Morning, everyone. Firstly, welcome to Mexico City, and thanks to those who've been able to join us in person today. Our last Capital Markets Day event was in 2021, and it was fully virtual, and I must say, it's far more enjoyable to be in person with you all in a key market to enjoy a beer or two together and a spinning session on the roof at 6:00 A.M. I think I've met almost everyone here today, but in case not, I'm Shaun Fullalove, and I have the privilege of leading the investor relations function here for ABI. Michel has also tasked me with being the MC for the next couple of days, which is a new role for me, so this should be an interesting experience for all of us.
Before we bring Michel to the stage to kick us off, I just have a few housekeeping matters to mention. So on the screen behind me, or next to me, at some stage, we will have a legal disclaimer in admittedly very small font for the content we'll present over the next couple of days. So here are the relevant pieces that we have to mention. So some of the information provided during this meeting may contain statements of future expectations and other forward-looking statements. It is possible that AB InBev's actual results and financial condition may differ, possibly materially, from the anticipated results and financial condition indicated in these forward-looking statements. For a discussion of some of the risks and important factors that could affect ABI's results, please see the risk factors in the company's latest annual report on Form 20-F, filed with the SEC.
AB InBev assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information provided in this meeting and shall not be liable for any action taken in reliance upon such information. We've also managed, despite careful date planning, to plan the event today during a national earthquake drill, which is commemorating the 1985 earthquake on this day in Mexico City. So at 10:30 A.M. and 10:45 A.M. this morning, there will be short PA reminders. And at 11:00 A.M., we will have an alarm sounding for the earthquake drill. This is an important remembrance of this day in Mexico, so in respect for the moment, we are gonna take our first break of the day then.
We will leave the auditorium, and the hotel staff will guide us just to probably a safe zone, the columns outside, for a few minutes, and then we'll proceed to take our first 30-minute break of the day. So I hope we've planned the agenda well, and we wrap up the presentation before the earthquake drill. So in the event of either an actual earthquake or a fire, then the hotel staff will tell us where to go, and we should not use the elevators. So for those that didn't join for breakfast, then the bathrooms are located in that direction, so right and then left at the corridor. Lunch is planned for around 12:30, and then we'll have another 30-minute break around 3:00 P.M. But of course, feel free to take a break as needed. Grab some refreshments during the day.
Finally, on your name badges, you have a few relevant details. The first is your table number, which, given you're all sitting at a table now, I guess is clear. The second is your van number for the brewery experience this evening, so we'll come back to that at the end of the day. The third is your van and group for the market visit tomorrow. We'll provide some more details there, too. There is security on this floor, so please wear your badge as you walk around the second floor just to ensure that everyone is a registered attendee. Lastly, if you haven't already, then please download the event app. We'll use that to provide notifications throughout the day. And if you weren't part of the spinning session this morning, encourage you to sign up for tomorrow morning.
Any issues with logistics, scheduling, transfers, please stop by the concierge desk outside or find myself, Masha, Cyrus. We're happy to make a plan. With that, let's get it started.
There's a saying: love is contagious. If that's true, it explains what fuels everyone here. It's why those who enjoy our beers also catch that passion, that love that brings us together. Where there's love, there are beautiful stories.
You know how they say in life there's always somebody who's out there for you? I found mine already. I mean, yeah, Mary is technically the love of my life. So is Michelob ULTRA. She knows me so well. Last week, she threw me a party for my 35th. Three words: Michelob ULTRA themed. So, yeah, I mean, I love ULTRA. But after that party, I gotta say, I love Mary that much more. So yeah, I mean, the competition's fierce, but she's clearly still the one.
Four years ago, she came into my life. Stella! Okay, I admit it. I named her after Stella Artois. You know, they kind of say you should never dine alone, so for the past four years, I've had a sidekick who joins me for every single meal.
... My wardrobe, everywhere is full of clothes that I designed myself. So, I guess I can already call myself a designer, right?
Meaningful people and a shared commitment. AB InBev writes stories that blend with people's lives. Is it a perfect relationship? Of course not. Every relationship lived with intensity has its ups and downs. But here we are, trying to get better every day to honor this passion. And with each declaration of love we receive, our commitment grows stronger. So together, we're on this journey, striving to turn this shared love into a future with more and countless cheers.
Please welcome, Michel Doukeris.
Good morning. Morning, everyone.
Good morning.
Welcome to Mexico. Shaun forgot to explain that we asking him to be the MC 'cause more affordable. You did very well, Shaun. Based on the price that we are paying, was great. So welcome everyone, to the 2023 ABI Capital Markets Day. Welcome to Mexico. It is great that we can be together in person again. Thank you to those who are able to travel to join us. I heard that some of you had long trips to be here, and I know it's tough to travel a lot. Welcome to those joining us on Zoom as well from around the world. It is very exciting to be here in Mexico, where over the next two days, you will have the opportunity to experience a vibrant beer category, to see a large and growing ABI business, and most importantly, to experience our strategy in action.
The beer category in Mexico has been growing volume an incredible 4% annually over the last five years, and this growth is very meaningful. Because for us, Mexico is our second largest market by EBITDA. As we spend the next two days together, we'll see many of our replicable toolkits that are driving organic top-line growth in Mexico of more than 11% over the last five years. We have three objectives for our time together here. First, we want to share how our hard-earned and unique competitive advantages enable us to lead and grow the category globally. Second, recap the strategy I shared with you two years ago, and show the progress we've made in this area. And third, to demonstrate the execution of our key toolkits in the marketplace right here in Mexico.
I'll be joined here during the two days by several members of our executive team, of whom you have the opportunity to interact, as well as some members from our Middle Americas zone and from our Mexico team. So allow me to start by regrounding us on what we discussed at our last Capital Markets Day in 2021. So we shared the ABI history and how we got to this point. Most importantly, we talked about the shift we are making from an inorganic to an organic growth strategy. We also shared with you our purpose of dreaming big to create a future with more cheers. We discussed how having a long-term view provides a competitive advantage and gives us the flexibility and agility to capture the full potential of changes in consumers and customers' behavior.
And finally, we shared our new and simplified strategy: lead and grow the category, digitize and monetize our ecosystem, and optimize our business. Since then, we've checked in with you on our progress every quarter. But taking a step back, when you think about it, it is incredible how much has happened over the last two years. In 2021 and 2022, COVID continued to affect our operations globally, especially in Asia. Geopolitical tensions escalated, and high inflation and commodity costs dominated many of our conversations. More recently, the global social context has become much more relevant. While we are in Mexico to talk about our global company and our Mexican business, I know that you ask questions, and some of our conversations over the break and over the beer will be about Bud Light, and we have had many of these conversations over the last four or five months.
So allow me to give you an update here from what we shared with you in the Q2 earnings call. We continue to actively engage with consumers across the country, and they tell us they want three things. While those things haven't changed, our Bud Light actions and activations around the platforms that consumers love are increasingly part of the conversation. These activations include NFL and college football partnership, the Bud Light Backyard Music Tour, and the continuation of our partnership with Folds of Honor. All of this is what Bud Light does best. Last quarter, we provided an update on the available Circana data. The latest August and September to-date results show our share remains stable.
As we move forward in the U.S., the team is focused on what we do best: brewing great quality beer, actively engaging with our consumers, supporting our partners, and making a positive impact on the communities that we serve. Now, I would like to go back to why we are here in Mexico, to talk about our global business and the execution of ABI strategy. The beer category remains vibrant, growing volume and gaining share of throat globally. Through the execution of our strategy, we are delivering all-time high volumes and have generated $5.5 billion of incremental net revenues since 2019. As we continue to digitize and monetize our business, this has achieved more than $35 billion in annualized GMV, with $1.3 billion only in marketplace GMV.
As we continue to optimize our business, we have generated $34 billion in free cash flow since 2019, and reduced debt by $32 billion over the last four years. To bring this all together, the main learnings since we started on this organic growth journey are: We operate in an incredible category that's not only resilient, but also growing and gaining Share of Throat globally. Our strategy is simple, which enable us to execute consistently across the world. While our operating environment remains dynamic, our global footprint is a competitive advantage, and we continue to be resilient. In an ever-changing consumer environment, our connection with consumers must remain authentic around spaces that are relevant to our business and in line with our values. This is when we are at our best.
We continue to listen and learn, and as we move forward, our focus remain on creating long-term shareholder value. As you know, I love simplicity, and what is so powerful about the way we create value is that it's so simple it can fit on the back of a beer coaster. So let me show you how. Our value creation story has four elements. We operate in a large, profitable, and growing category, where we are uniquely positioned with structural advantages to accelerate growth. We have replicable growth drivers or toolkits that we are executing at scale, and we continue to deliver superior profitability. So let me start talking beer. Beer is the largest and the most profitable CPG category. Beer is projected to continue to gain share of throat globally and grow volume over the next five years.
For the avoidance of doubt, all these sources you see on the screen are aligned. Beer will continue to grow volume. Beer is not the only—it's not only the most profitable category, it is also a category with one of the largest opportunities to premiumize. When you compare across geographies, you can see large opportunities across our own footprint. When compared to other categories, for example, hard liquor, the headroom for beer is massive. It's double of what we have today. The question is, why this is important? It is important because premium beer is at least 30% more profitable. To recap, beer is big, profitable, it is growing volume and gaining share of throat, with significant headroom for premiumization, a large opportunity for ABI. Our ABI footprint is uniquely positioned to capture these growth opportunities.
Giving our leadership an advantage in scale. We have the responsibility on behalf of our consumers and customers to unleash the full potential of the category. As I have mentioned before, we have built the unparalleled ecosystem you see today. We have over 200 breweries, unmatched route to market that enables us to reach 6 million customers and generate 10 million weekly transactions. This route to market gets our brands in the hands of over 2 billion consumers globally. Every day, we work hard to earn the consumer preference that translates to us holding the number one share position in 28 markets globally. We have the number one share position in seven out of the top 10 largest beer profit pools, and we lead in seven of the 10 largest future volume growth markets.
To recap, we have built an unparalleled ecosystem that gives us unique scale, and we have leading positions in both current profit pools and future volume growth markets. We have developed and are implementing replicable toolkits that enable us to drive efficient growth. Our teams will talk a lot about these toolkits throughout the next two days. So let me take a moment to explain what we mean by toolkits. These are proprietary toolkits built to solve universal consumer or customer problems that we have codified as a product or as a process, that can be scaled across all our operations, and they result in efficient and effective organic growth. Our physical and digital Mega Brands continue to grow. We own a collection of $21 billion brands. They are iconic global brands.
To add on that list, we have a portfolio of local champions, each of which generates revenues of more than $500 million every year. As we scale these mega brands, we create efficient organic growth. We have the number one beer portfolio in brand power globally, with seven out of the top 10 most valuable beer brands, powered by great creativity and our investment capacity. More than big, our brands are loved. They are not only part of people's shopping lists, but a part of people's lives. Our brands are there when welcoming new members to the family, when celebrating big moments and wins, even leaving lasting marks on people's lives. Our brands are always there in the moments that matter, and as we continue to invest in our portfolio, more and more consumers fall in love with our brands. BEES has more than 3.5 million active users.
BEES is a mega brand, a digital one, that powers underserved consumers. We capture over $35 billion in GMV, and BEES is the preferred app to more than 75% of retailers. BEES is also creating new value streams, generating $1.3 billion in marketplace GMV, with more than 200 partners on the platform. Through D2C, we are not only deepening our relationship with consumers, but also maximizing our potential, the category potential, in existing and new occasions. Today, our products continue to scale, delivering over $1.5 billion U.S. dollars in net revenue with an NPS of 75. A third replicable growth driver we have is our category expansion model. Here in Mexico, you have the opportunity to see how this model comes to life. Powered by consumer data and executed through five category expansion platforms, the model boosts category participation, occasions, and ultimately drives growth.
To recap, we have a portfolio of mega brands that drive efficient growth, digital products that unlock greater value, and a category expansion model that drives organic growth. Next, superior profitability. We continue to deliver best-in-class profitability and cash generation amongst peers and CPG companies. Our dynamic capital allocation model guides our decisions on how best to allocate excess of cash. Over the last four years, we have consistently invested a total of $47 billion that position our business for accelerated organic growth. In summary, we continue to make progress on our capital allocation priorities. Since 2019, we invested $47 billion for organic growth and reduced our gross debt by $32 billion. In 2022, we increased our dividends 50% versus 2021. The progress we've made and the clear priorities give us continued flexibility and optionality for the future.
Just to bring this all together, we have best-in-class profitability and cash generation. We have an unwavering commitment to invest in organic growth, and we have a dynamic capital allocation framework that gives us flexibility and optionality. So individually, each of these elements is compelling. When combined, they become a powerful engine of compounding growth and value creation. This is the ABI value creation story, something simple. It fits on the back of a beer coaster. We operate in a large and growing category in which ABI has unique competitive advantages. We are accelerating organic growth by deploying our replicable toolkits that generate superior profitability. This is our formula to create superior shareholder value. This is what our 150,000 people work hard to deliver every day, and what I would like you to take away from the next two days.
Thank you again for joining us here today in person and virtually. The team worked very hard to create an engaging and interactive agenda to you. So enjoy your time in Mexico. I'm looking forward to our time together. Cheers!
Please welcome David Almeida.
Good morning.
Good morning.
My name is David Almeida, and I have been the Chief Strategy and Technology Officer since 2020. A little bit about myself: I joined the company in 1998 and had the privilege to take on various roles across multiple geographies. Of note, I led the acquisition and integration of Anheuser-Busch, and subsequently, the integration of SABMiller. This coming Friday will be my 25th anniversary with AB InBev. As Michel recapped for you, two years ago, we evolved our and simplified our strategy into 3Pillars that dictate the conscious choices we make to maximize long-term value. In the next 15 minutes, I'll go into a bit more detail on how we execute that strategy, starting with where we play and how we win.
To deliver our strategy, we simplified the way we manage our business through our four geographic clusters, which have been prioritized by the size of the opportunity and our ability to win in each of them. This is our where to play approach. The simplified geographic framework makes it easier to leverage our global scale and to develop and share replicable tools, such as our five category expansion levers, which we use to win in our markets. That's our how to win. We simplified the way we apply the category expansion model across markets with different levels of maturity. The model's powerful in two ways. First, similarities in maturity and characteristics across markets means many of the lessons learned in one market can be transferred and improved upon in another. This is a global advantage of our global footprint and scale.
Second, as Michel mentioned, by applying and executing our tools across markets in a consistent way, we've been able to bend the consumption curve and grow the category across all stages of market maturity. This framework also applies at the cluster level. While we have a unique role in each cluster, our significant presence in all clusters gives us our uniquely advantaged footprint and growth algorithm. Developing markets is our highest priority cluster in which we expect to see growth across all segments. We'll come back to developing markets in a moment. In China, our leadership in the premium and super premium segment position us to benefit from the remarkable expected growth of the middle and upper economic classes over the coming decade. In developed markets, we expect to see continued dollar growth of the beer category, underpinned by premiumization and high cash conversion. Finally, emerging markets.
This cluster represents a sizable population that is growing very fast, resulting in a big, multi-decade opportunity for beer. Let's drill down into each of these geographic clusters. China contributes 9% of our global EBITDA, and because of its size and unique operating environment, is a priority cluster on its own. While the premium and super premium segments in China are estimated to account for only 10% of the total beer volume today, they are projected to represent 40% of the growth of the category over the next decade. This is largely driven by the unparalleled growth of the number of middle income households, which is projected to become two times the size of that population in the U.S. by 2030. We are well positioned to benefit from these premiumization trends, given two main advantages.
First, with an estimated 45% share of the premium and super premium beer segment, we hold leadership within this attractive market. Second, we have a compelling portfolio of Mega Brands to lead growth. Budweiser is a driving force behind the premium segment growth in China, which, by the way, is the largest market in the world for Budweiser. And in the super premium segment, we position our brands like Blue Girl, Corona, and Hoegaarden to further elevate the category. Developed markets contribute 30% of our global EBITDA. This cluster includes mostly North America and Western Europe. This cluster is attractive to us in several ways. First, because consumer trends in these regions are constantly evolving, we're always innovating and finding opportunities for incremental value uplifts in areas such as premiumization and Beyond Beer.
Euromonitor projects beer value in developed markets to grow 6% annually over the next four years. Second, the scale of our operations in developed markets enabled us to optimize our business to one that is highly cash generative. Across our developed markets, we've been successful in growing our above core portfolios contribution by 10 percentage points over the past five years to reach 40% last year. Now, emerging markets contribute 7% of our global EBITDA. These are markets such as India, Nigeria, Zambia, and Mozambique. The combination of a sizable and growing population and growing beer per capita consumption, again, points to a multi-decade growth opportunity for the beer category in this cluster. But the early stage of economic development can also mean relatively high levels of volatility. This is where our category expansion model helps us navigate and identify the most attractive segments and markets.
A good example is India. In India, we're also over-indexed in the fast-growing premium and super premium segment, where we hold almost 70% share. Budweiser volume in India has tripled over the past five years, and now India is Budweiser's third largest market by volume outside of the United States, and there's still a lot of headroom to grow. While India is now the largest country in the world by population, per capita beer consumption today is only 2 L. We believe there's a massive potential to be unlocked there. Now, moving on to developing markets. This is our largest cluster, contributing 54% of our global EBITDA. These are markets like Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa. It's also the most profitable for us in terms of EBITDA margin.
With an EBITDA of around $10 billion, our business in this cluster alone is comparable to the entire EBITDA of many CPG companies in our peer set. In developing markets, we're seeing fast growth across all segments within beer, and because we hold significant share in this cluster, we are well positioned to lead the continued growth of the category. Speaking of share, it's noteworthy that we were able to both grow volume and maintain or grow share in the largest markets within the developing cluster, despite an evolving competitive environment over the past five years. We believe this is a testament to the resilience of our business and to the consistent execution of our strategy. Our financial performance in the developing cluster demonstrates the resilience of our business.
Over the past four years, we've maintained consistent volume growth ahead of the category, thereby, therefore, gaining share. By carefully balancing price and mix, we've delivered net revenue per hectoliter growth ahead of a high inflationary environment. We also manage our costs tightly to deliver high single-digit EBITDA growth above pre-COVID levels, despite that inflationary cost environment. Now, let's come back to our replicable growth drivers and look at how they work within our developing markets cluster. This chart illustrates the various tools across our strategic pillars and how effectively they are applied in each market, green being most effective and red being least. A couple of points stand out here. First, our replicable toolkits are consistently executed across multiple markets. They travel well....
Second, there is a correlation between the disciplined implementation of these toolkits and our desired strategic goals: share of throat, market share, and organic EBITDA growth. Where we have gaps, we have a clear view on what levers we need to work on, allowing us to drive our results even further. In summary, our strategy is clear and simple. Our where to play and how to win approaches are clear. We are executing the strategy across all of our geographic clusters at scale, and this is enabled by consistently applying our replicable toolkits to lead and grow the category, expand our share, and grow our business organically. Our strategy in action is exemplified in our developing markets cluster, a large, growing, profitable business that is also resilient against external headwinds.
Mexico is the largest market by EBITDA within developing markets, and we're excited to be hosting you here today, where you'll have the opportunity to see the strategy, our replicable toolkits, and our strengths come to life over the next two days. Next, I want to invite our partner, Ricardo Tadeu, Chief Growth Officer, who's going to introduce the growth group and dive into the details of the how to win part of our strategy. Thank you.
Hello, everyone. I'm Ricardo Tadeu, Chief Growth Officer. It's really a great pleasure to be with you today. Now, since we are talking about growth now, I would like to introduce you to our official AB good morning. Good morning!
Good morning.
