. If we just focus on beer and beyond beer, we segment the beer category across core beer, premium beer, and no- alc beer. Beyond beer encompasses all ready-to-drink products, whether they are made on a malt base or a spirits base. We map our portfolio to these segments. Busch Light and our legacy brands, Budweiser and Bud Light, compete in core. Michelob ULTRA leads the premiumization trends for us and for the industry. Similarly, Michelob ULTRA Zero now leads growth in no- alc beer. Cutwater leads growth in beyond beer.
We are also very excited about NÜTRL's growth and our most recent acquisition, BeatBox. If you choose to view us only as a beyond beer company, we are the third largest and by far the fastest growing. For the remainder of my time, I would like to focus on two aspects of our global strategy, lead and grow the category, and optimize the business. Let us start with lead and grow the category and dive a bit deeper into the consumer and our portfolio. We began our journey to rebalance the portfolio in 2018. Along the way, we have shifted resources and our execution more disproportionately to our growth brands or what we now call mega brands. We acquired new brands through thoughtful and growth accretive M&A. We have launched focused innovation.
We build our portfolio for all U.S. consumers, but we prioritize two key groups while growing the occasions in which we reach them. Let us start with our true beer lovers, which are 35+ year-old men. They are the heart of the beer category and drink more than 50% of all beer. Over the past few years, they are steady in their consumption and growing servings per year. This group includes Hispanics, and it cuts across socioeconomic standings from high income to low income. The second group is LDAs, 21- 24 year-olds. First things first, we have to dispel an industry myth. This group is just as likely to drink alcohol as everyone else, with over 50% claiming to have had a drink in the past week. This group is very much co-ed and over-indexes their consumption towards beyond beer.
Across all groups, U.S. consumers have expanded their repertoire with over 70% regularly drinking at least two categories. That is compared to just under 60% 10 years ago. This is why we have tailored our multi-year portfolio strategy to compete across several alcohol segments. Participation in beer remains higher than any other category. Beyond beer is the category that has significantly and consistently grown over recent years, reaching 52%. However, we also know consumers have faced increasing pressure in recent years, the rising cost of essentials weighing on discretionary spending, and the consumer sentiment at historically low levels. We are seeing these types of cyclical macro factors affect our industry, and as I mentioned, broader CPG landscape. Our addressable market has remained relatively resilient, with beer and beyond beer share of total alcohol remaining stable.
We've been focused on driving our commercial performance across these categories. If we choose to just look at beer, we've been growing share since the fourth quarter of 2024, led by Michelob ULTRA, which has been growing share for 10 quarters in a row. While ULTRA has been leading the growth for our portfolio and the industry as the fastest-growing beer brand, Busch Light has been the second fastest-growing beer brand. Busch Light has also been the platform for the most successful innovation of the last couple of years in Busch Light Apple. While ULTRA and Busch Light are different brands, they are similar in their respective positions being relentlessly consistent over decades, reliably meeting consumers where they are and remaining relevant in their lives. If we look over at beyond beer, we've been leading the way in both volume and share growth.
Cutwater has reliably grown double and triple digits for years, en route to its position today as the number one largest ready-to-drink cocktail, almost 5x the size of the next largest brand. Ready-to-drink cocktails as a segment has grown significantly over the past few years to its current size of about $3 billion. It's important to note that this RTD category sources more than 2/3 of its growth from wine and spirits, with over 40% from spirits alone. So it's highly incremental to our portfolio. What's even more exciting is that we size the cocktails segment within spirits more broadly as a $25 billion opportunity. Cutwater is less than a 5 share, while already leading as the fastest-growing spirits brand. So we believe Cutwater has a very long runway ahead of it.
While Cutwater has been leading ready-to-drink cocktails, we've been playing catch up with NÜTRL Vodka Seltzer and are happy with our progress so far. NÜTRL has grown to be a top four seltzer, regardless of being made on a vodka or a malt base, and it's the only one across the top five growing double digits. If you put our entire alcohol business together, including both beer and beyond beer, we have been growing share of total alcohol for nine consecutive quarters. In 2026, we are leading the industry's growth with the top two fastest growing in total alcohol brands with Michelob ULTRA and Cutwater, which they're largest in their respective growth in beer and their respective growth in spirits.
All of this work has culminated in our above core beer and our beyond beer brands now representing about 48% of our total net revenue, which is a clear sign of the progress that we're making in rebalancing our portfolio. This early momentum is not by accident. As I mentioned, it's a result of a deliberate strategy executed over time, combined with purposeful investment. The global company's commitment to invest in the U.S., combined with our local productivity initiatives, have allowed us to make increasing investments in our marketing budget to support growth. Our Chief Commercial Officer, Kyle, will take us through how we are effectively spending that money next. It's too early to mention any highlights about Phorm Energy, but this is an exciting brand with an exciting platform that includes other categories like protein.
We have great partners in 1st Phorm, which is one of the leading sports nutrition companies in the U.S., and in Dana White, the UFC CEO and entertainment mogul, and we are excited about where this brand and this business is headed. It is worth mentioning that our portfolio rebalance has been led by the mentality of doing less and expecting to get more. We repeat the mantra of simplicity, focus, and consistency. To clear bandwidth to accomplish what is most important, we made a deliberate effort to reduce SKUs and delist brands. In beyond beer and craft alone, we delisted over 60% and 75% of our SKUs respectively. We completely delisted over 30 brands. Overall, we are happy with our portfolio progress to this point, but acknowledge there is much more work to do. Now let us move over to optimize the business.
Our goal here has been to drive efficiency where it matters so we can allocate resources to where it counts. We have made necessary decisions across the business, like closing three of our large Anheuser-Busch breweries and reallocating volume to our lower cost, more efficient facilities. We closed smaller production locations and verticalized operations. We sold 11 craft breweries and closed 17 craft pubs. While these decisions impact people and local communities, they deliver productivity that we have been able to reinvest in our portfolio. Along with our supply chain, we have also right-sized our overhead and found that our organization is more effective and efficient overall, and their belief in our work has never been higher. Our recent employee engagement survey came back with the highest scores in our company's history. While we have driven productivity, we have also made investments to support our portfolio and its growth.
We have invested $2 billion in our supply chain over the last few years to increase capacity in the right locations and establish new capabilities, like producing no-alc beer and spirits. As I mentioned, we now produce Cutwater in four locations across the U.S. and have ample capacity to fuel future growth. Now, I would like to finish up today by talking a little bit more about the industry ecosystem that I mentioned earlier, namely our wholesalers and our retailers. As you know, the U.S. is a three-tier system with brewers, wholesalers, and retailers. While there are strategic locations where we are legally allowed, and we do own the distribution, 95% of our business goes through our independent wholesalers. Almost 100% of our business is sold through chain and independent retailers.