Great. So now this is normally what you do when you have large conventions. Well, I've been in the company for 28 years, having spent most of my career in commercial roles in Latin America and Africa, as well as our global sales and BEES teams. And today, I lead what we call the Growth Group. As I realized that until recently, this group did not exist, let me tell you more about how it came to be. So the Growth Group was created in 2022 to optimize our business model for the execution of our strategy. Integrating our commercial functions allows us to improve the effectiveness of our sales and marketing investments across our multiple markets. And by bringing together our global technology teams, we can digitally transform our business and fully leverage the connections and the data generated from our BEES and D2C platforms.
Now, this simplified structure and its clearly defined roles eliminate silos and enable collaboration among our teams, and as a consequence, we can better allocate resources to accelerate the next phase of innovation and growth of our business. So the structure of the Growth Group includes our sales and distribution team, led by Pablo Panizza, our marketing team, led by Marcel Marcondes, our BEES team, led by Nick Caton, and our direct consumer team, led by Lucas Herscovici. As Michel just shared, the first two pillars of our strategy are: lead and grow the category, and digitize and monetize our ecosystem. These teams help our zones and countries to translate this strategy into action in an optimized way. In the beer category, we want to continue to evolve from being the category leader to really leading category growth. Our marketing sales are best in class.
They are building for scale, delivering sustainable growth, and creating replicable models that can be leveraged across our markets. It's thanks to their focus that we're advancing beer participation, and that we continue to grow by developing occasions and expanding our portfolio beyond beer. As a category leader, we serve over 6 million customers and more than 2 billion consumers around the world. The Growth Group works in an integrated way to digitize and monetize that very ecosystem. Our B2B platform, BEES, and our D2C products, Zé Delivery, TaDa, and PerfectDraft, transformed our route to consumer and our relationship with our customers. Now, we can develop deep consumer insights, customer insights, elevate our relationship with them, increase the distribution of our brands, and sell more profitably. We're also developing new ways to monetize our digital and physical assets, creating new profitable business models for the company.
To go deeper into the progress across these first two pillars of our global strategy, I'll hand it over now to Marcel Marcondes, our Chief Marketing Officer, along with talents from several markets, to talk in detail about how we lead and grow the category. Following Marcel and the team, we will have Nick Caton, our Chief B2B Officer, and Lucas Herscovici, our Chief D2C Officer, to share more on BEES and D2C. Thank you very much, and Marcel, it's with you.
Thank you, Ricardo. Hello, everyone. It's a big pleasure to be here today.
... I am Marcel Marcondes, and I joined ABI 18 years ago, after 8 years at Unilever, running brands both in Latin America and also global. In 2005, I made a big decision: I decided to exchange shampoos for beer. First, running our Brahma brands in Brazil, then moving to sales to drive commercial integration. In 2014, I moved to our global headquarters to run our premium global brands. Then a few years later, I assumed the Chief Marketing Officer position for Anheuser-Busch in the U.S. Now, since 2022, I have the privilege of being the Global CMO for ABI. But it's not only a big privilege, it's also a big responsibility, because if we look at this timeline now for ABI, as we all know, the company we have today was built partially via inorganic growth, as we led the process of consolidation for the industry.
So over the last couple of years, we have been working together to write a new chapter for ABI with a revised strategic framework that starts from the right beginning: to lead and grow the category, driving organic growth. As we go through this transition, there are two key priorities we need to bring to life in order to execute our strategy: building mega brands and also our category expansion model, because this is all about strong brands and category growth. So let's start with the mega brands. We build mega brands in three steps. First, having a focused portfolio, then using effective creativity, then delivering scalable innovation. All that because in the end, this is a game of focus, effectiveness, and scale. So first, portfolio management. We have more than 500 brands. We used to meaningfully invest behind 10, sometimes 15 brands in a given market.
So the first step on our portfolio journey is to make strategic choices, because here, the key insight is that on a market-by-market basis, there's only four to five brands max commanding meaningful growth, always. This is why focus is the first step of the Mega Brands concept. So now, on a market-by-market basis, we have around five focus brands receiving close to 70% of the total investments, typically driving around 70% of the revenue growth. Then, with a more focused portfolio, we can concentrate resources to accelerate brand equity, which we track via Kantar as Brand Power. Brands with higher power level are better positioned to command a premium price and also deliver volume growth, and we can see that happening in practice. Our Mega Brands are accelerating both Brand Power and volume growth. But there's another thing that gives us confidence in this process.
If there's one company well-positioned to play with a focused portfolio, this is ABI. Because we have the privilege of owning seven out of the top 10 most valuable beers in the world, including the number one, Budweiser, and the fastest growing brand by value, Corona. This is why we're also intentionally making Corona our leading horse globally, because it couldn't be different. Corona is the only beer brand in the world with more than 10 points of power in more than 10 markets. So as people say in sports, "It's the double double." And Corona brand power is still way ahead of its market share in all of these markets, which means there's a long runway for growth. Let's watch a quick video with the Corona global approach.
Happiness hit her like a train on a track. Leave all your love and your longing behind. You can't carry it with you if you want to survive. The dark days are over, oh, the dark days. Can you hear our prayers 'cause here they come? Fight for your mother and fight for your father. Fight for your children, for your sisters and brothers. Leave all your love and your longing behind. You can't carry it with you if you want to survive. The dark days are over, oh, the dark days are done. Can you hear our prayers? 'Cause here they come!
... This is living. All right, so now let's talk about the second step to build Mega Brands. After focusing resources, we need to apply effective creativity, because in every study about effectiveness, creativity always shows up as the number one driver. This is what makes people pay attention to a brand, what makes people fall in love with brands. Iconic brands and iconic companies are built with great doses of creativity, which becomes a competitive advantage when used to solve real business and consumer problems. So to make sure that effective creativity becomes a sustainable way of working for our brands, we created a process, a replicable model called Creative X, which is made up of four steps. First, we train people all over the world on the jobs to be done for the brands.
Second, whenever there's a big idea or a big campaign, we convene with the brain trust, which is a meeting with senior people in the organization to challenge that idea on relevance, consistency, and how to take it to the next level. Also, twice a year, we have an external council of world-class creative leaders that evaluate our brand work and ensure we are constantly provoked to be out of our comfort zone. Then finally, once a year, every zone evaluates and celebrates their most effective work, followed by a global event to recognize the best of the best and share learnings across the teams to be scaled. We've had more than 500 campaigns from 60 brands across 25 markets going through this process, while more than 2,000 people have been trained on it. And as we use the system, our work began to improve.
The Effie Index is the global benchmark for marketing effectiveness, and last year, for the first time, AB InBev was recognized as the world's most effective marketer, improving from being number 24 in 2017. Earlier this year, they released their rankings again, and AB InBev kept the first position. Additionally, the Cannes Lions is the world's most prestigious festival for creative marketing. Every year, they honor the company that has delivered award-winning work together with strong results as the creative marketer of the year. In the past two years, AB InBev was awarded this honor, becoming the first ever back-to-back winner in the history of the festival. But most importantly, this is being built as a truly global capability.
All of our zones, with no exception, have work being recognized coming from multiple brands in multiple countries, using effective creativity to solve business and consumer problems to drive growth. Let's see a few examples.
Look at me, I'm on target. Looking like a starlet. I'm feeling me, if you're not, keep ballin'. You in the pink Impala. Keep doing you, ain't nobody gonna stop you. Keep it poppin', everyone blows. Turn it up now. All around the world, all around the world. Live it up now. Like we're never ever running out. Turn it up now-
Oh! You cannot be serious. How the hell did they do this?
Like we're never ever running out.
...
Vamos, carajo.
The life we're living, fly how we feeling. We really did it.
China understands that football fans will no longer be allowed to buy alcohol.
Keep it poppin'.
Budweiser will ship the unsold beers to the winning country.
And if you don't know, now you know. Turn it up now. All around the world, all around the world. Live it up now, like we're never ever running out. Turn it up now. All around the world, all around the world. Live it up now, like we're never ever running out.
I hear I'm good next to Shaq. What's up, bro? Ultimately, a focused portfolio combined with effective creativity has helped us achieve peak results in both Brand Power as well as volumes for our global business. But now, the same way as we will definitely stay very ambitious to continue on this journey, I have to say, we must be very humble to acknowledge the Bud Light episode in the U.S. We just spoke about a very robust process, and it goes without saying, it is not perfect. So we will keep listening, learning, and improving. There's a lot more that needs to go through this process. And as we move forward in this new, complex environment, some of our principles have been reinforced. Foremost, there is no room to compromise the authenticity, the values, and the strategic consistency of our brands.
We do beer, which exists to bring people together, to have a good time. I also, in times like this, we need to focus even more on what we're supposed to do best, which is to listen and actually love our consumers. Because when our brands love our consumers, consumers love them back. You just saw with Michel, we even tracked that. We have more than 340 million people around the world that love our brands, and it's growing. We just saw in the opening video real stories from real people. This is what we live for. We live for building brands that consumers love, that are part of their lives, so that they can have a great time with. This is what we mean when we say, "Let's grab a beer.
Come on, I'm buying you a beer. Okay. What do they say? Flight crew's next door eating pizza. Ah, here's to new friends. We used to come here with Eddie. You remember that? I had such a crush on his sister. We all did. They're gonna go their way, and we're gonna go our way. Lydia, we sure could use your help on this. Okay. Congrats. No, not yet. Hey, look who I found. Hey. It wasn't that noticeable, was it? Yeah, only if you have ears. I can't do Friday. I got a date. Why don't you bring her here? Ah! Come on, let's grab a beer. Yes.
Okay, so now moving to our third step, scalable innovation, and here we have 3Principles. The first 1Probably goes against expectation. Before talking about new launches, we need to simplify to grow. It is all about delisting the declining, low margin, and low scale SKUs. In the past few years, we've been taking it very seriously, reducing around 15% of the total SKUs versus 2019, which means almost 1,000 SKUs globally. Second, and still before talking about new launches, we need to make sure that our brands get properly renovated. Cell phones update every year, cars every four years, so beer should also be constantly renovated to maintain its key differentiation attributes versus competition. We at ABI run an annual global superiority assessment, and that triggers the renovation initiatives that keep our brands up to speed and differentiate it to consumers.
Finally, when we do map an opportunity for a new launch, we implement our approve and move approach. As you can see on the screen, we usually take three steps. First, we pilot and identify a success case. Then, we expand it to more regions, and if the success case continues, then we go for an all-scale rollout. That applies for both an international expansion, like Michelob ULTRA or Corona Cero, and also within the same market, like Spaten, for example, in Brazil. As we start applying these principles, we launch fewer, bigger, and bolder innovations. Michelob ULTRA, for example, has been growing consistently year-over-year for two decades. As we continue this process of expansion, here in Mexico, for example, Michelob ULTRA is the fastest growing brand of the whole industry.
In the end, these 3Principles help us build a scalable portfolio, with innovations contributing with approx. 10% of our total net revenues as a company. All right, so this is how we build the Mega Brands: through focus, effectiveness, and scale. Each one of them being implemented and executed across the entire company. Now, let's talk about the category expansion model. As David said, it is based on consumption amongst Legal Drinking Age consumers, times markets with different maturity levels. Our job as a category leader is to lead and grow the category. So we have five category expansion levers to help shape that curve. So first, it all starts with category participation. Here, the main objective is to invite more people into the category, increasing participation.
After that, we know that 60% of the beer category is made of big core brands, so it is vital to keep those brands vibrant. Then it is time to expand the consumption occasions, because as the category evolves, beer can become more relevant in more occasions. Next is premiumization, one of the largest growth opportunities for the whole industry. And finally, as consumers get exposed to a greater variety of product propositions, it's time to go beyond beer, which is a very incremental and profitable opportunity for the industry. These five category expansion levers have proven to be capable of bending the curve to lead and grow the category across all stages of market maturity. So now that we have seen the concept, let's see our strategy in action. So here's what we're gonna do now.
In the next 50 minutes, I'm going to invite six different countries to take you through some real-life examples of how this strategy comes to life. So let's start with category participation. In each one of these category expansions levers, we have their own replicable models. In this case, it's the POS system, where POS stands for Participation, Occasions, and Servings. In this case, we have a special emphasis on participation, bringing more people into the beer category, and we've been getting very positive global results. So now I would like to invite Danny Wakswaser, our VP Marketing in Brazil, to take us through the Brazil case. Danny, welcome on stage.
Hi. Good morning. Very happy to be here. My name is Danny Wakswaser, and I have been with ABI for almost 16 years. Thank you, Marcel. For the past two years, I have been leading Brazil's marketing as the VP of Marketing there. As Marcel explained, we have our POS system, and the first step for beer category expansion is participation. Today, I will share a little bit the Brazil story and how it can be replicated across the whole ABI footprint. When we look into the past, we can clearly see that beer was under pressure from 2015- 2019 in Brazil. It was losing share of total alcohol, where it lost 0.7 percentage points to cachaça.
On top of that, the core segment was declining 3.4 percentage points, and this was a major problem since we over-index in the core segment versus the overall market. So the solution to reverting this challenge in a profitable way was to expand our returnable glass bottles, what we call RGBs, since they have a higher gross margin than one-way packs. The only problem with that was that RGBs had been declining more than 8 percentage points since 2015. So we set in motion a plan with four main initiatives and started executing them with discipline and consistency. The first thing we did was to fix the price relativity versus one-way, as returnables have always been designed to be cheaper than disposables. The second initiative was to make sure consumers saw RGBs as a more appealing proposal.
It is more affordable, it is more sustainable, and Zé Delivery could help it become more convenient as well. Our third initiative revolved around using all of ABI's digital capabilities to accelerate RGBs in the trade through BEES. Finally, our fourth initiative was to boost our entry-level RGB, the 300 ml returnable bottle. All these initiatives were designed to help us recruit more consumers. Let's take a look into them. Going to our first initiative, we can see that we have been increasing the prices of RGB above one-way, which made them for sure, less appealing to consumers. As you can see in the chart, since 2019, we started reviewing our price tree, making sure that it worked from a margin perspective. In our second initiative, we increased our sales and marketing investment in RGBs, addressing key consumer barriers.
We created integrated campaigns to remind people that RGBs were more affordable, that they generated less impact in the environment, and of course, therefore, they were much more sustainable, and that consumers could order RGB via Zé Delivery, which could improve their consumer experience by reducing the hassle of having to go back into a bar and return empty bottles and reorder beer. Lucas is gonna show you a little bit more on the D2C chapter about that. All of this could make the beer category more exciting and recruit more people from value and hard liquor. When we go into our third initiative, we can see that this partnership with Zé Delivery was intensified, where, together with BEES, we invested a lot in incentives for both consumer and customers and encouraging them to order RGB. So let's take a look into the view of our campaign there.
So finally, we invested in 300 ML returnable bottles, as we saw that it could be an alternative to individual consumption that used to be done mostly through 350 ML cans. 300 ML RGBs grew from 2019- 2022, becoming almost 40% of our total RGB mix. It also massively helped us revert the declining trend of total RGBs that went back to growth in 2021 after five years declining. So to conclude, these initiatives have been very successful in helping us to develop the category. As we said in the beginning, the most important KPI here is participation, and after these strategic changes, participation has been back to growth more than 2 percentage points since 2019 in past four weeks.
The core segment that from 9-15 to 19 was declining started to grow again, and it hit 64% of total industry in 2022, mostly stealing from the value segment. And finally, the beer share of throat that had been losing to cachaça grew again, gaining 220 bps of total alcohol. We're very excited with how these replicable toolkits can be applied in other ABI markets, and you will be able to see tomorrow them already applied here in the Mexico portfolio. Thank you very much. Back to you, Marcel.
Thank you, Danny. Obrigado. Now shifting gears to Core Superiority. As I said before, 60% of the beer industry is made of big core brands, usually local champions. To keep these brands vibrant and strong over time, we identified the four key drivers with statistically significant impact on their performance. Combined, they form our Core Superiority framework, which we refer to internally as brewing greatness. This framework is behind many of the initiatives we've been implementing in our core brands all over the world as they accelerate their performance. So now, let me invite Ben Verhaert, BU President of East Asia, to share the South Korea case. Ben, welcome to the stage.
Thanks, Marcel. Hello, everyone. I'm Ben Verhaert, East Asia BU President. I joined the company 22 years ago, and since then, I've led very diverse markets like France, India, and since 2020, South Korea. I'm very excited today to share with you how we leverage the Core Superiority framework to keep our leading core brands vibrant for our consumers. In South Korea, Cass is a strong number one beer brand and represents Korean beer culture. Despite many competing brands' introductions over the last 10 years, Cass has stood the test of time by offering consumer distinctive, high quality, and refreshing beer experience, while also capturing the spirit of times and trends.
Since its launch 30 years ago, Cass has been building emotional connection by being the voice of the LDA generation, connecting with consumers' life values, while also owning functional refreshment through constant innovations in the brewing process, packaging, and product extensions. We leverage our Core Superiority framework to keep our core brands vibrant for our consumers, and this framework helps us to raise the bar on every consumer touchpoint and helps us to stay competitive. Let me play a video to illustrate how we leveraged the superiority framework to turn around Cass performance following a strong innovation launch from our key competitor. Let's play the video.
Born in 1994, Cass became the leader through innovation and by being the voice of the young generation. The thirst for something new was the opportunity that our challenger Terra took, becoming the new trendy alternative by launching a differentiated proposition. We needed a turnaround. We conducted a brand audit and market assessment. This is where the superiority framework came in. Our beer is the reference in drinkability and refreshment. As the market was evolving, we optimized the refreshment, crisp, and clean taste by increasing carbonation and optimizing color, while maintaining the unique Cass taste. Our new recipe, supported by cold brewed claim, was superior versus current and winning over next generation while not alienating current drinkers. With our pack, we wanted to celebrate the ultimate refreshment with confidence through our unique flute bottle. The pack stands out and is superior to competition.
If we want to be relevant to people, we need to understand them. Today's generation is fed up with pressure from society and media. In our creative, we want to inspire people to be true to themselves: physical refreshment and mental relief. Time to be real. We started with a patch. In Korean, sassak means completely and totally, and it is Cass spelled backwards. The message was delivered by Youn Yuh-jung, first Oscar-winning actress from Korea. During summer, we broke all the clichés of typical beer ads and showed real people in tough COVID situations. People were truly moved by our message. During World Cup, we invited everyone to have fun playing with Cass. Win or lose, real fun. In POC, we were superior by grabbing attention through owning sociability and fun, and the epitome was ABI being recognized as Marketer of the Year in Korea.
We introduced OBPPC packs to drive frequency in a unique way. The results are very positive. Brand imagery is more than rebounding, and Brand Power are back up. Our market share growth is very strong and only accelerating. But we recognize that the journey is not over. While we are a leader that is leading and winning again, we want to become a thought leader that is continuously evolving. That's what leaders do. The rebirth of Cass. To be continued.
So the turnaround is a result of following the superiority framework with discipline, a very strong consumer validation. We adjusted our packaging from an amber bottle to a transparent bottle, slightly adapted our liquid with more carbonation and a more intense color, which tested superior to competition, while also not alienating our loyal Cass consumers. Delivering a superior mix on every consumer touchpoint enabled us to deliver strong results following the renovation of Cass in 2021. Market share is growing significantly, brand power rebounded, and we were recognized as Korea's most effective marketer of the year. Today, the Cass brand is more vibrant than ever... However, we also recognize that our journey is not over. It's an infinite game. Tomorrow, we will be diving into how the superiority framework is shaping our operations in Mexico, and keeping our core brands vibrant to a future with more cheers.
Thank you.
Thank you, Ben. Gamsahamnida. Was it okay? Yes. All right. So now it's time to talk about our third category expansion lever: occasions development. To expand and develop consumption occasions, we actually have two pillars. The first is direct to consumer. All of our digital capabilities, like media, data, and the one-to-one communications, are integrated in this pillar. They are managed by draftLine, our global in-house agency that exists to drive personalization at scale, delivering tailor-made content for specific consumers on different occasions. For the interest of time, Lucas later today will talk about how our brands have leveraged DTC to expand occasions. Now, we're going to focus on non-alcohol beers, which expand occasions and therefore increase frequency. Our non-alcohol beer portfolio has been growing double digits since 2019. So let me invite Brian Perkins, BU President, West Europe, to share more about the Corona Cero expansion.