It is critical that we work closely and constructively with these partners because we all mutually benefit from this amazing industry. While investments in brands and analytical capabilities matter a lot, so do investments in establishing meaningful relationships. Our Anheuser-Busch wholesalers are oftentimes multi-generational businesses that deeply understand their markets and have strong relationships in those markets. In addition to planning, executing, and co-investing in brand plans, we also work with our wholesalers on technology and analytics solutions. We have the scale to invest in these solutions to help them direct their execution, truly know what is happening in the market, and fully understanding its impact. Included in those suite of tools is BEES, which continues to increase its adoption in the U.S. While our wholesalers are oftentimes multi-generational with Anheuser-Busch, we have also welcomed new family businesses into our network over the years.
Of recent note has been Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits, or should we say Southern Glazer's Wine, Spirits, and Beer. For those that don't know, Southern is a $25 billion net revenue company that has a long history as the largest nationwide distributor of wine and spirits in the U.S. Most recently, our wholesalers have given us the highest marks ever in their Voice of the Wholesaler, an annual internal survey that's been in place for over 40 years. This gives us confidence that one of our most important partners believes in our strategy, our brand plans, and the direction that we are headed. The relationship with our retailers today goes far beyond planning ads, displays, and promotions. Those are routines. We made the decision years ago to become strategic. That meant a significant and recurring investment in the category.
We added capabilities, people, insights, research, and we built a retailer collaboration center that we call The Vault. This is the physical space, which you'll see later today, where we bring everything together and co-plan the category with our retailers. We have become true strategic advisors to our retailers, and they have rewarded us by naming Anheuser-Busch as category captain for over 70% of the industry's volume. In summary, we've done a lot of work over recent years to rebalance the portfolio and rightsize the business. We invested in capabilities to expand our addressable market, and we have become a top growing spirits company. We've driven productivity to invest in the most important parts of our portfolio, and we have taken our most important industry partners along with us. We are encouraged by the early momentum, but as Kobe said, the job is not finished.
We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we are extremely excited for it, and we are confident that our business is better positioned for future growth now than it has been in a very long time. With that, I'd like to welcome Kyle, our chief commercial officer, to the stage to walk you all through our commercial strategy. Thank you.
Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Kyle Norrington. I've been with our company leading brands and commercial teams for 26 years. I started my career at Labatt Breweries of Canada in sales and marketing. Then I had the opportunity to lead our global brands from New York City. I returned back to Canada as the business unit president for a few years, and for the past five, I've had the privilege of serving as chief commercial officer, leading all marketing and commercial strategy here in the U.S. I'm very excited to share the progress that we are making and the plans we have to lead and grow the category, leveraging the One ABI Way Marcel talked through this morning. As Brendan laid out, and you will see throughout my presentation, consumers are at the heart of everything we do.
We have a simplified, complementary portfolio designed for growing segments, and we activate in the passion points that help us reach and engage our LDA drinkers. We are focused on our beer lovers, we are future-proofing with LDAs, and we are obsessed about the occasions where we connect with all of them. Our focus has helped us grow market share across the board, and we have the fastest growing brand in each of the respective segments. Let's dive deeper into the levers and start with our premium portfolio that has been consistently growing volume, share, and brand power since 2024, led, of course, by the number one in volume and the fastest growing beer in America. Michelob ULTRA started its run nearly 25 years ago, defining the balanced choice segment with its low carbs, calories, and a superior smooth taste.
Across the past two and a half decades, Michelob ULTRA has shown up consistently, delivering on its purpose to champion a social and active world. Let's take a look at our journey to number one.
In the most competitive beer market in the world, one brand didn't just compete, it redefined the entire industry. A brand competitors first dismissed, then mocked, and ultimately tried to copy. A brand built brick by brick. This is Michelob ULTRA's story. A brand that earned its place as both America's top-selling and fastest growing beer brand. Our story doesn't end here. Quite the opposite. We're just getting started.
I smell Michelob ULTRA.
Together, we'll write the next chapter of the superior light beer. We've been running fast, but in 2027, we fly.
Our mega platforms help reinforce our purpose. From the original active lifestyle, all the way to a decades-long PGA partnership that has helped us be the beer for millions of 19th hole celebrations. ULTRA, like most of our mega brands, is well-positioned to help reach our key consumer groups and convert occasions through our mega platforms. Perhaps none more mega than this past summer, as the biggest brand had the biggest sporting event in history in our own backyard. We built a commercially integrated plan like never before, coordinated from TV screens to in-store to the life-changing experiences themselves to ensure we squeezed every last drop out of the opportunity. Let's see it.
We like to say that Spain won on the field, but ULTRA definitely won with the fans. Being commercially integrated is critical to cutting through the clutter and winning the attention war. But it's even harder with LDAs, where we have a big opportunity on category relevance and an important job to drive participation with beer lovers. Our brands and platforms have got to be part of culture. That's why we have ULTRA sitting literally courtside for every nationally televised game in America. The NBA is now the second-most watched sport in the U.S. and the largest following of any league on social media. It helps us drive next-level engagement with this critical LDA consumer. And engage we do, creating relevance and an unskippable presence for our brand by being integrated and celebrated throughout, from the court to the dressing room to the parade right down Broadway.
Let's check it out.
I just need a proper fight to touch that crown. Can't stop this. Let it pop. Let it. Bring it hot. Bring it home. Better seize your moment before it's gone.
Presented by Michelob ULTRA.
Can't stop this. Let it pop. Let it boom. Let it shine like. Bring it hot. Bring it home. Better seize your moment before it's gone. When we in the house, you better bring it zone. Bring it hot. Bring it home. Better seize your moment before it's gone. Michelob ULTRA, baby, let's go. Shut this down. Can't stop this. Let it pop. Let it boom. Let it shine like.
Any Knicks fans out there? Come on, right? Finally, our international sports platforms help us get after streaming and sports viewing occasions. The World Cup was an amazing opportunity for Ultra, but another summer event on American soil is set to take the country by storm. In 2028, the Summer Olympics are back in America, 32 years in the making. If the World Cup taught us anything, we need to plan to win. That is exactly what we have been doing. After many years of faraway locations with challenging time zones, Paris 2024 and Milan 2026 put the Olympics back on the map. Ultra made these historic sporting moments count, just likely we will for L.A. Let us take a look.
The Olympic rings are the most recognized logo in sport, and the Team USA marks help us flex our patriotic muscles, so we will waste no time leveraging them to drive occasions. It has been over 30 years since America hosted the Summer Olympics, so we have created a 12-month plan that kicks off next summer as Ultra leads the country down the road to L.A. 2028, and wins gold before the torch is even lit. As Brendan said, the job is not finished, and we have lots of headroom to keep growing this brand. Today, Ultra is growing in all 50 states, but when you look closer, you see immense opportunity. In many states, Ultra is over a 12% share of the category. There are almost as many states, mostly in the northern U.S., where Ultra is still under a 6% share.
Getting these lower states to our national average represents over a half billion dollar revenue opportunity. With the trends at its back, unrivaled platforms, growing investment, and the focus of the entire system, we are confident in our ability to keep growing this brand. Next, let us talk about balanced choices, where we are the number one and the fastest-growing with over 40% share of no- alc beer. As you have heard, it is a booming category around the world, and the U.S. is no different, with beer lovers and LDAs looking to extend or introduce it to new occasions like meals. People often ask me: How big can no- alc actually get? You hear stories of European countries where it is a 10% share of the category, but it feels so distant from the U.S. reality, where it is growing fast, but still only 1.2% of beer.