Brian, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Marcel. Good morning. I'm Brian Perkins. I'm president of our West Europe operation based in the U.K. I've been part of the company for 13 years in a variety of marketing, sales, and general management roles across North America, our global headquarters, and Europe. So I'm here to talk to you about how we think about expanding occasions with non-alcohol beer, or NAB. NAB is a critical part of expanding beer occasions. We've studied consumer behavior, and we have learned that non-alc growth is incremental to the category and predominantly drives frequency as existing beer consumers add NAB occasions to their repertoire. You probably see this when you go out. There's a growing incidence of people starting the night with an NA beer, or opting for an NA beer midweek, or enjoying an NA beer at occasions like lunch, where alcohol beverages may be less relevant.
So in the spirit of simplicity and scalability, we have decided to focus on Corona Cero as our number one global non-alcohol beer proposition. Corona Cero is a unique NA beer. Its quality is recognized time and again by external awards. Beyond superior taste and packaging, it also offers consumers the famous Corona lime ritual, which elevates the experience and makes sure that this is, in every way, a real beer, just without the alcohol. This proposition is a rocket ship. We've launched it in 14 European markets. It's the fastest growing NA beer in Europe, and already the number 1Preferred NA beer in the U.K. in its first year of launch. In addition, because it is a non-alcohol proposition, it offers us new frontiers of growth and brand building in expansion markets. For example, we are launching the brand in Saudi Arabia, creating connections with millions of consumers.
Great for consumers, great for expansion, and offers higher margins than regular beer. Perhaps the best part, just like Corona Extra, this proposition works everywhere with the same battle-tested, scalable toolkit. We have found that marketing and merchandising the brand next to Corona Extra to be a winning strategy that fortifies the Corona mother brand. The expansion into new consumption occasions is huge for us, and tomorrow you're going to see how this momentum translates into our Mexico market strategy. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Brian. Thank you, man. Thanks, Brian. Awesome. So now let's talk premiumization. As presented by Michel, premiumization is our biggest growth opportunity, with 30% higher profitability than the total category, with significant room to grow also when we compare it to other categories. In this fourth level of the category expansion framework, our replicable model is pretty much about our four global brands, and they are four for a reason. The consumer demand landscape for beer is basically a matter of how many people you are drinking with and the energy level of the occasion. For example, if you're in a small group of people in a more relaxing occasion, your main need state is to relax and unwind. Corona was built for that.
Now, if you're still with a smaller group, but then in a higher energy occasion, like if you go to a restaurant or a nice bar, then you want to make an impression. This is when you choose the quality and the heritage of Stella Artois. Now, if you're in a larger group of people, socializing in a higher energy environment, like a party or a night out, energy is the key word. You're gonna have a Budweiser.... But if you're one of those people who has an active lifestyle, you are in a larger group, you're gonna play basketball, soccer, but actually, you're much more interested in the beers after the game than the game itself, then Michelob ULTRA is the beer for you, because you want to bond with your friends.
Long story short, each one of our global brands are intentionally built to address one of the main demand landscapes spaces to drive complementarity. Led by Corona, this approach has been expanding year-over-year, with a double-digit net revenue CAGR since 2019. So to share two examples of our premiumization journey, let me introduce you to Kyle Norrington, our Chief Commercial Officer in the U.S., and Matt Che, our Marketing VP in APAC. Welcome to the stage, guys.
Thanks, Marcel. Hi, everyone. I'm Kyle Norrington, the Chief Commercial Officer in the U.S. I've been with our company for 23 amazing years now, across multiple roles, from our Head of Global Brands to my previous role as the Business Unit President for Canada. And I'm excited to be here to share our story of this highly differentiated growth engine for the U.S., and of course, that is Michelob ULTRA. The U.S. market has been shaped over the last couple decades by two key macro trends: health and wellness, and premiumization. These consumer trends have been supporting the steady demand for lower carb, lower cal products, and premium priced brands across multiple categories. And of course, beer is no exception, with over 80% of the growth in the category coming from above core brands.
Michelob ULTRA, today, the number two brand by volume in the U.S., was launched in 2002, offering what consumers didn't really know they needed at that point: a premium, great-tasting, low-carb, low-calorie beer, and ULTRA delivered big time. But also took the category to a place it hadn't been, active lifestyle. Over the last two decades, we stayed consistent about what we brew, the superior light beer, and who we brew it for, those who aspire to an active lifestyle. In speaking with consumers, we heard then, and even more now, that being active is just a different way of bonding, as Marcel suggested. Whether it's a game of pickup soccer or quick nine holes, those active, fun times with friends often end at a bar. We celebrate that being active is a great excuse to get together with friends over a beer.
Let's take a quick look.
There are a lot of ways to exercise, and there are plenty of ways to grab a beer with your friends. But these two halves of ourselves, they've always been kept far apart, until Michelob ULTRA, a superior light beer for folks just as invested in their active lives as their social lives. Those moments where exercise and hanging out combine, there's no bigger win in life. When you're expanding your squad, finding your strengths, going the extra mile, win or lose, rain or shine, on the squad or in the stands, if you're doing it with your crew and you've got an ULTRA in hand, those are the moments in life that are always worth it.
This active lifestyle positioning is complemented by amazing pro sport partnerships, brought to life in a premium and disruptive way. Earlier this year, we deepened and expanded our global partnership with the NBA, unlocking superior assets. This one, for example, for every nationally televised game, we will have this logo on both ends of the hardwood, but it's so much more than paint. We will transform it into a 360-degree courtside platform with experiences of unparalleled access. We will also leverage our 20+ year partnership with the PGA Tour, with presence on the course, in traditional media, and culturally relevant content. Finally, soccer is about to enter a golden era in the U.S., as it will, of course, host the 2026 FIFA World Cup. There could not be a better time to double down on soccer with Michelob ULTRA.
It's already the number one sport with the growing Hispanic consumer, and we have the assets to make the most of this huge opportunity. From the U.S. and Mexican national teams to a host of MLS teams and athletes, there's a runway for this match made in heaven that will take off with the World Cup in 2026. This unique, relevant positioning, executed consistently, has helped us double the size of this brand in just the last five years, surpassing $3 billion in revenue in 2022. But we are equally as excited about the opportunity for future growth, not only globally, but also in the U.S. Our market share in these more developed states in the South is almost two times the rest of the country. We've got the plans, the resources in place to accelerate our growth trajectory nationwide.
Michelob ULTRA is obviously a top priority for us. This brand has a unique positioning in consumer's mind. We have a proven success case and clear headroom for growth in the U.S. and beyond.... Thanks a lot for your time. Now let's talk about China, and Matt, the floor is yours.
A very good morning, everyone. My name is Matt, and currently I'm leading APAC marketing team. I'm a local-born Chinese. I joined the company since 2006, working in various different positions in marketing team. And my passion and conviction is and has been always building the brands and be loved by consumers. Marcel just has introduced the four main demand platforms for premiumizations, and here I would like to share with you how we uniquely position our key four mega brands in China within this framework. Corona, our super premium brand, caters to unwinding platforms. On the projecting image, is Blue Girl, another super premium brand known as a classic lager. For creating bonds, we have Harbin, our national core brand. Last but not least, Budweiser plays a significant role in building the energy occasion.
Before we deep dive into this, let's take a moment to look at the China markets. As all of you can see on the table, on the right-hand side, which is a percentage of the annual household income, China middle class continues to grow, particularly rapidly in the upper class, middle class groups. In the middle graph simply illustrate the beer industry gross margin and how premium and the super premium segments, backed by the expanding middle class, are gaining much higher profits. In China, our premium and super premium portfolio are very well positioned for the success. For instance, in the super premium segment, we have Corona and the Blue Girl, while in the premium category, we have our flagship brand, our Budweiser, is leading the brand in the China premium market.
When we're talking about the beer industry in China, we can never forget about the growth story for the Budweiser. So hereby, actually, when I look at the slides, it's really my true honor and excited to share with you the remarkable twenty years journey of the Budweiser in China. There are some key milestones I'd like to share with you. Looking at in 1995, the first Budweiser brewery was established in China. By 2009, Budweiser had already become the China number one international beer brand in terms of the sales volume. Fast-forward to 2019, Budweiser had exceed 20 million hectoliters, claiming over 45% of the premium share in China. So now I would like to discuss how Budweiser continuously drive its premiumization through three strategic approach. The first, we call it owning the meaningful celebration.
Here, by partnering closely with our global brand teams, we ignite energy in the significant celebration moments of consumers through the various mega sponsorship platforms, like, for example, FIFA World Cup. And also, in the China, for the past 15 years, Budweiser has always paid a respect to the local culture by activating the big China celebration party events called the Chinese New Year. The second, leading and shape the culture, is really about pioneering, introducing the trends, and forcing the connections to our premium consumers through various passion points. Arts, fashion, could be also the high energy EDM festival, et cetera. And I particularly wear my beautiful T-shirt today, looking at the back, pay attention. This is the Budweiser crossover limited edition with Tomorrowland, which is a big EDM platforms, festivals in the world. And then finally, the icon of the authentic premium.
Example of this would be our stunning look of the Budweiser brewmaster bottle. Look at the dragon on the top. This will be launching for the Year of the Dragon in 2024. So now let's quickly look at a video, how this three approach landing in China in past years. Have a look at the video. All right, so after the Budweiser journey, the next critical brands that I would like to share with you guys is Corona. It fits into your unwinding platforms, and in China, Corona is positioned as a super premium brand. This means at price to the consumer, it is 11 times higher compared with core and the value brands. And talking about Corona, I always like to use a simple three ones to describe the brand, guided by the global toolkits myself, we launched.
The first one is really about a piece of sunset, representing the ultimate unwinding experience. Leveraging Global Sunset Tour this year, we brought the sunset experience to various locations in China, as well as different destinations in the world. ... The second is a piece of beach. We continue promoting the beach lifestyle through collaboration with the local communities on the sustainability initiatives, such as plastic reductions. The final piece I like to pay a bit more attention to that stands out when consumers talking about Corona is the lime ritual. Corona has its own iconic look, the fluted bottle, long neck. Moreover, adding a slice of lime into a bottle of Corona creates the most unique drinking ritual in the world. So here I would like to share with you a lime story from China, as the lime is so crucial to our brand experiences.
We're not just educating the consumer about the lime ritual through advertising or the retailers. About three years ago, we actually established a lime company to ensure the consumer can access the finest, the higher quality of the lime, anytime, anywhere in China. So let's have a look at the video that talks about the lime stories in China for Corona.
We all know the best way to enjoy a Corona is with lime. But China, the country where we drink the most beer in the world, is also the country that produces the least limes of good quality in the world. At the same time, more than 20% of our farmers live in poverty. So, instead of fixing the supply issue by simply importing limes, we decided to start a new business. Introducing Corona Extra Lime. Three years ago, we partnered with local governments, industry authorities, and lime farmers to provide them with the most advanced knowledge to switch to high-quality lime farming and expand their yields.
After 1,000 days in the making, Corona Extra Lime, a completely new lime brand with the highest quality standard in the market, finally hit the shelves all over China, improving the experience of drinking Corona, but also the lives of thousands of farmers since all profits were redirected to them so they could keep growing their farms. Today, our lime serves not only as an unprecedented medium, it's a sustainable business that is boosting our beer business even further. This initiative was recognized by the National Council Awards, the National Congress, and throughout the world, making the brand power of Corona thrive like never before. It's the biggest commitment Corona has ever had in a single market. Want a business that bears fruits? Try growing limes.
All right. Here, I would like to also humbly share of some of our achievements and the results so far. On my very light, right-hand side of the page, you will see our quarterly brand health tracker. On the so, on horizontal lines, it represents brand power, and on the vertical lines, it really indicates the premium scores. The position and the size of the bubble clearly shows that Budweiser gained a very strong brand power among all other beer brands in China. As you can also see, Corona is rapidly picking up the brand power in the past years. On my right, on my left side, it also indicates some promising results. Premium and the super premium volume, as well as the net revenue growth, has also enjoyed a very decent, steady growth in the past years.
In the past years, there has been an increasing demand of health and well-being trends across categories and services in China. Also inspired by the Michelob ULTRA success in other countries, and also just like Kyle was mentioning about the Michelob ULTRA in the U.S., we started seeing this in China about a year ago, and so far, we have seen some really promising results. And we believe in the next few years, Michelob ULTRA can be another potential mega brand to further enhance our premium and super premium portfolio in China. So tomorrow, we will look at how this demand landscape space are taking shape in Mexico with a specific focus on the development of the Michelob ULTRA for the past few years.
So that ends my presentation, and it's my pleasure to be here and to really spend the 10 minutes talking about the premiumization story in China. It's like David just mentioned, how important it is, right? To showcase the view and everything shows how capable and China can be further leading for the premium and the segment, and the super premium segment in China. That concludes my presentation. Thank you very much. Over to you, Marcelo.
Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, Matt. Xiexie. Okay. So last but not least, let's go Beyond Beer. Similar to what we did with beer, we went deep on understanding the consumers and their motivations to choose Beyond Beer. We found out that 20%-30% of alcohol consumers everywhere are what we call Sweet Seekers. We also learned that Beyond Beer consumption can also be segmented in four big spaces, with the similar path for category developed, development as markets mature over time. This business has proven to be incremental and profitable for the category, and we are doubling our net revenue contribution since 2019.... So now, to share how we're connecting with the Sweet Seekers and going beyond, let me invite our Beyond Beer VP in Africa, Le Anne Owens, and again, Kyle Norrington, to show how the category has been developing in the U.S.
Welcome to the stage, guys.
Hello, everyone. I'm Le Anne Owens, and I lead Beyond Beer for Africa Zone. I've spent the last nine years of my career building the Beyond Beer portfolio in South Africa and across the continent. I'm very happy to be here today to take you through how we've applied our global Beyond Beer framework to our South African business. Now, what is Beyond Beer? It's this unique intersection of three alcohol segments, and what we aim to address are consumer barriers within each of the three. Now, for example, a brand like Brutal Fruit Spritzer, it's got the sophistication of wine, yet it tastes like a cider, so it really is the best of both. We know in Beyond Beer that it is inclusive, and what I mean by that is it brings new consumers in by meeting their needs.
It's also incremental, as we source volume outside of our beer category. Lastly, it's highly profitable. We compete in high-growth segments and premium segments of alcohol. Now, we know that this is a big opportunity, and we know this because 20%-30% of all consumers across the world and across our various markets are what we call Sweet Seekers. Now, what do Sweet Seekers look for? Of course, something sweet, something fruity, and something flavorful. So in order to define our strategy, we looked at the Sweet Seeker segment from two different perspectives. We looked at it from a consumer lens and then also at our product attributes. And both of these two perspectives led us to define our global Beyond Beer framework for all the products.
Now, you'll see from left to right that, we have different segments, and these segments help us define our big bets in a way that we can accelerate growth depending on their maturity. We have international brands in each of the segments, and you'll see in South Africa, two of our brands, Flying Fish and Brutal Fruit Spritzer, are the lead horses in the flavorful and refreshing race. Now, what is this segment about? It's about addressing unmet needs for females and in social mixed-gender occasions. Now, first up, we have Flying Fish, our fun, I suppose, somewhat wacky brand. It was launched in 2013. It's a premium flavored beer, and what it does is really appeal to a multitude of people, to their hearts and to their minds.
We have expanded Flying Fish to nine countries across Africa, and our more recent launches in Tanzania and Nigeria are showing promising early results. Now, Flying Fish is a bit different in that it caters to a range of different palates, so the beer drinkers, cider drinkers, and our RTD drinkers, so much so that it's doubled in its volume size since 2018. Now, moving on to the ever-so-sophisticated Brutal Fruit. Brutal Fruit is not a new brand. It's been around for 21 years. But since 2018, since the launch of Brutal Fruit Spritzer, we've seen accelerated growth, so much so that we are now accelerating to over 1 million hectoliters in volume. That's four times the volume we were in 2018.
It's also the number one fastest-growing brand with females in terms of past four-week participation, and of course, the best part is it's premium, so it's 70% incremental to our core business. Our results have been strong, and we are very proud that we are winning the hearts and growing with women and with our LDAs in Flying Fish. These brands are powerful, and we see that in that for the past three years, they've been listed in Kantar's top 30 most valuable brands in South Africa. The brands are also highly incremental, sourcing more than 50% of their volume outside of beer categories. As I said before, Flying Fish, 50% beer, 50% cider and RTD source of volume. And lastly, profitability. We make a meaningful contribution to our South African business in terms of net revenue contribution. So what is all of this?
What am I trying to say, and what am I trying to demonstrate? Well, we're meeting the needs of Sweet Seekers, and we're doing it with powerful brands, and we are winning the hearts and minds of our South African consumers. I'm gonna hand over to Kyle now, who is going to take you through our Beyond Beer premiumization approach in the U.S. Thanks, Kyle.
Thanks, Le Anne. Hello again, everyone. Excited to share what we're doing to capture growth in Beyond Beer in the U.S., driven by our two big bets, Nütrl and Cutwater. But let me start from the beginning. The Beyond Beer category has been growing in the U.S. for a long time, but similar to beer, the premiumization trend has been a driving force and has migrated consumers up to real cocktail solutions that offer an elevated experience. This shift sources disproportionately from hard liquor.... When we look at these two segments, there are a few things in common. They are more, more co-ed, over-indexing with females. They also over-index with 21- 34-year-olds and skew towards social occasions. So what is Nütrl? Nütrl is our bet in the light and refreshing seltzer space.
It's the fastest growing vodka seltzer in the market, growing triple digits, and has taken the number two spot in a crowded segment in just over a year. Its net revenue per hectoliter is 1.5x the average and is highly incremental to our portfolio. Nütrl is vodka, seltzer, real juice. It's very simple. It exists to remind us that the simple things in life can be extraordinary. So to tell the world, we enlisted Gunther, our seltzer sommelier, played by Chloe Fineman of Saturday Night Live, to inspire the masses of traditional seltzer drinkers to step up to something better. Let's check it out.
Oh, the cranberry! Cute on the outside. Tasty business on the inside. Vodka, seltzer, real juice. It's Nütrl, the one with the oomph. Got it.
So with Nütrl, we have a pure play proposition and have not slowed down our share growth in this booming segment, while established malt seltzer brands have unsuccessfully tried to launch vodka variants. Now, Cutwater. Number one in the complex cocktail segment and the crown jewel of our Beyond Beer portfolio. It has double the net revenue per hectoliter versus our core. It represents nearly a quarter of the segment, and it's growing over 20%. But why is Cutwater so special? It is a product that solves a consumer problem. People wanna elevate their hosting game to include a margarita or a Mai Tai, but they don't want to buy all these ingredients or go through the hassle of having to make one of those cocktails. Insert Cutwater. Real bar quality cocktails made with award-winning spirits.
Our new campaign, Open the Bar, brings this idea to life, showcasing occasions of people overcoming the hurdle of having a great quality cocktail wherever you are. Let's check it out.
Cutwater, open the bar.
Cutwater and Nütrl are front and center in our mega brand strategy in the U.S., and they are the core of our beyond beer portfolio. They are inviting new co-ed LDA consumers to trade up to a better beyond beer experience. They are profitable and accelerating our top line growth because consumers are willing to pay more for them. Finally, they are highly incremental, with over two-thirds of the volume being sourced outside of the beer category. Tomorrow, we'll dive into how this knowledge is shaping our strategy in Mexico, led by Vicky's. Thank you all for your time today.