You do not have to look any further than our neighbors to the north for perspective, where the category is already 4% of beer and continues to grow. Just the Canadian sizing represents over a billion dollar opportunity. That is why we have invested in a portfolio across price points, flavors, and styles. We saw an opportunity to help lead and grow this segment. So we asked ourselves what brand could credibly launch a category-defining, active lifestyle, no- alc beer innovation? The answer was obvious. So after two years of development, testing, refining, we launched Ultra Zero. With only 29 calories and the same Ultra smooth taste, it became the number one innovation of 2025, and in under a year, the number one no- alc beer in America. Let us take a look.
Hey. Prime time. Both sides. Never have I ever been on the sidelines. Only front line. The line on the stat sheet going up with a timeline. Man, I am big time. Playoff berth, I am a midwife. Back-to-back, I done win twice. All-Pro with it like 10x . What I am saying? All city, all state, now I am on the world stage. I took an L, had to turn page. Maxed out, yeah, I am work wage. I am on the top with it, first place. God got me for real, never burn sage. I just burn flame with it, worst case. Got their hands tied like I am Kirk Frank. It is prime time. It is prime time.
This January, we complemented Zero with a lime variant that has performed really well. It has got a hint of sweetness that LDAs are looking for, and it pairs great with food. Give it a try in the immersion if you have not tasted it. Now to the core. That represents just over half of the beer category, where we lead with 52 share of the segment, and we are growing share and brand power consistently since 2024. We have an iconic portfolio of brands, but I want to spend some time talking about the next icon that, quite frankly, does not get the attention it deserves. Busch Light is the second fastest-growing brand in the entire beer category. It is a textbook case for the power of clear, consistent positioning. It rewards those who hold true to their roots.
It delivers the familiarity that drinkers are looking for, with a witty, no-nonsense attitude. With its growing equity and affordable price, it delivers massive consumer utility, and for over 20 years, it has activated outdoor platforms that are authentic to our drinkers.
Presenting the cold, refreshing mountains of Busch.
That's the sound of refreshment. No question about it.
Don't just reach for a beer. Head for the mountains.
Busch. Looks like happy hour.
While we remain consistent, Busch Light continues to bring exciting news to our fans. Who else could partner with America's number one outdoor retailer, Bass Pro Shops, and America's number one farming brand, John Deere, and have it feel completely authentic? Platform activation like this has helped it become the second fastest growing brand in the category 2 years running. But the run room is still huge. Busch Light is over 10 share in 12 states and is the number one beer in many of them. With total U.S. share at around 5, closing the gap presents a massive opportunity. We continue to invest behind the partnerships, the media, and the execution. But Busch Light's growing relevance with LDAs has helped us innovate into another opportunity, flavored beer. It's a sizable segment that drives incrementality for the brand and category.
Two years ago, after listening to our pleas from the big and loyal fan base that we have, we relaunched Busch Light Apple, and LDAs stocked up big time on the brand they affectionately call Bapple.
Breaking news, Busch Light Apple is back. Yes, yes, yes. Ooh, I have been waiting for this. I have been waiting for this.
Obviously, do not go and do that.
You do whatever you like. I am taking it home with me.
Busch Light Apple became a 3.4 share of the entire beer industry in just one week, and the number one beer innovation through H1 of 2026. How you like them apples? Well, I like them so much they will be back next spring. Now let us get into beyond beer, because it is our number one growth lever today. It is highly incremental to our beer portfolio and provides new ways to connect with both men and women, LDA, and older consumers by disrupting traditional spirits occasions. Today, we are a top 10 spirits supplier and the fastest-growing.
However, the job is not finished. There is still an ocean of opportunity for our mega brands and big pockets of growth for future innovation. But you heard this from Brendan, and it bears repeating. We have the fastest-growing brand in the spirits category with Cutwater. But it was not an overnight success. After the M&A in 2019, we nurtured this innovative product to the mega brand it is today.
Well, this morning, Anheuser-Busch just announced they are getting into the spirits industry. In 2019, there were a lot of questions.
What they are very good at is beer. Are they prepared to make a long-term financial investment?
Capabilities is one thing, but actually having strong brands is something completely different.
But what looked risky to others, we saw as opportunity to take an emerging spirits brand and turn it into the next big thing. Not to spoil it, but that's exactly what we did. A foundation this strong let us innovate a lot. But okay, not everything was a success. It turns out people simply wanted real, complex, perfectly mixed cocktails in a can, so that's exactly what we gave them, putting our cocktails in the hands of millions. We made hosting occasions our main stage and revolutionized what it means to have a cocktail at home. This year, we've accelerated.
Cutwater is taking the internet and the liquor store by storm.
Now they're canning every great cocktail you can think of.
And with an incremental $25 billion opportunity in front of us, there's no way we're slowing down now.
Cutwater is a product that solves a consumer problem. As alcohol repertoire has evolved over the last 30 years, so did occasions for cocktails. They were no longer stuck in the fancy bar. They came home, where hosts like to serve their guests a margarita or a martini. Not everybody's a mixologist. They don't want to buy all the ingredients, and when the game is on and the party's pumping, they definitely don't want to go through the time and hassle of making a cocktail. Insert Cutwater. Bar quality cocktails made with real spirits and the crack of a can, elevated in a unique glass over ice and personalized with your garnish of choice. We have intentionally and consistently positioned Cutwater against the massive entertaining occasion. See how this has come to life in the last couple of years. There is a Cutwater for every season.
From a marg on the dock in the summer, to a White Russian for the holidays, Cutwater has become synonymous with the best occasions for cocktails. There is one moment in the U.S. that's like no other, and that's the Super Bowl. In 2027, we will put the fastest growing spirits brand on the biggest broadcast in America. Now is the moment for this brand to step onto the big stage and drive massive reach. I believe we have the biggest, most comprehensive commercial and innovation plan in the brand's history. As a team, we feel like we're just scratching the surface, because there is so much headroom to grow at the expense of spirits with this disruptive, highly relevant, and incremental brand. With the short time I had today, I was only able to dive into a few of the key brands driving our momentum.
As I said, we have a distinctive, complementary portfolio of mega brands. Like the number one core beer in Bud Light, an iconic American brand that activates the biggest passion points and beer occasions in the industry, from tailgating to grilling, to watching the game with your friends. To the king of beers, 150-year young American icon that has won the hearts and votes of the nation for the past two Super Bowls, and eight before that. To complement ULTRA and premium, we have Stella Artois. This summer, we leaned into the World Cup with our Star. Fans new and old drank it up. We're excited to fuel this momentum as Stella Artois becomes the official beer of the UEFA Champions League in July 2027.
We also have a Kona Big Wave, our Liquid Aloha, the country's next generation lifestyle brand that has become a tidal wave in the on-premise. Now ranking as the number nine tap in the country. In Beyond Beer, NÜTRL continues to be one of the fastest growing brands in spirits-based seltzers, and we are well on our way to our ambition to become number two in the industry. I couldn't be more excited to welcome BeatBox. This brand engages LDAs for a wide flavor lineup. Its packaging and ABV were intentionally designed for the occasions that matter to the target consumer. Having this amazing portfolio has not driven complacency. Our innovation strategy and team are always looking for new pockets of growth.
We evolved how we innovate, better leveraging our expanded industry to drive incrementality, spending more time developing insights, testing, and patiently piloting to improve before we scale, and killing non-productive brands, saving money and focus. We have leveraged these capabilities to drive excitement and trial in our mega brands, where we have hit a few home runs, from Busch Light Apple, to Michelob ULTRA Zero, to what is now the second biggest Cutwater cocktail, the Lemon Drop Martini. We are also hitting some singles as we develop seeds or micro M&A in areas that we see opportunity. From a flavorful lemonade in SHADIES, all the way to authentic flavors of Chillitas. Our strategic, intentional, and iterative approach is working, but we are far from done. Now, as I close, I want to highlight that our performance has been fueled with intentional, concentrated investment.
96% of our marketing spend is behind our mega brands and our largest sustained brands. Since 2021, our media investment on them is up over 50%, helping us show up when and where our drinkers are looking for us. No other company invests in partnerships like we do. From the NFL to the NBA, to new partners like the Champions League, to Team USA, and LA28 that is right around the corner. As I said earlier, connecting with consumers is harder than ever. So beyond our investment and amazing partnerships, we have done a lot to drive an unskippable presence for our brands in culture. From the most streamed shows, to the biggest games, our brands are seamlessly integrated into content that our drinkers love and watch across platforms every day. Let us take a look.
The Bud Light Super Bowl celebration.
Bud Light please.
Brought to you with limited commercial interruption by Michelob ULTRA. Take a look at fans right now at the Michelob ULTRA inside clock.
No symbol is more iconic than the Budweiser Clydesdales.
Bud Light Sunday.
In summary, we are rebalancing our portfolio toward growth by putting the consumer at the heart of everything we do. We have expanded beyond beer, where we have a unique, diversified, and complementary set of brands that drive incrementality. We invest in commercially coordinated mega platforms and partnerships that help us connect to our key consumers and the occasions that matter. Finally, our focused strategy and our brands are better positioned to lead and grow the category. Thank you all for your time today. All right, now you've seen how we're approaching the U.S. business and the portfolio. I wanted to take a minute to explain how this will all come together this afternoon.
We're excited, as I mentioned earlier, to host you at our St. Louis campus, where you'll get a chance to tour our facilities as well as experience a brand immersion to see firsthand how our portfolio and our plans come to life for our consumers. Let me start with a little bit more about the campus. As I mentioned earlier, the St. Louis Brewery is where it all started over 165 years ago, and today it remains our biggest brewery and one of our most capable. We've invested to produce that scale, everything from Budweiser to Cutwater. The campus also features our Anheuser-Busch Tour Center, where people come from all over the country and the world to experience what we do and to see our beloved Budweiser Clydesdales. St. Louis houses much from our company's past. This campus is also a home for our future.
As I mentioned earlier, a few years ago, we built The Vault, our industry-leading customer collaboration center, where we discuss and build our annual plans alongside our chain retailers. It's equipped with state-of-the-art analytics and technology, and The Vault facilitates critical key account relationships in a complex and sophisticated retail landscape. While you'll have the opportunity to see these incredible parts of our campus, on the tour, we've also set up, as I mentioned, an immersion area where you will experience firsthand our U.S. mega brands and the mega platforms. Our portfolio rebalance is anchored in focusing our resources behind the brands with the greatest ability to win during the moments that matter most to our consumers. We're excited to show you exactly what it looks like and what it feels like. Lastly, we've carved out dedicated time to a key part of our portfolio strategy, innovation.
As you heard from Kyle, we've evolved our approach to innovation. We are better at leveraging our capabilities and our deep consumer insights to drive incrementality and expand our addressable market. Today, you'll hear more about how we bring innovations to life across categories, ranging from No-alc Beer to Cutwater Spirits, to Phorm Energy and Phorm Protein. You'll also see how Marcel and his team approach innovation through a global lens, and we'll have the opportunity to sample some of our biggest bets and successes across our global market. It's important to note that what you'll see later today goes beyond simply showcasing our rich heritage, world-class production, and our iconic brands. It's a tangible look at how the choices and investments we've made in our capabilities, our portfolio, our partnerships, and innovation are all working in service of better positioning our business for long-term growth. Thank you.
Please welcome Shaun Fullalove.
Great. Thanks, Brendan and Kyle, for the presentations. That concludes our presentation agenda for the first day. We are going to end with a Q&A panel session with our speakers from today, plus special guest Fernando, who did not speak today, but will tomorrow. So give us a few moments here just to set up the stage with a few additional chairs. If I could ask Michel, Fernando, Tadeu, David, Marcel, Nick, Lucas, and Brendan, who has just sat down, can now come back up to the stage. A couple of notes on logistics here, just while they are coming up. We will start by taking some questions from here in the room. For those that are on the webcast stream, I do have an iPad, I guess, here in front of me with the Q&A functionality. If you want to ask questions on the stream, please submit them.
I will see them here, and we may pick a couple of questions from there as well. One other note is we will have a, I guess I will sit on this side. We will have a second Q&A panel tomorrow, which will just be Michel and Fernando. If you want to direct questions to the others, now is a good opportunity to do that. If we run out of time today, we have the second chance tomorrow, which knowing this group of analysts, seems highly likely that we will run out of time. So we give you the second opportunity to ask what you would like.
We have some mics around the room here, so if you want to ask a question, please raise your hand. We will go in order. If I see you, please try and stick to one question, I am looking at you, Sanjeet, if possible. Just to give everyone as much of a chance to ask. So we have around 40 minutes. Let us get started. Robert, you are right in front of me. Let us go here first.
Thank you. This has been great. I want to just flip back to Michel's first presentation. Michel, you talked about the evolution of the company, and the changes that you have put in place, and we have seen results, and you are going to take it to the next level. Can you talk a little bit about how you have changed the incentive programs? You have touched on that a little bit over the years, but love to have just a little better sense of how those have changed to drive long-term, consistent, reliable growth and brand building. What other metrics are you looking to strive and how maybe you have moved away from an emphasis on very discrete short-term targets? Thank you.
Robert, thank you for the question. Of course, incentives are a very important part of the way we run the business at ABI, and we are known by this idea of having measurable KPIs and aligning these KPIs with the way we compensate people. They never work in isolation, right? You need the people, you need the culture, and you need the direction, the ambition, where we need to go. The incentives, they wrap it up with the KPIs and the compensation system. We have made basically three changes since 2021. The first one was simplification.