Thank you, Kyle. Thank you, Le Anne. Let's wrap it up before the next alarm comes. To conclude, this concludes our category expansion model and the five expansion levers, each one with its own replicable model, so the strategy can get executed with consistency. Building the Mega Brands and the category expansion model is a big journey, a journey to lead and grow the category. To close, let me just show some global results. We showed you consistent improvement on Brand Power, on volume, and on net revenues, but more importantly, growing ahead of the industry, gaining market share globally. The name of the game here- ...
Okay, but the name of the strategic pillar is to lead and grow the category. So here are the end results. Beer is growing per capita and continues to gain Share of Throat of total alcohol. So in summary, we have one global strategy for organic growth, five category expansion levers, a unique portfolio of loved brands, all that to lead and grow the category with focus, efficiency, and scale. Thank you very much.
Welcome back, Shaun Fullalove.
Okay, thanks, Marcel and team. We navigated one announcement and almost navigated the second. I know that was quite a long session, but I think we covered a lot of ground and also managed to finish in time to avoid the actual earthquake drill and alarm. The alarm's gonna sound in the next 10, 15 minutes or so. So when it does, I think we can just, the hotel staff will guide us to the columns at the back, and we will continue our break thereafter. So I think we will take a break now. We're probably 10 minutes ahead of schedule, so we will come back, I think, at 11:30 A.M., if that's okay. So we can go outside, and go to the breakfast and lunchroom, grab some coffee.
When the alarm sounds, the hotel staff will just guide us to an area to observe the moment, and then we can continue with the break, if that works. Great. All right, see you guys in 30.
We are the champion, king champion! We are the champion, crown number one. We are the champion... Champion. We are the champion, king champion. We are the champion, crown number one. We are the champion, king champion. We are the champion. We are the champion, king champion. We are the champion, crown number one.
Take me to the place made of rock and stone soaking in sunlight. Echoes of the old and the lesser known mountains come alive. Overlooking treasures gold while tame corn trucks go in sight. Feathers flutter, elevate, and align, gliding through the sky. Lord of love, seed of life, take me on your trip among the stars! Take me to a land that can teach my soul, fly me far and wide. World may shrink down, oh, how it feels so small in the crimson sky. Mmm... Limestone love, slow down time. Take me on your trip among the stars. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone.
It's the rolling stone.
... With more than 250,000 corner shops, Poker has nationwide promos and this is how it looks. But in a country with more than 250,000 corner shops, shopkeepers love to do their own thing. And who can blame them if they know best which promos work for their consumers? That is why the brand looks like this at their stores. So how could we use store owners' knowledge and keep the brand consistency at the same time? Introducing Promos de Barrio by BEES and Poker. Using BEES, the same B2B platform where they place their order to us, we let them create their own ads using our brand assets. With a simple editing tool, shopkeepers could personalize their promos in just three steps and download in seconds, ensuring the brand presence in every unique promo.
This platform not only improved their comms, but digitalized their store promos, and the promos were even shared on WhatsApp, a platform where we were not allowed to advertise, increasing their sales by 14%.
[Foreign language]La herramienta me ha ayudado mucho porque mi ortografía es pésima. Siempre dudaba si precio es con c o con s.
[Foreign language]Mi hija era la que me ayudaba a hacer las historias para Instagram, porque yo de eso no sé nada.
[Foreign language]Ahora no dependo de las promociones de la marca, sino que puedo crear mis propios descuentos.
More than 175,000 redemptions. Our B2B sales increased by 14%, raising the average order in three cases. Other local brands joined the platform and we expanded this tool to four countries, with more than 15 brands using it. Now we know in real time which promos actually work... and the price that people are willing to pay. And we even understood which are the products that best accompany our beer. Priceless data that ensures the brand consistency in every neighborhood. Promos de Barrio, making shopkeepers part of the team.
Please welcome back, Shaun Fullalove.
Okay, welcome back. We managed to navigate the earthquake drill, I think, quite well. We're gonna continue with the growth group now, and move to the progress we have made on the second pillar of our strategy: digitize and monetize the ecosystem. I think in my two years in investor relations, the question I've been asked the most is generally about BEES, so we have an opportunity to talk more about that today. To start us off, I'd like to invite Nick Caton, our Chief B2B Officer, to the stage to take us through an update on BEES. Nick, it's with you.
Hi, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with all of you today. My name is Nick Caton, and I'm the Chief B2B Officer for AB InBev. Before I dive in, I'd like to introduce myself. I studied math at Stanford and law at Yale. I spent some time as a corporate attorney at Skadden, and then I joined McKinsey, and from there, I joined ABI. Over the past 11 years, I've held roles in sales, technology, and finance, and I've worked in our Asia Pacific zone, our North America zone, and our global headquarters. Today, I am privileged and proud to lead BEES, our B2B platform that's fundamentally changed the way ABI does business. Our transformation is grounded in our strategy. The role of BEES is to digitize and monetize our ecosystem, unlocking incremental, profitable growth for ABI.
Now, our B2B journey starts with our customers, who are millions of retailers all over the world, from individual entrepreneurs running small businesses to large chains and everything in between. We serve these customers weekly, and given the strength of our category and the power of our brands, we have built strong relationships with them. Whether they're in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, South Africa, or China, these retailers are integral to their local communities. They're valued for their convenience, service, the products and brands that they offer to billions of consumers every day. And as such, we know that our customers are well-positioned to grow. But in knowing these customers, we also know that historically, they have been underserved. Despite having the capacity and opportunity to grow their businesses, they have struggled because suppliers haven't been meeting their needs.
Our customers depend on stocking leading brands at competitive prices, but historically, they've received limited service from their suppliers in short and infrequent visits. They've been unsure whether they are getting fair pricing, and delivery schedules have been rigid or unpredictable, and they have received little to no data or insights on what products can help their businesses grow. However, in these challenges, we saw an opportunity, the opportunity to leverage technology to improve their businesses. By transforming how these customers are served, we saw the opportunity to unlock profitable growth, both for them and for ABI, and it is natural that ABI would be the one to lead the transformation. As you heard this morning, we have a strong portfolio of Mega Brands. We serve many of these customers directly, providing an exceptional service level and building strong relationships.
Given this deep connection with our customers, we are uniquely positioned to address their needs, so we built BEES. From the beginning, we have dreamed big with BEES. We have invested to build new capabilities and superior technology, and as I'll explain today, it's more than simply digitizing. It's a fundamental transformation in how we do business and how we serve our customers. Over the past few years, we've built a world-class technology organization with thousands of talented engineers, product managers, data scientists, and experts in product design. Their mission has been to leverage technology to build new capabilities and transform how we serve our customers at scale, and it has worked. We have more than 3.3 million monthly active users. These users collectively serve hundreds of millions, no, billions of consumers.
More than 75% of these BEES users say that BEES is better than any other application they use to run their business. We transact more than $35 billion in gross merchandise value, and we are continuing to grow this figure, and we've expanded our offering with third-party products. Today, of all the orders placed in BEES, more than 35% include third-party products, making up nearly $1.5 billion in gross merchandise value. Over the past three years, BEES has launched in 25 markets, becoming a global mega brand of its own.... Many of ABI's most important markets are fully digitized, with 90% or more of their net revenues now digital. This has only been possible because of superior technology, a global platform, and a replicable model to transform at scale.
Importantly, our platform addresses the needs of our retailers and delivers profitable growth for their businesses and ours. Let me tell you how. At the center of our ecosystem is the customer product. Our digital connection with our retailers enables an always-on, personalized experience, which has been built to address their needs. At their fingertips, they have access to our full portfolio of products, transparency on pricing, an promotions selected specifically for them. We communicate digitally, building our brands, customizing for what is most relevant for each and every retailer. We offer personalized shopping recommendations, providing convenience and highlighting incremental growth opportunities for their businesses. And now, our customers also can participate in rewards. They also can access account information and customer service digitally. They receive data and insights about what products are growing in their area, and they can schedule deliveries when it's convenient for them.
Every feature of BEES has been purpose-built, designed to transform how we interact with our customers to unlock profitable growth for them and for ABI. Now, beyond our app, which is generally used by smaller retailers, we also connect digitally with our larger accounts in modern trade. These customers, some of which have multiple stores, tend to place larger orders and even have multiple people placing those orders across their businesses. Alongside our BEES app, we have created a tailored solution for our modern trade customers to provide a connected, data-informed experience. No matter the size of our customers, we have a solution that is designed to fit their needs. Now, in addition to the customer experience, we've built software products for all touch points with our customers. For example, once we changed how our retailers buy, we had to transform how we sell.
Our sales reps on the frontline no longer need to spend their time doing transactional activities. Instead, we've transitioned them to focus on helping our retailers build the category as business development reps, or what we call BDRs. We built BEES Force to empower these BDRs with algorithmically driven tasks to personalize their visits with the store owners. BEES Force also measures frontline effectiveness, giving ABI insights into how we can further optimize our store visits. Similarly, we built BEES Care for our inbound customer service agents, BEES Grow for our outbound call center agents, and BEES Deliver for our logistics teams and drivers. These, and the rest of our product suite, are all connected in a single ecosystem working together. I hope it's clear by now that BEES is more than an app. It's a purpose-built global platform. It's a multi-product ecosystem.
It's enriched by AI-driven personalization, and it enables coordinated online and offline communication. That all sounds great, but what I want to emphasize is that these are not empty words. So let me take a moment to really explain what they mean. It's purpose-built. Purpose-built means that it was built by a CPG specifically for the purpose of transforming how its customers are served. And because we understand our own needs, our route to market, and our customers' needs deeply, this enables us to develop technology that is more effectively tailored to generate impact. It's global. When we built BEES, we made the choice to build it as a global solution. We, as ABI, are uniquely positioned to build for scale, and at scale, we can provide a world-class technology product and are able to spread the cost over a large base. It's a platform.
BEES is not a single product, but it is a connected set of software products, digitizing all the touch points in our route to market. They are connected in a single platform, enabling each endpoint to leverage data generated by all of the others. As a result, we now have transactional and behavioral data that we've never had before. This enables BEES to leverage AI to personalize the experience of all our users, whether they are retailers, sales rep, call center agents, or delivery drivers. Now, to make it plain and simple, imagine a store where the shelf is fully customized for you, optimizing for your convenience and your incremental growth. Everything you see, from the brands, to the specific packs, to the placement on the shelf, is customized for you... and the promotions are specific for you, ensuring that commercial investment is deployed most efficiently. That's BEES.
Now, imagine you're a sales rep, and you walk into that store, and your tasks for that day are customized for you based on what has been selling well and the specific growth opportunities of that particular store. That's BEES. BEES coordinates this online and offline execution, ensuring our relationships with our retailers are intelligently supplemented by the activities of our sales reps and delivery drivers. Simply put, we can better serve our retailers in person and more effectively drive our commercial strategy when online and offline work together seamlessly. I hope by now that I've convinced you that BEES is not just an app. It's a fundamental transformation in how we serve our customers. Now, while we are proud of our technology, it's not about digitizing. It's about how we convert that into results, into profitable growth and stronger customer relationships.
As I'll share with you now, BEES has enabled our business to sell more, sell more profitably, and elevate our customer relationships. Let me walk you through in some detail. First, we're selling to more retailers. In our fully digital markets, BEES has increased our customer coverage and the number of products we're selling to each retailer. In these markets, we're selling to 10% more customers than we were prior to BEES, and across those customers, we're selling more than 10% more SKUs of ABI products. And if you include third-party marketplace items, that's more than 30% more SKUs. BEES also enables us to sell more efficiently. By transforming our frontline sales team into BDRs and implementing BEES Force, we've increased the number of stores our frontline can visit by nearly 15% and reduced our cost to serve by over 30%. Thirdly, BEES has dramatically improved our customer relationships.
Our net promoter score among our customers in the markets that we've digitized has grown by 36 points since 2019, reaching 60 at the end of the first half of this year. This is because BEES was designed for our retailers, and we're constantly evolving to improve their businesses. Features like rewards, flexible delivery, and personalized order recommendations were all developed based off feedback directly from our customers. To better illustrate how BEES impacts our business, I'd like to double-click into one of our markets. You'll hear more about Mexico later today and tomorrow, so for now, I'll focus on Brazil. In three years, Brazil has transformed into a fully digital operation, digitizing approximately 90% of its net revenue with a network of more than 1 million monthly active users. Reaching this level of digitization unlocks new methods and insights that enable us to sell more effectively.
The full personalization I described before comes to life in Brazil. What you see on this screen is not what everybody sees. It's what this particular retailer with this particular growth opportunities will see. These are personalized digital communications designed to incentivize behavior and open new opportunities for growth. They are tailored promotions to drive additional sales in the most cost-effective way, and we leverage our in-person visits to assist and supplement this digital connection. Using these levers together, BEES. Brazil has used BEES to accelerate growth. As you can see here, the impact of BEES on Brazil is similar to our global results. BEES has accelerated the growth of our business by connecting us to more retailers and increasing the number of products that they're purchasing from us.
In Brazil, we cover over 20% more customers than we did before BEES, and we're selling them more than 15% more SKUs of ABI products. And again, if you factor in third-party product, this increase is far higher. Brazil is also using BEES to sell more profitably. Brazil leveraged BEES Force to serve more stores more efficiently. Our frontline in Brazil can now serve approximately 15% more stores per person, and as a result, we've reduced our frontline cost by over 20% as a share of net revenue. And beyond commercial efficiency, we're also driving efficiency in our supply chain. Before BEES, delivery demand was concentrated on certain days. This required our logistics network to have enough trucks to deliver the peak days. So we developed a flexible delivery option based on feedback from our retailers.
This enables them to choose a preferred delivery day in exchange for a fee or a minimum order quantity. We set these fees and minimum order quantities using algorithms to incentivize our retailers to choose days that flatten our delivery curve, which in turn lowers our cost to serve in our logistics network. We've proven this in Brazil and are scaling globally. So while we are proud of our digital transformation and our technology, what we are really excited about is the impact that it has generated in our business. With BEES, we sell more, we sell more profitably, and we improve our relationships with our customers. We've utilized a replicable model to do this all around the world, but we're not finished.
I spoke earlier about how our retailers are underserved and how ABI is uniquely positioned to alleviate their friction, given the strength of our brands, our service, and our relationships. BEES has enabled us to digitize this relationship, to improve their businesses, and grow our businesses together. By doing this, crucially, BEES has also enabled us to extend this relationship, generating new revenue streams with little marginal cost to ABI. We do this through our marketplace. Because we've already invested in the technology and digitized our route to market, onboarding other suppliers comes at little to no marginal cost, but a high reward for everyone involved. It improves the experience for our retailers by expanding the product offering in BEES across multiple categories, and it allows partners to capture the same benefits that we've been able to see in our own business. This marketplace business is thriving.
We're live in 16 countries, with around two-thirds of BEES buyers purchasing third-party products. Our marketplace captures nearly $1.5 billion in GMV, with more than 200 different partner company brands. Now, let me explain a little bit about how we structure this business. The two ways we work with partners are through what we call a 1 P model and a 3 P model. Our 1 P model is fairly simple. We offer partner brands in BEES, our digital platform, and use our existing logistics infrastructure, driving incremental revenue streams and a higher asset utilization. In exchange, we earn a margin on the products that we sell. This allows partners to leverage our route to market to drive incremental growth at low cost for them.
It also enables us to monetize the spare capacity of our physical infrastructure, ensuring a higher asset utilization and incremental revenue streams. Our 3P Model gives our partners the ability to fully transform their own route to market by integrating BEES into their existing B2B processes. By enabling partners to sell through our platform and deliver using their own physical infrastructure, we monetize our digital assets without any incremental capital needs. Now, as we continue to grow the relevance of our platform and bring more value to our partners, it enables us to also grow the monetization of premium services like advanced analytics, advertising, frontline activations, and rewards. Now, to better understand the impact that we've made for our partners, I've brought a couple of examples. First is an example of a 1P partner in Brazil, a beverage company. So again, a simple reminder of how it works.
The customer places an order for a partner's products in the BEES app, and ABI uses the spare capacity of our warehouses and trucks to fulfill the order ourselves. This is a better experience for our customers because they have a wider assortment of products in BEES, and they also get all the benefits of BEES that they enjoy: catalog and pricing transparency, personalization, rewards, and others. For this 1P partner in Brazil, BEES increased their monthly buyers by 160% and tripled their rate of sale. As their GMV captured through BEES grew, they also unlocked data and insights that this supplier had never had before to better understand their customers and identify new growth opportunities. So that's 1P. I brought also an example of 3P partner, in this case, an FMCG company in Peru. Now, again, a reminder of how this works.
Unlike our 1P model, the 3P model doesn't require any physical infrastructure from ABI. It's purely digital. Instead, ABI is monetizing our ecosystem of our existing digital products and services at low cost. In our 3P business, the customer places an order for a partner's product in the BEES app, and that order is fulfilled by the partner using their existing supply and logistics network. Just as with our 1P model, this allows us to offer a broader assortment of products on BEES, which gives our retailers a better experience. For this 3P partner in Peru, we helped digitize their route to market to unlock growth. As of August, more than 80% of their customers in Lima were ordering using BEES, and our partner was able to increase SKUs with those customers by more than 20%.
As you can see, we're bringing our partners the same benefits that BEES has brought to ABI: the ability to sell more, sell more profitably, and enhance relationships with their customers. Let's hear it from one of our 3P partners themselves.
Fortunately, we have made the right decision to start with the entire BEES ecosystem. BEES is an accelerated digital transformation consulting company... [Foreign language]donde te ayuda a cambiar el mindset del equipo de ventas, los procesos, la estructura que soporta los procesos y también te ayuda a definir el perfil correcto de los profesionales para asumir esas nuevas posiciones. Además, con la fuerza y la experiencia que nuestro socio estratégico, AB InBev, tiene en el mercado local, ellos nos han ayudado desde su fuerza de ventas a que los PDVs se conecten a la tienda Gloria y hagan su primer pedido digital. Esto es algo que ninguna otra plataforma en el mundo nos podría ofrecer.
[Foreign language]Desde que yo descargué el aplicativo BEES, realmente ha sido un giro positivo, ya que yo puedo seleccionar mis productos que realmente necesito en mi negocio. Me permite elegir la fecha que deben de entregarse sí o sí, y me da libertad. Libertad de donde, el lugar de donde yo esté, puedo hacer mi pedido sin ningún problema. Con la marca Gloria, yo pido mermeladas, pido leche, pido yogur, pido una variedad de quesos y muy aparte también pido lo que son, cervezas, también gaseosas y aguas.
BEES [Foreign language]me ha ayudado a mejorar mi vida en varios aspectos. Para empezar, poder administrar mejor mis tiempos. Al punto de venta llego a hacer un conjunto de más acciones, no netamente solamente a vender. Tengo más tiempo para revisar sus stocks, verificar que su pedido anterior haya sido entregado correctamente, apoyarlas con sus reposiciones, interactuar un poco más con el cliente sobre capaz hasta temas de mercado.
[Foreign language]Estamos tan satisfechos con la herramienta, los procesos, el soporte del agente de BEES y del agente de AB InBev local, que ya decidimos implementar BEES en otras dos operaciones de Gloria: Colombia y Bolivia. Muchas gracias. Un fuerte abrazo a todos.
I hope you enjoyed that video. I personally love it. There's a lot in there, so let me take a moment to emphasize some of the key points. Gloria is an iconic company in Peru, and it is great to have them as partners. They've been very innovative in their approach to digital transformation, and for that, I actually want to say thank you to Cristiano and his team. BEES is offering our partners something that, in their own words, no other platform in the world can offer them. Gloria is adopting our platform and implementing BEES full suite of products, and they're seeing the same benefits that BEES brought to ABI: selling more, selling more profitably, and elevating relationships with their customers. And Gloria is so happy with the experience that they're expanding BEES into two additional markets.