Our model tends to be more complex than the average models that you find in the market, and we thought that would be very important to simplify so more of our people would be able to have clarity and understand how their actions and their initiatives impact the company results, and how this impact reverts back to them in their own compensation. So step 1, we made the simplification. Step number 2, we have decided to align more with long-term. The way that we did that was both, as I said, on the culture and the way we run the business, but then we reflected that as well on the remuneration system. We basically rebalance the short-term bonus with the long-term bonus. We used to have 20%, let's say, for executive level on the long term and 70% on the short term. We balance more towards 30/50.
This was very helpful because then instead of looking for the year KPI, people are more aligned with what we call missions that are on average three to five-year missions, and we give them one third of their compensation in long-term incentives, not short-term bonus. The third change that we made was then, I think, an important one. We adjusted the weights of how we pay bonus. In the past, the formula used to be there is a global part, there is a zone part, then there is the BU part, and this was over-indexed towards the front end, right? There was less solidarity at the global level and the big objectives, and more focus on the short-term objectives of each and every market. So we rebalance that. We put more weight on the full entity targets, so more solidarity to the global company.
We kept very sharp, less KPIs on the front end. So simplification, long-term, more alignment with the overall company rather than the pieces and bites of the company. Together with that, we made a change on this long-term incentive that used to be 100% in RSUs. We broke this in two parts, RSUs and PSUs, and the PSUs are TSR relative. So we rank and benchmark us versus this CPG peer set. The better we perform versus the peer set, the better the PSU perform for the individual. So simplification, more long-term with alignment with the shareholder TSR, and then more solidarity with a higher weight for the total company and a smaller weight for the short-term individual targets. But again, this works together with the culture, the people. This works together with the dream, the ambition, the direction that we want to have.
Thanks for the question, Robert. We will just keep going in this direction for now. We go to Ed Mundy here. Over this way.
Ed Mundy from Jefferies. Thanks for the presentations. I think you have demonstrated very clearly how when you join up all the various parts of the growth strategy, it is a pretty compelling offering. Obviously, one part of that is to allow you to both lead and grow the beer category, but the other part is mix, which I think you have pointed to, Michel, driving at least 1% to top-line growth over the last couple of quarters, which I guess back in 2021 was not necessarily the case before you really got momentum in your strategy. My question is really, how do you think about the sustainability of mix? Is there still a very big headroom for growth on mix, number one?
Number two, Fernando, since you have not had a chance to speak today, what does that mean from a CFO's standpoint, and does that give you opportunity to really deliver towards the upper end of your framework?
Yeah. So we talk a lot, and Tadeu today was talking about this, the revenue management strategy. Revenue management can be as simple as trying to price your products with whatever basket you have to follow, being costs, being CPI, being the competitive market, or you can double and triple click on that and have a more holistic approach, really thinking about how to maximize your revenue through the different levers that you have into the business. Tadeu was talking today about the price, which is an important lever, and how we as a company try to pricify our products, balancing correctly the disposable income, the situation of each market with the inflation.
But how we add on top of that our mix management. In this mix management you have everything from the SKUs that we delisted to our ability to premiumize in innovating packs that have more margin than the current packs that we transact with consumers. On top of that, we have initiatives that we always had in the company. In the past, to be fair, more localized on initiatives to control better promotions, discounts to maximize your commercial activities. Because of this today, we can gather the best of this practice and make it to work at scale with the best possible data, with the best possible execution, and with the speed that the digitalization brings to us. So it's a very holistic approach to revenue management.
After all, we've been able to get net revenues above inflation, better than the CPG peer set and better than the brewers. In the last few quarters, we saw this component of north of 1% coming from revenue initiatives and mix. As long as we have the right portfolio architecture, continue to innovate, and speed up the work, the quality of the work that we do with data, we'll be able to sustain this. So this is an objective for the whole commercial team, it's an objective to the whole organization, and is embedded in how we've been managing the business.
And maybe add, I will answer only part of your question because I don't want to give any spoiler for tomorrow, so just bear with me. Tomorrow you'll get more color on that. But just echoing Michel, definitely if you have mix and it's helping revenue, that helps the whole P&L, of course. But more to come tomorrow.
Ed, I'm going to allow your one A one B question style, but a black mark against your name for tomorrow, I think. Let's go to Sanjeet, and then we'll go to the table behind that.
I'll keep it to one short.
Appreciate it.
It's for Brendan on Beyond Beer. You've had phenomenal growth the last 12 months. Cutwater now is coming to a point where it's starting to cycle a lot of those high growth rates. You expressed a lot of confidence in your presentation on room for upside, but can you just double-click into that and just give us a feel for where that upside is going to come from? Is it more about innovating across the brand? Is it more about distribution? Do you pivot now to really pumping distribution on this or? I guess the plan for BeatBox now. It doesn't feel like you've done much yet, but what are you hoping to get out of BeatBox?
Yeah, I think the answer to the Cutwater question is like D, all of the above. Because it still has ample room for growth on everything. As Kyle mentioned, innovation has been a great platform for Cutwater, so the Lemon Drop Martini has been a great producer for us. We still have stuff in the pipeline, but still its base sits inside of the tequila-based margarita world. It's not a coincidence that we think now is the right time to put Cutwater on the greatest awareness platform that exists in U.S. marketing, which is the Super Bowl. So very excited for what 2027 brings.
Of course, any time a brand grows, at some point in time the percentages become less and less, but then we start looking at what is the absolute incremental cases that it delivers to the business, and we still feel in very good shape. As it pertains to that, whereas maybe there is not triple-digit percentages of growth, but the absolute cases that it incrementally delivers to the business, because we are focused on volume, is what matters the most to us over an extended period of time. I think BeatBox, anytime you do a M&A, there is always that time period where you transition. I think the brand was inside of our route to market more than maybe some other brands.
We are essentially transitioning an entrepreneurial way to execute the business to the way that AB InBev and Anheuser-Busch executes the business. So that is around visibility on data, how we work the logistics, how we get it around to our wholesalers in a more efficient way than the way the founders got it around. We are really excited for what the growth projection is for 2027. I think we just need to reorganize some of the base executional work, which is kind of the same playbook that we used with Cutwater, so we feel confident in how we build the base of its execution and its distribution.
What is great is the founders, as our model always does, are with us, and they are going to be part of the solution as we move forward, but we are bringing the muscle of Anheuser-Busch to the game. I think it is going to be cool what we can do.
Thanks, Sanjeet. We will go to the back, Simon, and then Chris, so in the middle.
Yes. Thank you. Simon Hales from Citi. If I could ask a little bit more about BEES. You referenced the perhaps trillion-dollar addressable market that is out there. That is a long-term potential opportunity. When I try to think about some of the drivers of some of the shorter-term uplift we are seeing, particularly in BEES marketplace with the GMV, how do I really drill into that? Is the expansion you are seeing there coming through signing up new big CPG companies to the platform? Is it existing big CPGs, like we saw in the presentation, expanding into more of your BEES markets? I was particularly interested to see, I think in the Nestlé presentation, them referencing using BEES in the Philippines, which I think is a market where you do not have much of a beer business.