This is a great example of how we're leveraging our existing assets, in this case, our digital platform and our transformational know-how, to create new, profitable revenue streams for our company. We are very excited for our partnership with Gloria. Beyond this particular example, we are actively building and scaling partnerships with other iconic local companies and global CPGs. Now, after digitizing the route to market and extending our relationship with our customers in the marketplace, it's natural to embed financial services and further extend this digital relationship with our customers. Our fintech tools allow us to offer our retailers a seamless experience and improve our efficiencies. We're able to provide more payment methods and digitize the credit experience to offer retailers better and more transparent credit terms. The enhanced connection we have with our retailers makes us smarter in how we grant credit, reducing our risk.
This also helps our customers grow their businesses faster. In addition, we can further extend our relationship by enabling our retailers to sell digital goods like cell phone recharges and bill payment services, which are common in many of the markets in which we operate. We do this with Vendo, which you'll have the chance to see firsthand during the market visit tomorrow, or you can stop by our booth for a demo. I'd like to thank all of you for your time today, and if you take anything from the pre-presentation, I hope it's the following: ABI is uniquely positioned to address the needs of our underserved customers. BEES is a global mega brand, preferred by over 75% of our users. It's more than an app. It's a purpose-built global platform.
It's enabled us to sell more and sell more profitably, and we've extended it to a material and growing marketplace business. Thank you. And if you haven't already, I encourage you, please stop by our emergent area and experience the BEES ecosystem for yourself. Cheers!
Please welcome Lucas Herscovici.
Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be with all of you today. As Tadeu mentioned, I'm Lucas Herscovici, and I'm the Chief Direct to Consumer Officer for ABI. I joined the company 21 years ago in Argentina as a global management trainee.... In 2008, I embarked on several international assignments in global headquarters and the North America zone, where I held different positions in marketing, driving change through to innovation and technology. In 2018, I was honored to join our SLT, first as Chief Non-Alcohol Officer, and later as Chief Sales Officer. Since 2022, I've had the pleasure of leading our D2C business, where I can apply my commercial experience to drive ABI's business transformation. The goal for today's D2C section is to share with you three things.
I will start by providing an overview of our D2C strategy and how our D2C products are designed to help deliver ABI's company strategy. I'll then talk about each of our digital D2C mega brands and how Zé Delivery became a replicable model that is being scaled globally. I'll finish by sharing our key messages and how D2C is helping us lead and grow the category through digitizing and monetizing our ecosystem. Direct-to-consumer is part of the digitize and monetize pillar of our strategy and generated $1.5 billion in net revenue. We have both digital and physical businesses. The key focus for the presentation today is how we're scaling our three digital brands: Zé Delivery, Ta-Da!, and PerfectDraft.
Our D2C brands have enabled us to collect more than 1 billion first-party data points that we're leveraging to develop deep consumer insights and transform the way we engage with our consumers. This is helping us drive category growth by developing occasions. Within our D2C business, we have three digital mega brands. For developing markets, our value proposition is focused on delivering cold beer in less than 30 minutes at supermarket prices. Our brand in Brazil is Zé Delivery, which we replicated to the rest of the world under the brand Ta-Da! For developed markets, our proposition is called PerfectDraft, which is like an espresso for beers, where 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 this a key differentiator versus other players. Our digital mega brands are currently operating in 20 markets: Zé Delivery in Brazil, Ta-Da in 12 markets across Latin America and South Africa, and PerfectDraft in seven markets across Western Europe. In the past years, we have been growing exponentially, generating almost $500 million in annual revenue from our digital mega brands. I've just shared with you our D2C strategy and our mega brands. Now, I'm going to zoom into each of them, starting with Zé Delivery, which became a replicable model that is being scaled globally. Zé Delivery was born in 2016 and grew exponentially during the pandemic.
Today, Zé is available to over 60% of the Brazilian population, serves over 8 million consumers per year, offers more than 300 SKUs across a variety of categories such as spirits, soft drinks, snacks, charcoal, and we even sell meat. We offer consumers the products they want for the occasions we serve. We generate millions of data points that we transform into action to help solve consumer problems. As you can see in the social media pictures on the right, consumers have a strong passion for Zé Delivery. In 2022, our app rating, both on Google and Apple Store, was 4.9, and NPS reached 76. What makes Zé Delivery different, viable, and scalable is our unique model that leverages the full ABI ecosystem and the relationship we have with our customers. In Brazil, we have deep relationships with over 1 million customers.
Our footprint enables us to deliver cold beer in less than 30 minutes in every city, regardless of its size. Scaling to new cities requires very little incremental costs, creating a model that's unique, scalable, and truly asset light. We believe this is a true competitive advantage. Now, let me share with you one example on how we leverage our D2C business to develop occasions and grow the category. In Brazil, two of our key priorities are to improve margins and expand the category by reaching more consumers on more occasions. As you saw previously in the Brazil category participation section, expanding the availability of returnable glass bottles can help us progress on these priorities because consumers can buy a beer at a lower price point, driving increased participation.
Customers earn higher margins, it's better for the environment, and this all benefits ABI because RGB drives superior margins and category participation. RGB products are very popular in the on-trade Brazilian market, making RGB 45% of total mix. However, RGB represents only 16% of the off-trade market mix and 0% of the mix in e-commerce retailers when you exclude Zé Delivery. Given this context, we had 1Problem to solve for our consumers: How to eliminate the hassle of carrying these bulky products to and from their homes? By fixing this pain point, we're increasing beer participation within the in-home occasion. We were able to solve this problem with Zé Delivery. Today, Zé is the only e-commerce retailer in Brazil that sells RGBs online, eliminating the consumer friction of carrying the bottles.
That's why Zé has been activating returnable glass bottles at scale, increasing relevance within a variety of consumption occasions. With these activations, small RGB now represents 44% of total mix within Zé. And because of this growth and the scale, in-home participation of small RGB bottles in Brazil has grown by 40% since 2019. This is one of the examples of how D2C helps us solve consumer pain points, drive profitable growth, and grow the category by developing occasions. Now, let me bring back to the stage Danny Wakswaser, our VP of Marketing Brazil, who's going to share some case studies on how we leverage Zé Delivery to build brands and grow the category by developing occasions.
Thanks. Thanks, Lucas. Morning. Good to be here again. So now I'll be sharing a little bit with you guys, how we leverage this D2C business to develop occasions and grow the category. So driving new occasions starts with powerful consumer insights. In order for us to really have this deep consumer understanding, we are focused on integrating technology with business knowledge to convert data into actionable insights. And the good thing is that we're building already a very solid consumer data platform that already has 25 million consumer records, right? Powered by Zé Delivery transactions and the data we gather from our brands and our campaigns. All this data enables us to do the best of two worlds: continue to build strong brands while driving occasions development.
So today, I'd like to give you a little bit of a couple of examples of how this works on occasions for two of our key brands, Corona, the brand that we believe the most to build the future of high-end, and Brahma, which is the biggest brand of Brazil. Let us start with Corona. So through the data, we found out that Corona consumers really want to disconnect from their everyday routines, either through travel, outdoor, nature, but the fact is that they don't have that many opportunities on their day-to-day lives. We also found out that the Zé Delivery users, they over-index in relaxing occasions, like chilling, going to the beach, and Friday happy hour. So the biggest challenge we have is to increase participation and total beer servings of Corona beyond holidays or just very special moments that connect with Corona very well.
We want people to connect with the brand in everyday relaxing moments. We found out that the solution has always been in front of us, using the sunsets as a period for daily unwinding. The name we created for this platform is Corona Sunset Hours, and it is a series of promotional activities that happen every day from 5 P.M.- 7 P.M. in Brazil. We explore the best of coupons, prizes, and even free shipping to encourage people to celebrate the sunsets. Of course, all of this had to be connected with our lime ritual experience, but we also doubled down on experiential activities, connecting the Zé Delivery consumption with trips and festivals in real life, and even giving consumers a chance to get to know our beautiful Corona Island in Colombia.
From doing these activations on direct-to-consumer, we learned that the sunset moment can be much bigger than a happy hour. It can really represent the moment of relaxation after work that drives the disconnection that consumers really seek, either in home or out of home. Results so far in Corona have been very encouraging. Driven by this incremental occasions, we have increased almost 1 percentage point of our market share is in Zé for Corona brand. Furthermore, 7.3% of total Corona volume in Brazil is now sold directly to the consumers via Zé Delivery. This means that we have direct control and full consumer understanding of over 7% of all the brand's volume that is sold nationally.
Not only is the brand big and growing in a healthy way within Zé, but most importantly, these learnings were scaled beyond D2C, and Corona is growing their revenue by more than 30% year-to-date at the national level, and this is what I think the intelligent part of this process, scaling outside of direct to consumer. Now let me share another great example of Brazil's biggest brand and the biggest passion point, which is Brahma and the soccer occasion. Again, it all starts with powerful insights. 25% of Zé Delivery orders come from soccer occasions, but the thing is, the majority of these orders are coming from weekends. There is a double-digit uplift when there's a soccer game, and the peak orders, the period where the order peaks, is one to two hours before the game.
So the fact that the bulk comes from the weekends, we clearly had an opportunity to increase Brahma participation and total beer servings in soccer weekdays to create more moments of celebration within the week. So our solution, Quarta Pede Brahma, which is Wednesday Calls for a Brahma, is a full program to leverage our assets during the week. We started activating Brahma on Wednesdays with soccer games through digital media investment and club-based communication, game-time promotions and cashback, and full consumer activation within the app because we know what are the teams that each consumer support within Zé Delivery. Our results in this ongoing soccer platform have also been very encouraging. Almost 5 percentage points increase in frequency versus the Zé Delivery average....
We're glad to report that Brahma's brand lovers have been increasing from 2022- 2023 by almost 500,000 new lovers. To showcase our finger on the pulse in terms of data, this Sunday, we had a major match in Brazil among two of Brazil's biggest soccer clubs. This Sunday. It was literally the best Sunday for Zé Delivery ever. We almost reached 350,000 orders, and we know that more than 30% of these orders came from Brahma, which is above our fair share, and within soccer lovers, almost 40% of their volume came from Brahma. So this shows that our Brahma and Zé Delivery soccer strategy is working, but also conveys for all of us how fast we're able to get information and insights in our D2C brands partnership.
So as you saw from these two examples from Brazil, we're fully leveraging Zé Delivery scales and consumer insights to lead and grow the category by developing occasions. Thank you very much. Back to you, Lucas.
Thank you, Danny, for sharing those cases and showing how D2C is helping deliver on our company's strategy. Shifting gears, now I wanna share more of what's happened and what's coming. Since the creation of the growth group, BEES and D2C are becoming truly complementary, creating a unique omni-channel engagement platform. This integrated platform leverages the full power of the ABI ecosystem, benefiting all involved, including both our customers and consumers. There are three areas that unlock synergies between BEES and D2C. First, customers. We're empowering them via insights and data. Second, marketplace. We're improving assortments via additional partnerships. And lastly, rewards. We're expanding benefits through omni-channel ecosystem. Now, let's talk more about rewards. Zé Compensa is our rewards program in Brazil.
Consumers can earn points by buying ABI products on Zé, and can redeem points for online coupons on Zé, for beer in bars and restaurants enabled by BEES, and for access to sport events, music concerts, or a wide range of experiences that only ABI can offer. This omni-channel engagement platform is only possible through the integration of BEES, D2C, and marketing. Let's watch a video to learn more about it. Cool. So as you saw, this omni-channel engagement program brings more options for consumers to enjoy their favorite beers, and also foot traffic to our customers, driving sales uplift. It also drives incremental consumer frequency and provides us 100% consumer understanding from following their online and offline behaviors. To wrap up our Zé Delivery overview, it is important to highlight that Zé Delivery brings 50% volume incrementality to ABI.
Furthermore, by leveraging ABI ecosystem, Zé has positive unit economics, something that is difficult to accomplish within last-mile delivery businesses. Inspired by Zé's success, it became a replicable model that we decided to expand to the rest of the world under the brand Ta-Da! This digital brand was born to be global. Following Zé's replicable model, we scaled to 12 markets in less than one year, from Latin America to South Africa. Let's watch a video to show how this happened.
Ta-Da! is here to transform our business and the way we interact with consumers. That's why in our first year, we introduced ourselves in a magical way. In just 10 months, we launched Ta-Da! in 12 countries, driving simplification and efficiency, with every market adopting the brand and framework. The real magic behind Ta-Da! comes from AB InBev's power, our brands, and the unique experiences they can deliver. Not to mention, having the best magician of the World Cup on our team, plus our operational strength and our legacy. Ta-Da! brings us modernity, agility, innovation, one-on-one communication, but most importantly, insight... a deeper understanding of our consumers' behavior to shape the category, driving organic growth and making AB InBev's ecosystem stronger, and this is just the beginning. Ta-Da!
As you saw, Ta-Da! is a reality across Latin America, yet our largest opportunity is in Mexico. Let me tell you more about it. Mexico is our number one market for Ta-Da!, and has the benefit of leveraging the footprint of the physical Modelorama stores. It already delivered over 1.8 million orders in the first half of 2023, exhibiting exponential growth since its launch in 2020. We've achieved 4.8 app rating, 77 consumer NPS, and we have recently launched Club TaDa, a rewards program based off of Zé Compensa, where consumers can already experience the benefits of the program both online and offline through coupons enabled by BEES. We've now covered two of our three mega brands, which takes me to sharing with you the overview of our business for developed markets, PerfectDraft.
PerfectDraft is the ultimate home draft beer experience, with a machine that chills the keg within hours and preserves the beer freshness for 30 days once opened. Through PerfectDraft, consumers can enjoy more than 40 different brands in the convenience of their home. Moreover, consumers pay half the price of draft beer in the on-trade, while ABI sells the beer at ultra-premium pricing. PerfectDraft is present in seven European markets and is most developed in the UK and France, where we have more active machines than bars and pubs in those countries. Our state-of-the-art machines, paired with our recently revamped app, redefine the consumer experience. Users can now customize settings like beer temperature, discover new brews, and even receive notifications about low beer levels or keg freshness.
Beyond these features, this technology gives us deep consumer understanding, and we don't just get insights from purchasing behaviors, but also deep dive into our consumers' occasions. Since the launch of Corona Zero on PerfectDraft, we've gained valuable insights into the occasions and times where non-alcohol beer is most relevant for our consumers. Corona Zero consumers in the U.K. over-index their consumption in post-work hours and during dinner occasions relative to other brands. As you can see on the Corona ad on the right, our team in Europe have been able to use these insights to focus the Corona Zero activation during these occasions, maximizing effectiveness of their campaigns. Now that I've shared with you the details about our d...
Three D2C brands, I encourage all of you to visit our booths, where you can learn more about them and how we're growing key occasions such as soccer, barbecue, and meals. But before I finish, let me leave you with a few final messages. As we saw today, D2C products exist to help deliver ABI's strategy by solving consumer problems. D2C is helping us lead and grow the category by using consumer data to unlock deep consumer insights that are replicated beyond D2C and activating our brands to develop occasions. Moreover, D2C is digitizing and monetizing our ecosystem by building digital D2C mega brands that are loved by consumers. Having a unique and scalable, replicable model, grounded in our enduring relationships with millions of customers, paving the way for the global expansion of our D2C business in a profitable way.
Wanted to thank you for your time and consideration today. ABI is on a transformation journey to become the most tech-enabled CPG company, and D2C is an integral piece of that transformation. We're committed to drive incremental, profitable growth for ABI and look forward to engaging with you further to discuss the promising future ahead. Now, I welcome back Ricardo to the stage.
I'd like to thank very much the team for the insightful presentations. Now that you heard directly from Marcel, Nick, Lucas, and everyone, I hope you can see how well we are positioned to continue to drive profitable growth. I will now quickly wrap up the key takeaways from these first two pillars of our global strategy. Let's start with pillar one: lead and grow the category. We have a clear and consistent global strategy to drive organic growth. We are building mega brands with focus, efficiency, and scale, and we are delivering volume and net revenue ahead of the industry in most of our markets. That's happening already. Now, moving on to digitize and monetize. We are connecting and enhancing our route to market. Our digital platforms, BEES, Zé, TaDa, and PerfectDraft, allow us to sell more, reduce our cost to serve, and increase overall satisfaction.
On top of all that, we are creating new profitable revenue streams, enhancing beer occasions, and developing deep insights about our customers and consumers. You've seen the booths already, so during our extended lunch, I hope you can interact with our BEES and D2C brands and applications. I really encourage all of you to take a moment to explore the booths, to engage with our teams and our technology. Thank you very much for your time, and I really look forward to sharing a beer with all of you later this evening. Thanks.
Once again, Shaun Fullalove.
I think I'm the last person between you guys and lunch, so we'll wrap this up very briefly. Thanks to Tadeu, Nick, Lucas for the presentations. As Tadeu mentioned, we're gonna head to a lunch break now for the next hour. I think we'll plan to be back here at 1:30, so 1 hour and 5 minutes from now. As I mentioned, we have the BEES and the D2C booths next door. Enjoy your lunch, take some time, engage with the team there, and we will meet back here at 1:30. So thanks very much. We'll see you guys in an hour.
Oh, yeah! All right. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah! All right. Oh, yeah.
Take me to the place made of rock and stone soaking in sunlight. Echoes of the old and the lesser known mountains come alive. Overlooking glaciers go while tame corn trucks go in sight. Feathers flutter, elevate, and align life into the sky. Rolling down, rolling down. Lord, I'm gone, need your light. Take me on a trip among the stars! Take me to the land that can tease my soul, fly me far and wide. World may shrink down, oh, how it feels so small in the crimson sky. Limestone love, slow down time. Take me on a trip among the stars.
South Africans are starving.
About 12.8 million people in South Africa have gone to bed hungry this week alone. Brands that have our scale have an immense responsibility to do work that positively impacts the communities in which we operate. After the process of lautering, we're left with all the spent grain.
So what we've been able to innovate is a unique recipe, capturing the spent grain from our brewing process and converting it into flour. We know that our ingredients are of such a high quality that they can be repurposed for a food product like bread.
Bread of the Nation. Bread of the Nation. Bread of the Nation.
This flour has up to three times the fiber that you find in most natural products on the shelves in the supermarkets. This is why initiatives like this are very important to actually bring more bread into the communities.
By partnering with SA Harvest, we're able to make this a truly national initiative.
We are working together with SA Breweries to stave off that feeling of hunger. By leveraging our nationwide distribution channel and our community-based organizations, we're able to reach every corner of South Africa. In 2022, we delivered just over 20 million meals.
I ate it, and I was dancing when I was eating it, because I knew this bread is so nice.
I feel like this conversation's really gonna get your attention. Very soon, the bread that you and I eat will be made from the byproducts of the ingredients used to make beer.
Castle Lager, together with SA Harvest, launched their first-of-its-kind Bread of the Nation...
Bread of the Nation. Bread of the Nation. Bread of the Nation.
Bread of the Nation.
Bread of the Nation. The answer as to why this type of initiative is important, I think, is fairly obvious.
Please welcome back, Shaun Fullalove.
Hey, welcome back from the lunch. I hope you guys all managed to interact with the booths a little bit, order a few PerfectDraft kegs for when you get back home, and I hope you managed to sample the 16 different versions of pasta that we had available. So, next up on the agenda, we have an update on the third pillar of our strategy: optimize the business. And for that, I'd like to invite our CFO, Fernando Tennenbaum, to the stage. Fernando, the stage is yours.
Hello, everyone, and thanks again for joining our Capital Markets Day here in Mexico. It's a great pleasure to welcome you all here in person in one of our key markets. I hope today's presentation have given you good visibility now into our strategy to lead and grow the category and how we are digitizing and monetizing our ecosystem. Now, I would like to talk to you about the third pillar of our strategy: optimizing our business to maximize long-term value creation. I've been in the company for more than 19 years across various finance functions, including investor relations, treasury, and M&A, and was most recently the Chief Financial Officer of our publicly listed subsidiary, Ambev. When we think about maximizing long-term value creation at ABI, we are focused on three key areas: optimized resource allocation, robust risk management, and efficient capital structure.
Let me start with optimized resource allocation. Every day, we make strategic choices to drive balanced and profitable organic growth. Throughout the day, you have heard about some examples of these choices across the first two pillars of our strategy. Consistent investment in our replicable toolkits, such as our mega brands, five category expansion levers, and our digital transformation, allow us to better serve our customers, attract new consumers to expand the beer category, and to drive increased participation across our footprint, resulting volume growth ahead of the industry across most of our key markets over the last few years. We have made important choices in disciplined pricing and other revenue management initiatives, which drove an annualized net revenue per hectoliter growth of 5.4% since 2019.
The strategic investment we made in our digital capabilities, such as BEES and D2C, have further enhanced our ability to grow. All combined, the execution of our strategy has delivered accelerated top-line growth with a healthy combination of volume and net revenue per hectoliter since 2019.... As Michel mentioned earlier, we operate in a large and growing category, and we have no shortage of opportunities to invest in driving the organic growth of our business. Despite the challenges of COVID, commodity cost pressures, and FX headwinds, we have invested nearly $47 billion between sales and marketing and CapEx over the last four years. Perhaps more importantly, these investments have been consistent year over year to support the brand power of our portfolio, maintaining the efficiency of our facilities, and develop the right capabilities to drive future growth.
While we invest heavily in our business, we are always seeking opportunities to optimize the effectiveness of the resources we allocate. Within sales and marketing, there are two key concepts which are enabling us to be more effective with our commercial investment dollars. First, Marcel spoke earlier about the Mega Brands concepts and reducing unprofitable brands and SKUs, which are enabling us to focus on our sales and marketing investments in the brands that have scale, Brand Power, and are best positioned to capture growth across our markets. Second, we are scaling our replicable toolkits, such as BEES, digital direct-to-consumer brands, and our in-house marketing agency, draftLine, across our footprint globally. We are still exploring how we can fully leverage the customer and consumer insights developed across these platforms, and we see clear opportunities in driving both efficiency and increased effectiveness across sales and marketing.
We measure the effectiveness of our commercial investments through Brand Power and volume growth, with consistent improvement across both measures since 2021 for our overall portfolio and for the Mega Brands in particular. In relation to CapEx, from 2019 to 2022, we have invested nearly $19 billion in CapEx to support execution across our three strategic pillars. Almost 60% of this CapEx was invested in growth and technology initiatives, including expanding our capacity to meet the growing demand across developing and emerging markets, investing capabilities in faster growing premium and Beyond Beer segments, and developing digital platforms such as BEES and D2C that have fundamentally changed our route to consumer and the relationship with our customers. We also continue to invest to optimize our business, improving productivity in our facilities and logistics operations, and invest in key sustainability initiatives.
Roughly 10% of our CapEx has been focused on cost-efficient projects across our business. The next building block of how we think about optimizing resource allocation across our business and translating top-line growth to value creation is our margins. So let me take a few minutes to go through the evolution of our margin profile. Our business' superior margins are driven by our fundamental strengths: our portfolio of iconic mega brands, our global scale, our unique global footprint, and our efficient operating model. However, over the last couple of years, the overall beer industry profitability has been under pressure due to unprecedented commodity and transactional FX headwinds, and ABI has not been an exception.
As you can see on the left-hand side of the slide, our EBITDA margin compression since 2019 was almost entirely driven by the gross margin decline, as our key commodities, key input commodities, reached near all-time highs. Further, our basket of emerging and developing markets' FX exposures depreciated significantly above inflation differentials. These two factors combined, resulting in input cost escalation well above CPI. Despite the cost pressures, we have been disciplined and continued to price in line with local CPI, and this is the long-term pricing strategy that we believe maximizes the value of the beer category. This, this location in local CPI versus brewing input cost pressures has primarily driven the 660 basis points of gross margin contraction since 2019.
We cannot control commodity prices or FX movements, but we are able to manage our overheads tightly to free up resources to continue to invest in our business despite the elevated cost environment. Our culture of everyday financial discipline and the ownership mindset of our people have enabled efficient overhead management. Over the last four years, we have meaningfully increased our productivity, with our volume per FTE increasing by 9% since 2019. When you look at our total overhead expense for the same period, it has declined by 1% in U.S. dollars. If we compare the evolution of our overhead expenses versus local CPI, we estimate that since 2019, we have saved more than $300 million. The silver lining is that what I've just covered shows that the margin decline we've seen in recent years is not structural.
As we move forward, although input costs are still elevated, recently, the key commodity and FX rates have begun to ease for the first time in a few years. Our fundamental strengths, disciplined pricing, continued premiumization, and efficient operating model remain the same, creating an opportunity for margin expansion over time. I know there are many financial professionals with us today in the room, and as I always tell my team, cash is king. The ultimate measure of value creation of a business is the size of the free cash flow generation and the consistency of delivery. When you look at the last four years, despite the dynamic operating environment, and even including the impact of COVID in 2020, our business continued to deliver consistent free cash flow while investing for growth.
When we benchmark our cash conversion and margins across our peers in the CPG landscape, we consistently have best-in-class profitability and conversion of net income to free cash flow. Now, let's move on to how we think about robust risk management. Our risk management framework is an important lever to maximize value creation. By reducing the uncertainties, we lower the cost of capital, mitigate tail risk events, and ensure the sustainability of the business for the next 100+ years. We do this by focusing on three areas: cost visibility through our hedging policy, actively managing our debt portfolio, and bringing greater efficiency and standardization with our replicable management systems. Our 12-month rolling hedging policy is focused on all economically viable exposures and is designed to provide our business with input cost visibility to enable revenue management and strategy planning.
With respect to balance sheet management, as you can see on this slide, our debt maturity profile remains well distributed, with no bond maturities in 2023 and no relevant medium-term refinancing needs. Our bond portfolio has an average pre-tax coupon of around 4%, and 96% of our bonds have a fixed rate, insulated from both interest rate volatility as well as inflation. The structure of our debt is a direct result of active choice. We have managed to minimize risk and manage our deleveraging. Before we move to efficient capital structure, I'd like to invite Ezgi Barcenas, our Chief Sustainability Officer, to join me on stage to take you through how sustainability is integral to our business and is key to both risk management and optimizing resource allocation. Ezgi?
Thank you, Fernando. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. Thank you for joining us in person and online. For those of you I haven't met yet, I'm Ezgi Barcenas. My background is engineering and environment. Before joining ABI, I worked in public health and international development. I've been with the company for more than a decade now, and I've had the honor of serving as the Chief Sustainability Officer for the last two years. I previously held roles in corporate affairs and procurement, where in 2018, I led the creation and launch of our 2025 sustainability goals. Sustainability is key to optimizing our business for the long term. It allows us to manage our risks and costs, ensure supply security, and protect our license to operate and grow for the next 100+ years.
Our sustainability efforts are centered around three core attributes that are inherent to the beer category. Beer is inclusive in the types of products we offer and in how we strive to improve livelihoods across our value chain. Beer is natural. We're a company based in nature, leveraging nature-based solutions to build resilience where it is needed the most. And last but not least, beer is local. With more than 500 local brands in our portfolio across nearly 50 operating countries, the success of these local economies is our success, and we continue to invest in their well-being and resilience. Today, I wanna share with you how we're approaching sustainability at ABI as a fundamental enabler of our strategy. As I mentioned, our value chain is deeply rooted in local communities and natural ecosystems.
From tens of thousands of farmers, to millions of retailers, to billions of consumers around the world, putting sustainability at the forefront of our value chain helps optimize our business and also create shared value. As you well know, we're a target-driven organization, and that is no different when it comes to sustainability. We set clear KPIs across our priorities, and we work together to deliver against them, and we're proud of the progress we're making. Fernando was just talking about our approach to robust risk management, and part of that risk management is investing in value chain resilience and supply security. To strengthen and formalize local supply chains, we work side by side with farmers in the field to improve their productivity through research, crop management tools, and agronomic advice....
In 2022, we worked with nearly 24,000 direct farmers to source barley, hops, cassava, sorghum, maize, and rice, our six priority crops. Taking a farmer-centric approach, our agronomy teams work in the field to skill, connect, and financially empower 100% of our direct farmers. That's our 2025 agriculture goal. When we set this goal back in 2018, we knew that if we put the farmers at the heart of all we do, we would see impact, and we did. Let's take Uganda as an example. Roughly 40% of ABI's smallholder farmers, about 10,000, are in Uganda. In 2017, we locally sourced approximately 8,000 tons of barley in Uganda. In 2022, we sourced nearly 30,000 tons from roughly the same number of farmers, from 8,000- 30,000, with average production per farmer nearly tripling during that timeframe.
In addition to improved productivity and agricultural development in Uganda, sourcing locally rather than importing gave us an annual excise benefit of over $30 million. While these are clear wins for our business, they also speak volumes to the resilience we're building across our local supply chains and the broader food systems. In 2022, as you can see from the chart, 89% of our direct farmers globally met our definition of skilled, which meant they had access to approved crop varieties that are suitable for their climate and soil, and technical support from our global research teams and network of agronomists. To truly embed sustainability into the business, we set clear goals and work diligently to deliver against them. We build alignment on key priorities and drive progress across the business through shared targets that are linked to our bonuses, our annual variable compensation.
In 2022, over 3,000 colleagues had targets linked to sustainability, from chiefs like Fernando and me, to energy and fluids directors, to agronomists and logistics managers. This is exactly how we approach climate action and our ambition to achieve net zero by 2040. Shared targets drive our primary strategy, which is deep, deep decarbonization inside our operations. One example of how we do this is through our proprietary Simmer & Strip technology, which reduces the amount of energy required for boiling by 80%. This translates into approximately a 10% reduction in energy costs where implemented, and now we're using the Simmer & Strip technology across five zones. Since 2017, we've reduced our absolute operational emissions, that is Scopes 1 and 2, by nearly 40%, as you can see on the chart.
Achieving our science-based target to reduce absolute operational emissions by 35% by 2025, three years ahead of target. This emissions reduction is due in part to the decreased energy use, resulting in over $200 million in savings over the last five years. As we decarbonize inside our operations, we continue to share the learnings and best practices with our value chain partners so that we can tackle our Scope 3 emissions. We also rely on replicable toolkits to advance sustainability and scale impact. Let's take water, for example. We developed a water risk assessment tool that leverages external data and input from our local teams to review our water risk on a quarterly basis. We know that water security is local, and it is complex, and there's no single solution
So to help our local teams tailor solutions that are needed for each high-stress watershed, we've developed a seven-step watershed management process that drove measurable improvement in six high-stress watersheds in 2022. And inside our four walls, as some of you may recall, we're aiming to reach a global water efficiency level of 2.5 hl per hl across our breweries by 2025. As you can see on the chart, we've now reduced nearly 14% since 2017. The biggest replicable toolkit for our operations is VPO management system. VPO allows us to manage the performance and complexity of our operations, from production to environmental metrics, to safety KPIs, in a disciplined way. To date, Nanning Brewery in China is our most water-efficient brewery at 1.1 hl per hl, including the reuse of treated effluent within the brewery and the local community.
We continue to benchmark our progress with this and other top-performing facilities. As I mentioned, the 14% reduction we've seen since 2017 gave us a saving of 16 billion liters of water. Sustainability allows us to innovate and unlock new sources of value, and that is the case when it comes to circular packaging. Our approach to circular packaging is based on four key principles: reduce packaging and the need for virgin materials, increase the availability and use of recycled content, promote the recovery and reuse of packaging, and last but not least, rethink our packaging and distribution models. And we continue to develop innovative solutions that provide, and you've heard this earlier, better price point for the consumer, higher margins for us, and less impact on the environment. A recent example of this is in Brazil, as you heard from Danny this morning.
Earlier this year, we launched a nationwide returnable bottle campaign that drives increased participation and promotes sustainability. The campaign also leveraged Zé Delivery, as Lucas mentioned, and Zé Delivery is the only e-commerce retailer in Brazil that sells returnable glass bottles online, eliminating the consumer friction of carrying bottles back to collection points. It's initiatives like this that allow us to protect and promote the returnable volumes. In 2022, 77% of our products were in packaging that is returnable or made from majority recycled content. We also increased the return rate of our two-way bottles by 1.5%, which translates into more than 600 million bottles saved compared to the year before, capturing more than $50 million in value. Beer is a drink of moderation.
Our smart drinking initiatives aim to empower consumers with information and choice to make smart decisions while enjoying our products. We're encouraged by the evolution of the non-alcohol beer segment. In 2022, we were well positioned to respond to consumer trends with 30 non-alcoholic brands spanning 42 countries. For example, one of our latest non-alcohol innovations, Corona Cero, and you heard Brian talk about this, was launched in 2022 with social norms marketing campaigns across Europe and in Brazil. Since 2016, we've invested more than $700 million globally in social norms marketing campaigns like this and others to promote smart drinking and moderation. Since we're here in Mexico, I wanna share with you two stories that make me particularly proud of our local teams.
The first is an initiative launched in 2021 called Rebounce, a project that rescues bottles that are lost in the market post-consumption. In 2022 alone, the initiative worked with 90 collectors to recover more than 350 million glass bottles, nearly tripling the number of rescued bottles from the previous year and saving approximately $18 million. The second is from a trip I made to Apan earlier this year. Apan is a couple of hours of drive from here, where our teams are partnering with the local community to help rebalance the aquifer. As you can see, this is a very arid region. Together with local partners, GIZ, the German Development Agency, we're investing in nature-based solutions to improve the health of this watershed.
It was incredible to stand on one of the recently built gabion dams, that you can see in the picture, which is a structure made from rocks that slows the flow of a stream just enough to allow the water to naturally seep back into the ground to help decrease soil erosion, a systemic problem in this area. I was so moved as I walked through the areas where we planted native species, which have now literally taken root. These plants were thriving, and we could even see the regrowth of other plants, a visible indication that the health of the watershed and the ecosystem around it had been improving. We're humbled about this partnership, and the learnings, and the progress being made, and we're excited about the potential of scaling these learnings as stewards of nature and watersheds.
In conclusion, I wanna leave you with five takeaways: To help future-proof our business and enable our commercial vision, we continue to invest in value chain resilience and supply security, set clear goals and deliver against them, build replicable toolkits to scale best practices, always seek opportunities to unlock new sources of value, and differentiate our category through promoting moderation and choice. In short, we believe that sustainability is good business. Thank you for your time, and always, we welcome your feedback. With that, I would like to turn it back to Fernando to close out the Optimize the Business presentation.
Thank you, Ezgi. As you can see, sustainability is embedded into our within our business and a fundamental component of our strategy to drive long-term value creation. Both the scale and consistency of our free cash flow generation are relevant drivers of value creation on a standalone basis, and when we add an efficient capital structure, there is additional upside to be unlocked. With the excess cash flow generated by our business after investing for organic growth, we dynamically allocate between our three capital allocation priorities: deleveraging, selective M&A, and return of capital to shareholders. At our last Capital Markets Day, we showed our optimal capital structure and also the theoretical curve of value creation to shareholders from deleveraging, and that is unchanged.
As you can see here, 2x net debt to EBITDA remains the point at which we maximize value, though approximately 90% of the benefits from deleveraging can be captured as we approach 3x. As a result of the value to be created from deleveraging, since 2019, a significant portion of our free cash flow has been allocated towards debt paydown. In the last four years, we have reduced gross debt by approximately $32 billion, and we reached 3.5x net leverage at the end of 2022. With our focus on deleveraging, the amount of free cash flow available to return capital to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks has been limited. However, given the progress we have made on our deleveraging path, there has been additional flexibility in allocating our capital and the 2022 dividend increase.
Going forward, as we move towards 3x, we believe that there will be continued flexibility. If you look at the output of this dynamic balance of capital allocation over the last few years, while we invested more than $47 billion in the organic growth of our business, we also reduced gross debt by $32 billion, reaching 3.5x net debt to EBITDA, and increased our dividends to EUR 0.75 for the 2022 fiscal year. Wrapping up, I want to leave you with a few key takeaways. Our consistent investment across sales and marketing and CapEx to support our strategy are driving organic growth. Our industry-leading margins are a result of our iconic mega brands, global scale, and unparalleled footprint, and efficient operating model. As a result, our business has best-in-class free cash flow generation and cash conversion.
Our dynamic capital allocation is another lever that we are actively using to further unlock value creation. With all of this, even in an ongoing dynamic operating environment, we are confident in delivering our medium-term growth outlook of 4%-8% organic EBITDA growth. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to continue to engage with you all today and tomorrow. Thank you.
Once again, Shaun Fullalove.
Thanks, Fernando and Ezgi, for the presentations. I wouldn't go too far, Fernando, 'cause I'm gonna bring you back up on the stage in one minute. That concludes the update on our global strategy. We're gonna end this portion of the day with a Q&A panel session with our global chiefs that have just presented. So give us a few moments here just to set up the stage with some additional chairs for everyone to come sit. So if I could ask Michel, Fernando, Tadeu, David, Marcel, Nick, Ezgi, Lucas to slowly join me on stage as they start to put the seats up. A couple of notes on the logistics for the Q&A. We're gonna start by taking a couple of questions from here in the room.
Those that are on the webcast stream are also able to submit questions via the Q&A functionality on the platform, and if I can figure out how the technology works, I will take some questions from the web as well. We have some mics around the room, so if you would like to ask a question, then please raise your hand. We'll get our team to get a mic across to you. As much as possible, try and stick to one question, just so we can give as many people an opportunity to ask something. So we have 45 minutes from now. So give us 2 seconds just to get situated here, and then we'll kick it off. Great, so I think we're all here, all ready. So if anyone would like to take a first question from the room, please raise your hand.
We'll get a mic across to you. We can go with Ed over here.
Thanks for the, Hi, can you hear me? Good. Great.
Yeah.
I'm Ed Mundy, Jefferies. Thanks for the presentations. I wanted to come back to, I think it was Korea, where you mentioned OBPPC, and I think that was the only time that's been mentioned throughout today. Clearly, there's a lot going on within the broader business, but could you perhaps talk about where you are on that OBPPC journey? You know, the soft drinks bottlers have clearly spent the last decade or so getting very advanced on that. Is that a continued opportunity for you to unlock further value over the medium term?
I can take that one. OBPPC is one of the key elements we have in two of the growth pillars that the growth levers we spoke about today. First one is on participation, because this is proven to be a very effective lever on participation, because of course, it offers options in different price points for different occasions, so it helps bringing people into the category. And then, we mentioned that in Korea as well, because it's another part of the core superiority framework we have. So especially for big brands, it's proven also that the more you bet behind OBPPC, the more you keep these brands up to speed, exactly on connecting with different consumers in different occasions. It's all about having our brands fit for the occasion. So it's been working very well.
It was one of the key elements behind the success of Cass. If I'm being fair as well, I would say that we've been trying some, and we've been getting some very good early results on OBPPC as well with our premium brands, because we've been breaking some barriers for expansion on premium brands by offering more offerings of our premium propositions so that they can go further. So this is something that we're now applying on our premium brands as well. So simply put, across the portfolio, OBPPC is one of the key elements that permeates the growth levers.
Do you want to add, Shaun?
Sure. Yep. I, I don't know if Tadeu wants to comment, but I think that the question is how far? And I think it's fair to say that on a one to ten scale, when you benchmark, for example, with soft drinks companies, which are very heavy on that, we are like four out of ten. So it's like a three to five years journey, depending on the country, and so far, good mapping of the opportunities.
... good tie up onto the strategy, but in terms of execution, we are in the early stages, like four out of 10.