Are there many other markets that you have got big opportunities to roll out in that are not traditional ABI heartlands?
Thank you for the question. It is a little bit of all of the above. First, BEES continues to expand within AB InBev's footprint. Today, we are live in 30 markets, but we see more geographic opportunity within ABI's footprint. That will be a driver of growth for us. For the marketplace and some of our large-scale partners, you may have seen in the Nestlé video that Nestlé is live in 13 markets. As we go with these large partners, there is a path of growth to expand within those partners. As they go live at different times, there is growth that comes from them. We have partners who are earlier in the maturity, partners who are later in the maturity. So within our existing partners, just as we expanded up to 13 markets with Nestlé, we can continue to expand with other partners.
We do not think that the 13 markets with Nestlé is a ceiling. As you heard from Jordi in the video, he sees there is more opportunity to come. Beyond geographies and our current partners, there is also new channels and partners we can go to. As you saw in the L'Oréal video, in case it was not clear, that video showcased both L'Oréal, the brand owner, and Okajima, the distributor. A large portion of B2B transactions around the world do come from direct distribution, but a lot come from indirect distribution, like Okajima. We are building a group of distributor partners who are launching BEES, as these are an important way in which many brand owners reach the market and many ways in which retailers access products.
So in addition to geos and partners, there is also different verticals, specifically going into our partnerships with indirect distributors as ways that we can continue to expand the relevance of BEES. You mentioned the Philippines. Yes, I cannot comment on future planned launches with partners, but the Philippines is a good example that BEES can travel beyond where ABI has direct operations. It is a very interesting proof point learning opportunity for us.
Thanks, Simon. We will go to Chris, and then we will come to Robert over here.
Thank you. Chris Pitcher from Rothschild & Co Redburn . Two half questions, hopefully. One was a follow-on from Simon's. On BEES, understanding the opportunity, it almost feels like in those Latin American, African markets, that the total addressable market has perhaps become bigger than you thought in Mexico. Outside of those areas where you have fragmented retail and a strong market share, maybe that the adoption rate has not been as quick. Could you maybe talk about how it has gone in China and maybe some of the issues in the U.S. in terms of getting it adopted? The follow-on, I was quite surprised to see the rate of technology investment falling back to only 1.1x 2019. How are you going to maintain BEES advantage? I would have thought ABI would have kept spending to keep ahead of the game. Thanks.
Great. I will start and then I can pass to you, Brendan, if you want to complement on the U.S., feel free. BEES continues to grow both in direct distribution and indirect distribution markets in ABI. In indirect distribution markets like the U.S. and China, we, of course, partner with our thousands of wholesaler partners. The pace of adoption takes more time in indirect markets as we work with our wholesaler partners. We highlight
Latin America and Africa is where we are most highly digitized and most advanced because the pace of the rollout that we have had, but we continue to expand in both U.S. and China. In the U.S. specifically, we work with a group of lighthouse wholesalers who are most engaged with BEES, improving the same value that we see outside of the U.S. in the U.S. You will see BEES in the market visit tomorrow in some of our retailers. Specifically to the investment, do you want to take that?
I think, Chris, the best analogy I can make on that is mega brands, mega platforms. When we started digitizing the company and really going for digital transformation, we did a lot of things. We diverged, and we launched a lot of initiatives. When you launch a lot of initiatives, zone initiatives, local initiatives, right, where it was a big sense of urgency, and now we are in the phase where we really focus. What we found was a lot of those things that we launched were actually not even helping because they were diverting resources, and they were actually getting in the way of our systems architecture. So we took the new approach now, similar to mega brands and mega platform, which is let us really put the money behind things that matter, make a big difference, and do them end to end, really well done. Right?
We are doing fewer things and really executing at scale. I think the operative word here is really focus. Focusing on bigger global platforms and making a big difference. The other leg of that is technology is evolving. So we talked about, for example, GenAI. One of the biggest developments in GenAI is coding has become simpler. Right? With Anthropic, for example, and some of the other leading models that are out there, it is easier to code and less expensive to code today. Parts of the process have become more efficient. Right? So it is a combination of focus behind big global platforms with greater efficiency in the way we work. We actually feel that we have the resources we need to really drive continued expansion of these platforms that we built that we can really roll out globally.
Great. We will come here to Robert.
Yeah. Thank you. I have a question for Brendan. I am here. You are very successful currently with Michelob ULTRA and also Busch Light. In that context, how would you describe your current strategy for Bud Light? Are you still investing behind the brand and how, or is it more milking strategy for that brand?
No, it is not milking at all. I think Bud Light still has a massive amount of investment and some of the most premier properties that we can associate ourselves with, like what is happening right now with the kickoff of the NFL right in week two. It still is an amazing brand with huge rates of sale, huge participation. We are there to make sure that we get the absolute most out of it as we look across our portfolio of mega brands, and support those disproportionately as well. I think we are happy with the progress and the success that we have had on Michelob ULTRA and Busch Light, and we are just as focused on Bud Light, and it has some of the best stuff that we have to bring to the table. A lot of money.
Just doing a check here on the live stream. We have three questions, Fernando, but they are all about capital allocation. I am going to reserve those for tomorrow, I think, and then we can discuss that in the second panel. We will go to the back here to Gen. If you have a.
Yeah, thank you. Gen Cross from BNP Paribas. My question is going back to BEES. You talked a little bit about these other revenue streams, which sound very interesting. I just wondered if you could share a bit more color on how big these other revenue streams are right now in the context of that EBITDA growth contribution that BEES Marketplace is providing, and also how we should think about that scaling going forward. Should we think about it scaling kind of basically proportionally to the 3P GMV growth?
Thank you for the question. We're not going to disclose specific additional details about the sources of profitability of BEES beyond what I shared before. What I can tell you is that we don't have to invent the playbook on how to generate revenue from a platform. We've been able to be inspired by other successful platform businesses, and our focus is on building the scale of the platform, which comes from generating real commercial value to our partners, generating real convenience and value to our retailers. As we build the scale of the platform, generating that value for both sides of the equation, we've been able to prove to ourselves with conviction that that will generate additional new revenue streams.
Come over here to Sarah, and then we'll go to Andrea after that. Sarah first, yeah.
Thanks. Sorry. Thanks. Sarah from Morgan Stanley. Just a question about the business mix within the U.S. You've talked a lot about experiential, all the sponsorships and sporting and some great videos. How has your mix between on-trade and off-trade shifted between, say, the start of the strategy and where we are now? Is that also part of the driver of the improved profitability in the U.S.? Thanks.
You want to take that?
Yeah, I think, the U.S. it is a vast majority, right, massive off-premise, and on-premise is around 15%. I think COVID had a little bit of a shock to that, because on-premise suffered disproportionately. It has always been a vast majority in the off-premise. I think what is interesting in the off-premise is just the rate at which chains and retailers are becoming a greater percentage of the business. Independent is still relevant, but chain is much larger. We obviously saw this evolution over time, which is why we wanted to get significantly better and really lead the industry in how we partner with sophisticated chain retailers to be the captain of the category, and then what we think is the best thing for the category, be able to sell behind that with our solutions.