If I were to compliment, it's on the other hand, we also added some elements to BPPC, which is also our ability to develop occasions, right? So, I think that's when we rate ourselves four out of ten, it's when we think of, you know, the opportunities that we have ahead. But I think that these four, they are very meaningful and give us lots of opportunities in the future. So, for example, if you think of the example of Litre in Brazil as a way to reignite returnables and have a great in-home package that could also be returnable and that we could leverage on Zé, I think it's a great case of, like, using a package that could be both affordable but also convenient in a way that only we can do.
So I think there's much more to come, but I think that's the beauty of it, is we can today identify occasions that we want to either create or incentivize. We can identify the channels, and sometimes we can create the channel ourselves as well, and then we design for that. So I mean, much more to come, but I think we've made good progress in the last few years.
Okay, thanks, Jade, for that one. Anyone else in the room? Andrea from BMO, on Table 7. Hmm? Yeah.
Yes, it's Andrea Pistacchi from Bank of America. Looking across your developing markets, there's been consistent and strong top-line growth in almost all the markets. But when you look at EBITDA growth or conversion of this top line into EBITDA, there's some differences, like Mexico and Colombia really stand out as having delivered also strong EBITDA growth. But in other markets, I think, like Peru, Ecuador, in part Brazil, the profit growth so far has been a bit more subdued. Apart from potential sort of differences in cost inflation that you faced in these markets, are there any other reasons that explain this difference? Maybe capability rollouts or things like that. And also, going forward, should we expect in these high-margin markets like Peru, Colombia, an acceleration of EBITDA growth, of conversion of top line into profit?
Maybe Michel, if you want to start today.
Yeah, I can take that. I think that in couple of the, the earnings results, we talk about these markets with very similar questions. And despite of us using one hedge policy globally and have a very well-organized and centralized supply chain in terms of procurement, the reality is that all this cost escalation, they hit markets differently, and the cost escalation, the commodity, was coupled with FX. And what we are seeing, for example, today, is that the markets that early got hits, like Brazil, for example, they are the first markets that are getting out. While some of the markets, they got a much delayed impact, and therefore they need another one or two quarters to move on the right direction.
But as Fernando covered during his presentation, a lot of what we saw in terms of margin compression was really commodity FX-based, and as these effects subside, then we start seeing the margin come back, and there is no region structurally for what the margins should not come back, even though each market will come a little bit different depending on the FX commodity combination on that specific market. But there is no fundamentally difference between Peru and Mexico, or should not be in Colombia and Mexico. But we know that Colombia, for example, has a much higher internal inflation caused by imports, and therefore it's taking longer to get away from the impacts on cost.
Thanks, Andrea. Brett from Consumer Edge. Here.
Thanks. You guys have spent a couple of years and more today on the benefits of digital and really treating those as brands. So I would love to hear how you think about those in the competitive environment, so people trying to get in there, given all of the advantages you've spoken about, and how you retain the competitive advantages that you have today.
Maybe Nick, if you wanted to start, or Tadeu?
Yeah. I think that, the best part to be in our position today is because we are developing the technology. It's everything proprietary and, and the how tools. I think our great advantage is not only having our own platforms, but also creating every feature of these platforms with, like, a clear purpose. And therefore, after having implemented this platform in 25 countries, we know that it takes a much greater commitment from the organization to actually, digitize your business in a meaningful way, in a way that actually adds value, in all elements. And this expertise is something that we're always building on, right? In terms of personalization, in terms... The type of skill sets that we expect now from our commercial teams is very different than what we expected two to three years ago.... a goal, right?
We had to come like a very important work of re-education of all levels of the commercial organization. Because think about from our marketeers, that now they have access to this pool of information from consumers, from our own D2C apps, and now they understand much more about when the brands are being consumed, the time, you know, the occasion. From our BDRs, that used to go there with, you know, the objective to sell more every day, and now they have a completely different personalized task per customer. So we believe that we will be leading the way on how to really utilize technology, combining consumer insights, customer insights, you know, portfolio management, resource allocation.
We think that when it comes to customer and consumer, what our data has been saying is that the more we create benefits to them, the more they've been rewarding us with, with their satisfaction and their preference. So, so far has been a great win-win journey, and we want to continue this way.
Great. I'm gonna take one from the webcast, then we'll go back to the room, if that's okay. So Ezgi, one for you, actually. When you think about the trade-offs between investing in sustainability versus the financial performance of the company, how do you think about that internally in terms of the pros versus cons, in terms of sustainability and actually driving financial performance in the company?
Sounds good. Thank you for the question, online. So as I hope it was clear through our presentations with Fernando and, and I, the way we think about sustainability is really it's an enabler of our business strategy. So for us, this is not about a sustainability strategy, but about building a business strategy that is more sustainable. And I think we're quite fortunate that we work for a category that is so inherently sustainable and local and inclusive, that it really gives us that ability to be able to make those decisions, fairly quickly and very well aligned within the business in where we should be investing. As we think of financial KPIs or sustainability KPIs, of course, there will always be trade-offs.
Of course, we will always look for those that are value accretive and invest in them, and look to scale the technologies with proven results. But we also always look for ways to bring in new technologies and new innovations into the business, where maybe the business case may not be as clear just yet, but we need to be testing the technology and building the case study within the business, and we do that through our 100+ Accelerator program, for example. I don't know, Fernando, if you wanted to also comment on how we approach these initiatives within the business.
I think probably what you said that sustainability is good for business is a very fair statement. I know that if you compare to different industry, they'll give different answers, but for us, a more sustainable business is a more efficient business, and I think Ezgi gave a lot of examples of those. So whenever we are gonna decide a new project, we look at the financial angle, and we look at the sustainable angle, and then we see out of this almost like a matrix or chart, which is the one that gives both the best financial return and sustainable return. And this is an ongoing exercise because, as Ezgi said, there is always innovation, there is always new technology that come into play that's changing the equation.
It's always a very easy discussion because all of us wants to have our business being more efficient, and if sustainable is more efficient, we are all in for it.
Okay, thanks, Ezgi, Fernando. We'll come back to the room. I think Laurence had a question. Laurence from Barclays.
Hi. Thanks. Yeah, Laurence Whyatt at Barclays. On your marketing piece, a lot of the adverts you've played to us today sort of draw on the heartstrings. They're very emotive type advertising. What place is there for showing off the quality of the products you're producing, whether that's the ingredients or the brewing methods? I think historically there have been some adverts that have focused on that side of the products. Is that simply the short time we have today, and you don't have the availability to show everything to us today, or is that something in the background?
That's vital for the category and for the work we have. Like, if you remember from the reels we saw today on Corona, this is a key part of the Corona toolkit. There is one full pillar where we talk about the product. We spoke about the lime ritual a couple of times. When we spoke about Corona Cero, we showed how much the product is differentiated and how much it's been winning awards in terms of being a high quality non-alc and the best non-alc product in Europe, for example. When we spoke about Core Superiority, it was almost all about the product, and the Cass example is exactly about how to revamp packaging, liquid, brewing process, exactly to maintain its superiority versus the competition.
All that gets translated into communication as well, so that consumers can be aware of it and appreciate the key attributes and the key differentiation points of our products. This is when we apply the effective creativity model. In case we didn't show as many examples as we could because of time restrictions, rest assured this is a key element in our process, without a doubt.
Just like... Just complement that, I think that the Core Superiority framework is product packaging, but starts with product, right? And then goes into communication. And if you think about the-
... digital products. Lucas started by saying the value proposition is fast delivery, 30 minutes, cold beer, prices of off-trade. Right, so these are the core quality ingredients of the digital product. And he was very quick on the spots that he was showing, but the spots were all about that. So was the fast delivery of the motorbike. As you would open up the TaDa box, you could see the ice, the dry ice coming out to mention and to reassure people that's cold. And of course, because it's integrated with Modelorama, people know what the price they're paying for. So the quality attributes of the products, both in the physical products, but in the digital products, are a key component of this product superiority framework.
Laurence, maybe probably the agenda was not set in the best way to give you the right view. We have the Q&A before the brewery visit. So hopefully, at the brewery visit, we get the full opportunity to understand the brewing quality and all the process. We're gonna have a whole session about it.
Mitch at the back from Deutsche Bank.
Thank you. It's Mitch Collett from Deutsche Bank. Fernando, you talked about the margin erosion you've faced since 2019. At the same time, we've heard a lot about the efficiency benefits you get from BEES, which is now quite fully rolled out across your global footprint. Is it conceivable that you could get back to your previous level of profitability in the near future? Does it require input costs to normalize more? And given the benefits you've had from BEES, is it possible that potentially, with a more predictable level of input cost inflation and FX, that you could get to a higher level of profitability than you've had in the past?
Thanks, Mitch. It's a very good question. What we said, and it's worth repeating, is that the margin decline that we had is not structural. It was mostly driven by all these pressures, and in the meantime, we keep working on driving efficiency on the business. If you look at the overhead side, we had efficiency there. If you look on the BEES presentation, there are a lot of different efficiencies, both on top line as well in the cost, on the sales cost to serve. So definitely we see a lot of opportunities. At what speed and how fast? It's almost like a competition because every year we have the discipline of growing price in line of inflation.
We had the discipline to maintain price in line with inflation when cost was much higher than that, and once costs go to a more normal level, we continue to maintain this discipline. So at the end of the day, the margin answer is a combination of how much time you need to keep pressing on inflation and at what speed commodities or effects goes to a more historical normal levels. Probably, the right answer is somewhere in the middle. As you keep maintaining the pricing discipline and commodities getting more normal, then you start to recover in the margin.
Chris, did you want one? So Chris Pitcher from Redburn here in the front, and then we'll go to Trevor afterwards.
Thank you very much. A lot of what you've been talking about today, about growing the category, the category growing. If we look at the U.S., and I'm very mindful of everything that's going on in the United States, but you highlighted obviously what you've done with Michelob ULTRA. You'd highlighted the Beyond Beer. Could you dig a little bit deeper into, to how everything we've seen today, absent the Bud Light situation, could help get that category back into growth? You talked about, you know, BEES in the United States, how the technology you're doing there could re-energize the core category.
Maybe Michel, if you want to start.
Yeah. So if you look at the U.S., I think that we, we, we discussed it many times before, these different phases of the U.S. And I think that what we, we need to use as a starting point is how developed the market already is in the U.S., right? So it's a different conversation when you think about an African country, the market that we have in Mexico, for example, and the market in the U.S. But the, the market in the US was expanding volumes until 2010. You had this big disruption in 2010 with heavier liquids coming to the industry and a lot of variety, but mostly less sessionable. So between 2010 and 2020, the market was no longer growing volumes, but was growing revenues still.
And then from 2017, which connects to today, we've been seeing acceleration on dollar growth. So it's a very healthy market in terms of dollar growth. Some reignition of volume, so 2021, growing; 2022, decline is likely; 2023, we saw a little bit of everything, a quarter of growth, a quarter of decline. And when you add this Beyond Beer space, which is not 100% beer, but it plays very similar on the consumer side, then this year the market is growing volumetrically and in revenues is accelerating because there is a lot of source from wine and spirits. So if you remember the presentation when Marcel was covering... the more you go to more developed markets, the higher, the bigger the role of Beyond Beer is. Because Beyond Beer is a manifestation of a more developed market.
So I believe that the U.S. market will continue to be very resilient in volume, continue to grow in dollars, and in this beer plus Beyond Beer space, there will be acceleration as the Beyond Beer brands get more scale, more investment, and more consumer participation. So the model remains the same. The market is much more developed, so the per capita is higher, and the Beyond Beer now plays a much important role on the development of volume into the space for the industry in the U.S.
Chris, do you want to follow up something?
Sorry, could you just give a bit more color? 'Cause you, you talked about BEES globally, but how BEES works in the U.S. to give you competitive advantage with obviously the different market structure?
Sure. We always talk about BEES to, to make it easier for people to understand, like if you have three waves of implementation, and this links a little bit with the question that you had before on what makes BEES move faster than other apps, right? So what we call somehow like a wave one is where we have the route to market and the reach to the final customer. And this is the case, for example, in Mexico, is the case in Brazil, is the case in, in many of other markets. This wave of implementation is a much faster one, and simply put, because we have one ERP, because we own the distribution operations, so we digitalize, convert, train people, and scale very fast. The second wave, Nick touched upon that today, is what we call link, right?
Many of these very large retail customers, think about the Walmarts, Carrefours, they are digital for many, many years on what they call EDI, this electronic transaction and data interchange. I use a way to compare, I hope that people never get, like, upset with me on that, but I, I almost think that this, the EDI was created 20-25 years ago, is almost like a landline telephone, right? So you have the communication, but you need to dial in. It depends on this physical spot in which you are calling from and receiving the call. What we do with this, because it's modern technology, and this link follows the same idea, is your mobile phone, right? So has a different microprocessor, more intelligence, more, automation of data.
This link is the one that we are rolling out to this medium and big off-trade retailers that for us, depending on the country, 20-25% of the volume. The third wave is the wave in which we need to connect three-tier systems that we have in many different countries. Think China, Korea, the U.S., and is a more wholesaler by wholesaler rollout. Because at the end of the day, think the U.S., they have, like, in total, close to 20 different ERPs. You have three ERPs that are very dominant in the market. Every ERP for one of these wholesalers is customized to the customer. So every time that you need to integrate, you need to integrate that ERP.
In the case of China, because 10 years ago we built the infrastructure for the wholesalers, is a very similar three-tier system, but because the ERP is more common, the rollout of BEES in China is being very quick. So today, what is the number?
As of June, it was 45%.
So today, 45% of the revenues in China are already within BEES. In the U.S., is a more wholesaler by wholesaler, state by state, and we get moving. Because of the state laws in the U.S., you also have an extra layer of customization in what you can use or not. But it's evolving, it's working. The fundamental insights from BEES, they remain the same. As a matter of fact, a lot of the B2B, when we tested, we tested Brazil, Argentina, and the U.S., and was all the same. It sells more, is more affordable for us to reach the market, and customers get an extra layer of satisfaction because they are in control of the transaction. The data that we extract from that is very powerful data. So China, three-tier system moving faster.
South Korea is moving as well, and in the U.S., it's more a game of operator by operator, state by state, as you go moving through the country.
Thanks, Chris. Trevor, you had one? And then we'll come to Olivier.
Thanks, everyone. Trevor Stirling from Bernstein. Probably one for Marcel. Marcel, when you were laying out the strategy, particularly when it came to beer, you had your dimension for your four global brands based on the size of the group and the energy of the occasion, and that seemed to fit fairly neatly. But as you were discussing beyond beer, what seems to be driving Cutwater in the U.S. is very different from Brutal Fruit in South Africa, and Skol Beats Senses is different again. It seems to be much more country specific, and the role of global brands seems to be much more limited. Is that a fair observation?
Sort of. Thanks for the question. I think it's a very good debate. I wish we had a lot of time to talk about it. This is the beginning of the whole strategic foundation. I think what we see in Beyond Beer is that there is actually a good pattern in terms of how this industry evolves. So if you remember those four segments, usually it develops from left to right. First pillar being party mixes, which is all about people looking after sweet propositions for high-energy occasions. This is usually the first manifestation of Beyond Beer that we see pretty much everywhere. The second one is familiar flavors, flavorful, and refreshing.
The key insight here for Beyond Beer is that it starts by giving consumers familiar flavors, flavors they grew up with that are usually sweeter, but with alcohol and ready to drink. So this is why in this pillar you see the hard teas, the hard lemonades, so on and so forth. Then, as the category continues to improve and premiumize, we see this third pillar, which is, which we call light and refreshing, which is the same rationale of the familiar flavors with alcohol. But then consumers start to expect lower stats. And then as the capabilities evolve, together with marketing, market development, so as we acquire capabilities of having ready-to-drink cocktails for real, I mean, it's not about having a liquid that has the flavor of a Mai Tai. It's the real Mai Tai ready to drink in a can.
As this becomes available, then the industry is evolving to ready-to-drink cocktails. So we see a good pattern evolving from left to right, following those four segments pretty much everywhere. What varies is how often people access those products, because it takes time for that to develop, because people need to acquire to be more exposed to different profiles of taste. So simply put, when you compare that segmentation model with the beer segmentation model, the Beyond Beer is still pretty much focused on product characteristics. Whereas for beer, because it's a much larger, much more developed, we are bringing the human component on the energy level and the consumption occasion based on group size.
Marcel, if I can just complement, I think that it's fair to say that the development stage of each market also gives you some clues on the sources of volume from competition. So while in the U.S. you see Cutwater, which is the manifestation of this more developed cocktail, which is very present in the overall industry in different shapes and forms, right? These cocktails are less present in developing markets and even less present in emerging markets. But if you go to South Africa to get the example, the cider and wine industry is quite developed. It's a alcohol that's present in the market, and therefore, Brutal Fruit, which is the second in the development from the party mix to the familiar flavor to the refreshing, is the one that has more ability to source volume from the existing industry.
We should expect, and in this case, we do have in South Africa, as the industry continues to develop, other manifestations will come. So we have a gin and tonic ready to drink, Black Crown is the name, which we are seeding and growing in South Africa because this is the light, refreshing next manifestation in the industry. If the industry will continue to develop, at 1Point, Cutwater can make it, right? But in the U.S., because the industry already moved from the party mix to the familiar flavor to a very evolved industry in terms of cocktails, the largest size of the price where we are focusing on is Cutwater. What we had in the past, for example, familiar flavors, Lime-A-Ritas, right?
The light refreshing everybody saw seltzers happen in the U.S., and now Nütrl is a big bet into this premium seltzer, which is real vodka plus seltzer plus juice. So four spaces. The more developed the market is, the more you can cover all four spaces. The more developed the market is, the more the size of the price is in the more complex. And of course, as we seed the early stage markets, we start seeding from what is more, the initial stage of each market for the Beyond Beer.
So would it be, would it be fair to say then, the framework is global, but the manifestation is still very local? So a hard tea in the U.S. is what your local flavor is. Here in Mexico, I've seen it Vicky Chamoy or Vicky Piña will be the local implementation here in Mexico.
It's absolutely right.
Okay.
Thanks, Trevor.
In Brazil, it's caipirinha.
Then we'll go to Olivier, and then we'll take one from the webcast.
Thank you.
Olivier Nicolai, Goldman Sachs. Just one question. You mentioned earlier non-alcoholic beer, and obviously, we've seen good traction on this category in Europe. How big do you think the category could become, and do you see upside outside of Europe? Do you see a potential for this category in the U.S., for instance, where historically the focus has been much more on carbs and calories and not really on the alcohol content?
Maybe Marcel, you want to start?
... we see still a big variance in terms of, size and growth rates. So in the US, this industry is around 1%. Non-alc accounts for more or less 1% of the total industry. In countries in Europe, it's much higher than that. If you go to Spain, it's huge, right? So this is why we believe that there's a delta, that over time, the countries that are still low will keep growing. We are optimistic, with the growth, of non-alc in the next coming years. Because of the delta, and because it also connects with consumer trends. So we see the tendency of moderation and all that getting manifested in, multiple markets. So when you see size times, consumer trends, it all leads us to believe that this is going to continue to grow outside of Europe.
Thanks, Olivier.
So maybe if I can just like comment on the, on the question as well. The first part, it is global. So it's growing Brazil, it's growing the U.S., it's growing across Europe. Even in the markets that are already big, it's still growing. Germany, Belgium, and most recently, we've been seeing a lot of growth in the Asian countries. Two manifestations: one that is zero alcohol, and one that is zero sugar, which is very interesting as well. So it continues to grow. If you look to the benchmarks, right? So Marcel was mentioning that there is this 1% in the U.S., that is 4% in Belgium, that is 12% in Spain. So one can say that if everybody else would follow Spain, it's 10%.
But one very interesting thing I was mentioning here, and I'm not sure if Brian is still in the room, but Brian was presenting the U.K. case. And I was the other day in France, and we have Corona Zero in France as well. And I was just walking through the city, going from one meeting to the other meeting; it was the Deutsche Bank conference. And I'm not sure how much of you noticed that, but when I walk in a street, I don't look forward. I always look to the side 'cause I'm looking at the tables, right? If I'm in the supermarket, there is only one aisle that I walk. All the rest, someone else is shopping for me. So it was incredible the amount of people drinking during lunch, Corona Zero. And I don't think that these people usually drink beer at lunch.