If you look at this at the global level, it is very interesting because the COVID was a big hit on the on-trade, as we know globally. After COVID, there was a group piece of the on-trade that never came back. In some areas, it is taking way longer to recover. Think about Europe, for example, or think about China. Now you see places like the U.K., and there is a little bit of a revival of on-trade. You see places like Latin America where the channel is growing, but people never stop socializing, gathering, and doing things. At the same time that the off-trade, the in-home occasions grew, we have been seeing an incredible explosion of these live events. It does not matter where you go.
You can go for the New York and the final of the Knicks, or you can go to Brazil to the rodeos, or you can go to concerts in Europe, and they are all selling 20%, 30% above historical levels. I think that everybody saw during the World Cup here in the U.S., across the board. In Mexico it was the same thing. The concessionaries were reporting all-time high sales on the matches that were played in the U.S. and Mexico. You had the big matches, like the Argentina and England, but you had the small matches of Scotland in Boston, and they all worked similar. It was 20% to 30% more consumption. I think that on-trade, the average globally is slightly below the bars and pubs. The live events are 20%, 30% above.
You can even say that is more because there are more concerts, more games, more events, and the in-home socialization occasions are also more frequent now than they used to be before. In many of these events, equally interesting, there are events that you have limited audience. I went to a rodeo in Brazil that you can fit 100,000 people per day. That is it. There is no space for more people than that. Still, the event sold 20%, 30% more because the hours were longer, so people were in and out. What used to be a night event became two events, one during the day, one during the night. The surrounding areas of the event now have activations, people gathering, camping, barbecuing, and at the end of the day, the event sold 1.3x more than what sold before. Antoine.
People don't invent, people don't destroy. At the end of the day, things get transformed.
Thanks, Sarah. We'll go to Andrea, then we'll come to Olivier, and we'll go to the table at the back.
Andrea Pistacchi, Bank of America. You've told us today about some exciting plans to accelerate Stella, like with the Champions League sponsorship, the Netflix partnership. It feels like you're focusing on the brand more than you have ever done before. Should we think of Stella as an incremental vector of growth for you going forward? How do you size the opportunity for Stella when you benchmark it with a global brand like what you've done with Budweiser and Corona in the last 10, 15 years?
Yeah.
It's twofold.
It's a great question. Thank you. I would say that when you think of the status quo approach for these discussions, usually one would think of the big brands with the big programs, medium brands with the medium programs, so on and so forth. That is a defensive or a status quo maintenance approach. Under Michel's leadership, the direction is very clear. We're here to play the game of growth. That relationship between the programs and the brands changes. We give the big programs to the biggest growth potential and so on and so forth. This is why you see Olympics with Corona, very successful on growth rates. FIFA World Cup with Michelob ULTRA, and Michelob ULTRA is not even fully globally distributed yet. Very healthy growth rates. Now UEFA Champions League with Stella Artois.
It follows the same thinking to boost growth creation with brands that have both scale and growth potential. That's what we're seeing. The performance of Stella Artois, for example, is very healthy in the last couple of years. There's much more room for growth. It's doing really well in Brazil. It's growing in Mexico. It's growing in the U.S. It's the leading brand in the U.K. It's growing very well in Africa. We haven't even started in Asia, for example. The geographical expansion, the growth opportunity is huge. Given UEFA Champions League is the premium expression of European football, we attach the brand that is the premium expression of European beer. That is an authentic match that connects with a huge growth potential to fulfill our strategy.
Great. Let's go to Olivier, and then we'll come to you, Mitch.
Thank you. Olivier Nicolaï, Goldman Sachs. One perhaps for Ricardo. Going back to the underlying market growth of 0.3%-0.5% for ABI footprint, by how much would you assume to outperform this, considering that today the only market really where you underperform is China?
This is without considering market share first. This is just industry footprint, and this is just a mathematical analysis of taking back the last 10 years, 15 years of growth from different countries and applying this growth to our current footprint and the weight that each market has today. Depending on when you do five, 10, 15, you get to 0.3%-0.5% volume growth. There are variations in the year, we show that in the last 15 years, nine had industry growth, six we had decline, even with small variations. Of course, we never know what will happen in the next year. But we know that this is a structural growth tailwind that is part of our footprint. That was what I meant in that slide.
Thanks, Olivier. We will go to Mitch in the back and then to Laurence.
Thank you. It is Mitch Collett from Deutsche Bank. I am interested in the dichotomy between, you have said a few times, you talked about focus, and at the same time you are obviously trying to grow in Beyond Beer and energy and other areas. How do you manage those competing forces? As you focus more on a narrower set of brands, how do you make sure that the benefit to those big focus brands is not offset by a degradation to the brands that get less investment? Thank you.
Ricardo, that is for you. Maybe you start?
I think I can take this. I think that the definition of focus, of course, has different levels. We are a very large company. Everything we show today is just part of what we actually do and the teams in the field, just a small part, some examples. I think that focus is about making choices, prioritizing resources. David showed lots of tools that we apply today that help us make more informed decisions, better decisions to ensure that we can do more with the same or more with less, that we can guarantee our connection with consumers, guarantee that we know what's happening in the market, that we can lead the category, but leveraging our resources the best way possible.
That doesn't mean doing very few things, because the world doesn't allow us to just pick one, two, three bullets and say, "Well, this will make the company be successful." No, we still have to do a lot of things. But if you assume and think about the number of markets that we service, the number of route to markets, partners, of course, we have to be very precise in how we allocate our time and our resources so we can perform well.
Just adding to that point, which I find a very interesting question because it's one that we ask ourselves every day. If you are managing a company, a regular company, you're going to be wrestling with these decisions. If you are managing a company that spreads across 120 countries, 500 brands, 120,000 people, I can guarantee you that this dilemma knocks your door each and every day. And you can do both. We share the numbers here. We delisted 25% of our SKUs. We refocused from having 200 brands receiving meaningful investments to dedicate over 2/3 of all resources that we have to just 50 brands. At the same time, and people sometimes don't realize that it's good when we abstract from the quarter and we think, for example, five years. But five years ago, we didn't have a $2 billion business in Beyond Beer.
While in the ABI universe of $63 billion net revenue, $2 billion looks small, if you just think for a minute, a $2 billion business that was built over the last five, six years. Four years ago, three years ago, we had a sluggish portfolio of local non-alcohol brands in beer. Today we lead not only in market share, but also in growth. This portfolio today with Corona, with Michelob ULTRA, is 3x bigger than what was four years ago. At the time that you simplify your choices outside in. What are the consumer forces, consumer trends, consumer need states, spaces in which we can have growth? Then you prioritize your brands, your channels, your segments. You can actually achieve both.
And by doing that, which I think that builds on the question that Ed was asking before, the growth that comes from brands at scale is a more profitable growth. The simplification and focus is also part of the revenue management initiative. Because if we grow more with Michelob ULTRA, we have more benefits of scale. If we can scale Cutwater faster, you have more to take out of this brand than if you dilute yourself as we used to have in the U.S., only in the U.S., over 35 brands in this flavored space. Today, between apple, NÜTRL, and Cutwater, we have over 2/3, 80% of the business of the flavor and beyond beer in the U.S. So it's an "and" game.
It's not an "or." And yes, you can do both, but you need one strategy, you need one way of operate, you need the team that executes that, and then you need to be ruthless about deciding what you do and what you don't, which I think was a lot of the conversation here, both global and in the U.S., is a matter of making choices.
Thank you, Mitch. Just before we go to Laurence, just to prove that I'm reading the questions, I'm going to take a quick one from here, and then Laurence, we'll end with you. Just because you're talking about beyond beer, Michel, someone was asking here whether we see a relevant opportunity for our beyond beer portfolio in Europe. The actual question was, why can't they buy Cutwater in Europe? But I'm going to paraphrase here in terms of what they actually want to know.
I think as Marcel said before, just getting quick to that, the consumer need is global. So there is 20%-30% of the alcohol consumption occasions and consumers globally that they prefer sweeter than bitter. Okay? And sweeter spreads across wine, cocktails, ready-to-drink beverages, or combinations of those. And this is equally important in Europe as it is in South Africa. We believe that there is a deployment of efforts and capital to make things happen. We have our geographical matrix to prioritize things. There are brands that come first and others follow, and that is, at the end of the day, execution. Right? And if you go to Europe today, not everywhere, but in many countries, we launched Flying Fish, because Flying Fish for us comes as the first door in which we can access these consumers and these occasions.
We have other plans for other brands that we will be introducing and perhaps pretty soon, I do not know where the question is coming from in Europe, pretty soon you might be able to find your Cutwater. You are not the only one. There will be people competing for the shelves. If we launch, make sure that you go there and get your case.
Cool. Great. We will take a last one from Laurence, make it a good one, and then we will wrap it up after that until tomorrow.
All right. Pressure is on, then. It is Laurence Whyatt here at Barclays. I want to follow up again on Budweiser and Bud Light in the U.S., because of course, we think back to the 2019 Capital Markets Day. They were a big focus of the event there, and there was a lot of talk of improving brand metrics and the like. Of course, the volumes of both brands have struggled in the U.S. in the interim years. Brendan, you mentioned there is still a lot of focus on them. There is a lot of investment that is going in on them. We saw some new activations, I think 2024 with the UFC and the like.
Previously, when we have thought about the challenges of both brands, it sort of mentioned that the mainstream portfolio struggled in the U.S. But of course, the success of Busch shows that that does not preclude a brand from growing. Just wondering, do you see these brands as ever getting back into growth, or are they likely to see permanent decline from here?
Hard to predict the future, right? I don't think that's what we're here to do. I think as it pertains to the importance of those two legacy core brands to our business, that's significant. We invest, we execute, and we bring properties to them that are very meaningful. I think even if you look at what we did with Budweiser this year on its 150th anniversary, some of the highest levels of investment that the brand has had in a while. We're about making choices across the portfolio, and we've got an amazing brand that's premiumizing the industry in Michelob ULTRA. We have an amazing brand that's inside of mainstream in Busch Light.
Just as Kyle mentioned, we have a very high share within the core mainstream segment, and we work across all three of those big brands in order to make sure we continue to grow that.
If I can add on that, because I saw the question twice, and maybe complementing and building on what Brendan said. This connects with the answer I was giving before. You manage a portfolio, and when you manage a portfolio, you make choices. Choices that allow you to maximize current consumer trends, capabilities, and specific points of differentiation that your brands have. At this moment, brands like Cutwater, Michelob ULTRA, Busch Light, NÜTRL, they are commanding the growth as we rebalance our portfolio in the U.S. But part of this architecture continues to be to have brands such as Bud Light, Natty Light, Budweiser, that are part in the build, in the distribution muscle, in the consumer base that we have, and those are incredible franchises. Someone asked a minute ago about Stella Artois.
As we talk about Stella Artois today, excited with David Beckham and the growth that the brand has in Belgium, or what is happening in Brazil with Stella and Stella Pure Gold. We forgot that four or five years ago, we were coming from a decade in which this brand had no growth at all. The brand was an incredible brand, huge credentials, was positioned on a place that worked for the brand in the past, on trends that in the past were important, such as European heritage, sophistication. As we do that, as Marcel said today, this is one of the fastest-growing brands in our portfolio.
The idea that the brand's going in only one direction, or that you can accommodate investments, priorities, execution for all brands that you have, they are both not ideal and not pragmatic. The approach that we have, I think, in the U.S. with the mega brands is very pragmatic. It's covering the most relevant brands. That cover to Budweiser, Bud Light, Busch Light, Michelob ULTRA, Stella, Kona, but investing disproportionately in those brands that are better positioned for what the market will be in the future. I gave this question 10 years ago when we started rebalancing the portfolio in the U.S. While I was talking about rebalancing the portfolio, investing for the future, people were asking me the same question over and over and over about Bud Light.
Fast-forward 10 years, almost overnight, today we have a growing business in the U.S., gaining market share and having brands that are leading the industry, not only in the beer space but also around beer. Because back there, we decided to go beyond. It took me five years just to explain to people what Beyond Beer was. Today, you see Cutwater, the presence, the relevance, and the growth. Fantastic brands. They're very important in our portfolio. We are making choices in our portfolio architecture to be able to win, and those choices are important choices for us.
I'll just give you one. There's a couple of different definitions of resources that you can apply. The individual that's responsible for Budweiser and Bud Light is probably our most senior, most accomplished marketer inside of the North America business. We're still very much committed to those brands because they have to work for us.
NFL, the biggest for us.
100%.
Great. Cool. I think w e'll end it there, guys, I think. Thanks very much for joining on stage. We'll wrap it up there . A couple of notes and logistics for everyone as we step off the stage here, just in terms of what we'll do next. We'll take some chairs off here. So that concludes, I think, the general session for day one. For those on the webcast, we'll say thanks very much for joining. I know it's late across some of the time zones, so we will see you tomorrow. For those with us in the room, we're going to take a 35-ish minute break, I think, to allow you to put your bags back up. I would advise bringing a jacket with you to the brewery to the extent you haven't.
For Laurence, I would advise taking the tie off, maybe being a bit more casual for the brewery tour, if you like. The transfers to the Anheuser-Busch Brewery are going to leave at 3:30 P.M. sharp, so try and gather down here around 3:15 P.M., 3:20 P.M. if possible. We'll split into the groups, and then we'll go to the Anheuser-Busch Brewery after that. Remember that you're required to wear closed-toe shoes for the Anheuser-Busch Brewery for safety purposes. Then you'll see on your badges, I think I explained earlier, just which group you're going to be in for the tour. I think that is it. Stop by the concierge desk if you have any questions. First floor. Huh? The first floor. Good point. Lobby is on the first floor, not the second floor. We'll meet down there in 35, 32 minutes, around 3:15 P.M. Great. All right. Thanks, guys.