I think that they drink other things. And a lot of the data that we see in Europe, especially coming up, but also in Canada, there is some very interesting data of substitution for other non-alcoholic beverages in some occasions that are non-alcoholic occasions, such as lunch. Brian was showing the number two occasion in the U.K. is post-workout. Because it's refreshing, it's very low calorie. The Corona Zero, if you put the lime, then is a incredible experience, and it replenishes some carbohydrates, some minerals. So much so that in Germany, for example, people talk a lot about the isotonic characteristics of the non-alcohol beer, right? It's the sponsor of the national soccer team.
So I think that there is this 10% threshold within the beer category, but there is a very interesting adjacent opportunity for occasions that are non-traditional alcoholic occasions, and we've been seeing some very interesting substitution in these occasions. The most relevant to me that I've been seeing is the one that is leading the non-alcohol in the U.S., is post-workout, especially if it is outdoor workout.
Thanks, Silvian. One for you, Fernando, from the webcast here. So the question is, given the reinvestment in the CapEx priorities that you went through earlier, how should we think about the pace of deleveraging towards the three times level and our willingness to use cash to accelerate the deleveraging part of the business going forward?
I think the framework for dynamic capital allocation is very clear, and is about the goal is not to deleverage, the goal is not to do a payout. The goal, the goal is to maximize value. What is non-negotiable, and has been non-negotiable throughout all the years, is the investment behind our business. We show the amount of both CapEx and sales and market that we invest, even in ups and downs, COVIDs, and all that, we keep investing because it's a very good business. Then with the remaining of the cash available, then you need to dynamically allocate between the priorities. And of course, when you are—when we finish 2008 at 4.8 times net debt to EBITDA, then of course, all the resources go only to deleveraging because that makes more sense.
As you continue to make progress, we have a very good business, generates a lot of cash. As you start gravitating towards three, you start having more flexibility. So the best example is the dividend increase. It's from a smaller base, but it's a 50% dividend increase, so already show that we have more flexibility. I continue to see, going forward, we should have some debt pay down. I feel that's one of the, probably the lessons learned. Until 2019, we're trying to grow by growing a bit and not necessarily reducing debt. Since 2020, it's there must be a debt pay down component, so we should be doing some of that, but we have more flexibility to do other things. And I'm confident on the progress we are making.
I think our capital structure allows a lot of flexibility, given the way the debt maturity profile was structured. We, we are not giving any time frame, but we're definitely moving towards three time, and definitely have more flexibility than we had, let's say, a year ago.
... Okay, thanks, Fernando. We'll come back to the room. Simon Hales in the back there.
Yeah, thanks. It's Simon Hales from Citi. I had a question about your midterm guidance, if I can. You've highlighted in one of the presentations how you think that, I think, the global beer value category is gonna grow at about 6% over the medium term. Obviously, in the presentation today, you've highlighted all the tools you have in your business that hopefully will allow you to continue to grow ahead of the category. And then I think, Fernando, in the Q&A, you've just sort of said that you expect there's no reason over time why your margins won't recover towards where they were pre- the COGS inflation we've seen.
If I put all those building blocks together, it seems to me that you're gonna be really growing at the very upper end of your 4-8 or even above it over the next sort of few years. What am I missing in that analysis?
I need a microphone.
Every time that we talk about the outlook, the reason why we decided to provide a medium-term outlook is because we had a business model that was a business model that was much more inorganic. And the moment that we moved that to a business model that is organic, resource allocation, the investments that we make to the business are very important. You can see the magnitude of the investments that we made. And for us, the whole idea of giving the medium-term outlook is to give confidence that despite moving to a more organic business model and making investments into organic growth of the business, we'd be able to deliver a very robust financial performance. That was the main reason for that. Then, of course, every year is going to be different. Every year, every quarter is gonna be different.
If you see the different things that we have, and we have, like, a conflict, we had, like a shutdown in some of our regions. We had a lot of plus and minus, and we continue to maintain the outlook. It's much more to give a view and a confidence that we will be able to grow organically than to make sure that this year is gonna be this, that year is gonna be that, because every year is going to be different.
We have maybe time for one or two more. Is there any other hands in the room? Yeah, Vivien from TD.
Hi. Thank you. Vivien Azer, TD Cowen. I was hoping to ask about your philosophy about marketing investment as it relates to your aspiration to continue to grow the beer category, and how you think about share of voice across total beverage alcohol. Because as I think about some of the spirits companies that you're competing against, their A&P spend as a percentage of sales is sometimes higher than yours. So how much of a consideration is that? Thank you.
Marcel or Michel, do you want to start?
No, I can maybe kick us off here, and then Marcel, Tadeu, feel free to complement. But basically, we believe that part of our growth and a lot of what we've been building is based on having strong brands. And two years ago, we start calling these leading brands the Mega Brands, right? Because we, we believe on a more efficient growth coming from brands that have great consumer power, therefore, they command and continue to command premium price. And the benefits of scale that we get of these brands in terms of production, advertisement, they will continue to fill this superior margin structure that we have. And while we use a lot of benchmarks, and my team is gonna have a lot of fun here because they are tired of me talking about this.
Tadeu today was hugging me and saying to me, "Only this week is the fiftieth time that you give me the same feedback," right? While I believe a lot on ratios and comparing benchmark across companies, none of us should ever manage the business based on ratios, right? And let me use, for example, sales and marketing as an example. If we use sales and marketing ratio as a ratio of net revenue only, for a market where we do direct distribution, the net revenue is much higher, and there is a lot of cost of distribution underneath the net revenue. If you go to a market where the distribution is indirect through wholesalers, so then you pay on the net revenue all the distribution cost, and you have the net net revenue. Therefore, having five in one and 10 in the other means absolutely the same thing.
So I like a lot to check the ratio versus net revenue as a comparable. I like even more versus the contribution margin, because then you already offset all these differences. But the most important thing is, what is the money that you need for that brand to be well activated and delivering on that job to be done, right? And some brands, because they are already bigger and they have more salience, and they are more consolidated, they need a good amount of money, but a smaller ratio versus others. Some brands, because you are building them, you're gonna have a very high ratio as you build, and you are betting on the future scale. And I can use the same example, just get two of our markets, China. Majority of our business is in premium....
So the ratios that we have in China versus a hard liquor company are very similar. But if you go to Colombia, where majority of our business is in core and we have very large scale, then our ratios are very different from premium spirits, but they're gonna be closer to hard liquor in developing countries. So I love the ratios. I don't attach myself to them. I think more about what we need to do to grow the brand, and then the ratio is a consequence of that. And I think that one thing that was, and is being very transformational for us, and I hope that this is coming across to you, is the more we digitize our business, the better the insights get, the better the resource allocation become, the more efficient the growth is.
I will not be surprised if we continue to grow Brand Power, continue to scale our Mega Brands, and continue to have a better ratio than other categories, because our level of sophistication in terms of digitalization and insights grows with time, right? But we will continue to focus on these core brands that we want.
Send me the ball. Okay, so I think on top of that, I would just put some more detail on it. I think that the big aha that we hope you guys do is that we are building our own media platforms, right? So in the past, when we start digitizing, you know, our media interactions with consumers, we built at some point draftLine to create our own content, so that already made this much more efficient. Now, with Zé and Ta-Da, we can reach the consumers directly without an investment that actually can be seen necessarily externally. So, for example, all the campaigns that you guys saw on Corona that were extremely effective, very high ROI, were targeted to consumers that had high likelihood of being interested in the brand. So we didn't send, you know, the Corona activations to all consumers of Zé.
The same way that we don't send all the Brahma, you know, soccer activations for all Zé consumers. So we identify the passion points, we identify the platforms, you know, the consumer behavior, and then we do all that, and basically the cost is minimal, right? And nobody can see that because the platform belongs to us. So on top of all the analytics, the data science, and greater efficiency in allocating the resource, is the fact that we have a direct channel today with consumer and customer. And this allows us to increase a lot our ability to invest behind our brands and occasions without being that visible to the outside world.
Even when we don't use our own channels as a media, the fact that we have all that first-party data coming from BEES and DTC, I still believe that people still underestimate the difference that it makes for us to know who buys our products, when, why, and how, so that we can drive personalization at scale in our content. And this is why we have draftLine present in almost 15 markets already, doing it in-house. So the whole machine operates in a totally different way versus used to be before.
Great. That was.
Shaun, before you close, just because, I think that Adeil had a great point, and I want to emphasize what he was saying, maybe with an example. I think that everybody here, or most of us, use Amazon, right? To me, the example, or real example in your world of, of what Adeil was saying is, when you think about Amazon, I don't even know the number, but I, I would assume that they have, like, 300,000 SKUs or even 1 million SKUs. But magically, they always show you that white sneakers that you want to buy, right? Or that blue shirt that you know that you need every season because it's the one that goes well with all the jackets that you have.
So at the end of the day, the propensity models and the algorithms, they help us, the more this base of data grows, for us to penetrate exactly that moment, that consumer, where Corona has more chances to win, or that Brahma football activation that gets delivered to reach the all-time high Wednesday orders. So the models, they learn with data, and the propensity helps in efficiency, because at the end of the day, then you have one discount for a consumer that has a likelihood that is very high to buy your product that day. So it's very, very precise and, at the end of the day, the biggest bet behind this whole digitalization, and it's something that is still growing because there is much more that we need to do in this area, but the examples and the learning so far are very good.
So-
Great.
Getting back to you.
Yeah, no worries. So that was a super long answer to your question, Vivien. So we're well, well past the 45-minute mark. So I think for today, we'll, we'll end it here. We have another 45 minutes for Q&A tomorrow. I know we didn't get to everyone on the webcast or in the room, but we'll make sure to prioritize you tomorrow. So thanks to everyone for their participation. We're gonna take another 30-minute break here, just allow everyone to stretch their legs, grab a coffee. So let's aim to be seated back here at 3:30 P.M. That's again. Great. Thanks to you guys. Appreciate it.
Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! All right. All right. Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!
Take me to the place made of rock and stone soaking in sunlight. Echoes of the old and the lesser known mountains come alive. Overlooking deserts both wild and tame, contrast go inside. Feathers flutter, elevate, and align, rising to the sky. Born of fire, seed of life, take me on your trip among the stars! Take me to the land that can tease my soul, fly me far and wide. World may shrink down, oh, how it feels so small in the crimson sky. Limestone love, slow down time. Take me on your trip among the stars. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the rolling stone. It's the...
[Foreign language]... Me ha dado todo. Nosotros, en cambio, le devolvemos basura.
This huge amount of plastic affected both marine wildlife and fishing communities.
Corona has long been associated with beach life and its preservation. This time, we decided to take our commitment deep into the ocean.
[Foreign language]Corona convoca a su campeonato de pesca de plástico!
...
[Foreign language]Limpe o oceano e ganhe dinheiro.
We launched the first plastic fishing tournament, a global scale initiative where fishermen were rewarded for fishing plastic waste from the sea. The more they caught, the more money they made.
[Foreign language]Y ahora sí, vámonos. Ha! Hey.
What began in Mexico scaled all over the world. We connected thousands of fishermen with recycling companies, creating a new circular economy and a formal commercial practice all around the world. In some markets, fishermen can double or even quadruple their income because the price of plastic is higher than the price of fish. We're also repurposing the plastic from the sea in different ways. In partnership with an NGO, we are producing plastic bricks to build homes in coastal areas. This global initiative that started with Corona Mexico, was amplified and adopted by the governments in the Pacific Alliance, who committed to continue with it for years to come.
Please welcome back, Shaun Fullalove.
I don't think I've ever heard my last name being said so many times in one day, so it's interesting to hear. Welcome back from the break. We have our last presentation of the day, and we're gonna switch gears now from the global view to our Middle Americas Zone. Let's get it started with the Middle Americas Zone.
Welcome to Middle Americas, a passionate land, a region that lives at the rhythm of uniqueness, a region where the history is mixed with the future, and the joyfulness is combined with the ambition to progress. A land of contrasts, a land of never-ending stories, a land of power, of emotions, of flavors, of an unimaginable vitality, and a land of ends. Nature's wonders and active cosmopolitan cities, ancient heritage and innovation, happy and relentless people. A land of authenticity and openness, of dreamers and future builders. This land is full of life, culture, and a common spirit that unites us all. Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, República Dominicana, Panamá, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. A region without borders, a region that is increasingly attractive and in which more and more opportunities are created.
A region in which our company, for more than a century, has been part of its growth and transformation, with brands that feel and live its culture while helping the common progress. Our company has become part of Middle Americas's traditions, history, people, and will be part of the promising future that we will create together. We are Middle Americas, creating a future with more cheers.
Please welcome, Carlos Lisboa.
Hello, everyone. Welcome again to our Capital Markets Day. I'm Carlos Lisboa, CEO for Middle Americas, and after 30 years in our company, it's a personal privilege and an important career milestone to host such an important meeting for our company. Briefly about my professional journey at ABI. I first joined our company back in 1993 in Brazil. Throughout the next 17 years, I held several commercial positions, mainly marketing, including Marketing VP for Ambev. In 2010, I went on several international assignments, such as BU President for Andina region, BU President for Canada, Global Marketing VP for our global brands based in New York, CEO for Latin America South, based in Argentina, and for the last five years, I've been CEO of Middle Americas, based here in Mexico.
I lead a very senior, highly capable management team with a rich mix of vast experiences with people coming from ABI, Ambev, SABMiller, from different regions of the world, bringing a powerful diversity of backgrounds and capabilities to our zone. Together, we officially welcome you again to MAS, Middle Americas Zone. Internally, we refer to ourselves as the most amazing zone. Why do we call it most amazing? Three key reasons: First, we are a big developing region, transitioning towards a more developed standard of living. Secondly, after five years of compounded growth, we have reached approximately $6.6 billion of EBITDA, making us the largest contributor to ABI overall business. Finally, the opportunity to combine the two previous points with a proven growth strategy based on our company's replicable models, create an amazing future growth potential.
So let me elaborate with more details, each of these points. First, we are a developing region. We operate directly in 12 countries, serving a total of 30 markets, reaching a combined population of more over 300 million people, right? A population with a very interesting profile for any CPG. Why? Because it is a growing, productive workforce becoming wealthier, resulting in a consistent increase of household expenditure around 2x the GDP growth. This is the consequence of a very stable and positive economic context throughout the years across all key markets. We are also a region, we saw in the video, that shares strong connections as we speak the same language, as we share similar values, and as we have a similar way of living.
In other words, we share more similarities rather than differences, and that's why we operate with a mentality of a true zone without borders, right? One big region operating in a full collaboration mode to make this key developing markets a clear growth opportunity for ABI. Talking about ABI, let me give you some context of the relevance of our zone to our overall company. Over the past five years, we have successfully integrated the SABMiller business in the region. We invested ahead, ahead of the curve for growth. We built teams, we built brands, and we built capabilities that are truly best-in-class, resulting in a zone that is currently the second largest contributor to global ABI volume and revenue.
We deliver a volume performance of three- at 3.5 compounded growth rate, the result of bringing more consumers to our category, drinking beer on more occasions, and a beer volume growth that was ahead of total beer industry and total alcohol industry, generating gains in both market share of beer and overall share of total alcohol. This volume growth was a key component to deliver a healthy compounded revenue growth rate at 9.3%, paving the way over the last five years to make our zone the number one zone in terms of total EBITDA contribution for ABI, with a compounded EBITDA growth rate of approximately nine percent. Our scale was a key enabler to deliver our historical performance. Our zone footprint is composed of 30 brewers, 12 verticals, 46,000 employees, 1.2 million customers, and more than 50 million transactions annually.
Moreover, nowadays, our zone has three out of the top six markets for ABI globally in terms of EBITDA contribution. And in nine of the 12 markets in the zone, we have a strong beer share leadership position. We are also recognized as one of the Top three most admired CPG companies. We are the proud stewards of six of the top 50 most valuable brands among all categories in Latin America. And last but not least, we are also the region where the digital transformation for route to consumer has advanced consistently and rapidly across all key markets. Finally, our future potential growth opportunity. After all we have achieved, we still have a huge untapped opportunity.
When we compare our industry consumption level with more developed markets, we immediately realize there is still a clear, positive trend ahead of us as our category matures and becomes more appealing to new consumers drinking, choosing beer in more appropriate alcohol occasions. And this is why we call this zone the most amazing zone, because of our developing markets' demographics and economic growth potential, our iconic portfolio for brands, and unparalleled market position. Our momentum as a zone, our growth opportunity, and last but not least, because of our powerful and proven strategy based on replicable models deployed simultaneously across all key markets. All of that to continue progressing, perpetuating momentum, leverage in all three global strategic pillars: lead and grow the category, digitize and monetize our ecosystem, and optimize our business.
You heard earlier from Marcel, Nick, Lucas, Fernando, on each of these, but let me quickly go through the manifestation for our global growth strategy in the context of Middle Americas. First, lead and grow the category. This is when we must be true category developers, capable of building a portfolio of brands that consumers love today and will love tomorrow. A portfolio that has superior core brands, always the cornerstone for everything we do, and particularly relevant within our developing markets. A portfolio that offers everything our beer category can be, with the development of all category segments. A portfolio capable of driving category volume growth. A portfolio positioned ahead of its time, prepared for more evolving consumer needs and occasions. In essence, we must be category developers with the mindset that we are the industry. Second, digitize and monetize our ecosystem.
In other words, we are reimagining what a beer company can be and the value we can generate from our business. Our philosophy of delivering and transforming from the core is a powerful formula to boost core efficiency through transformation, while exploring and developing new sources of growth. Today, we can say that MAAS has a true digital route to market, with more than 90% of our revenues coming from BEES and other digital channels. Our B2B ecosystem is developing a true partnership with our customers, totally based on an outside-in mentality, creating a powerful competitive advantage for us. Not a coincidence that today our customers, they feel more empowered, they feel better prepared and better served to drive their business forward. And on the D2C side, also reality today with the Ta-Da! brand that Lucas introduced earlier, right?
Already present in all our key markets, offering a completely different shopper experience, right? And providing us the opportunity to interact directly and learn from more than 600,000 consumers. Finally, the game of ends. The power of combining our growth formula with our deep ownership culture, an ongoing discipline of optimizing our business. Our everyday discipline in cost management, creating the opportunity to allocate the right investments behind our brands and growth opportunities, and together delivering a consistent financial performance. However, I haven't mentioned yet a fundamental component in this growth formula: our people. Talented people that constantly search for a better version of ourselves as leaders and also as an organization. People that are passionate about delivering solid results today while simultaneously transforming our company. People that are focused on creating our future.
With this, it is a good moment to hand it over to Angelica, our VP of Strategy and Insights, who will provide you more information about how we are implementing the first pillar of our global strategy here in MAAS. Thank you very much. With you, Angie.
Thank you, Lisboa. Hello, everyone. Before walking you through our first pillar, I want to briefly introduce myself. I have 20 years of experience, the last 15 in our company. I started in Colombia, in SABMiller, and then I expanded horizons across Latin America. I had the opportunity to hold different commercial positions on and also in marketing, but I want to focus on my key competitive advantage, and it is that, a very important one for the pillar I will cover today. And it is that I have a broad experience in strategy planning, strategic planning, and insights roles. Now, coming back to our first strategic pillar, lead and grow the category, the name of the game, as you have seen during the morning, is to focus on beer category development for organic growth. As Lisboa mentioned, here in Middle Americas, we have a very broad opportunity.
When we compare ourselves with more developed markets, we see a very broad opportunity for us to continue developing the category, to continue expanding our consumer base, and continue expanding our location base.... Our on-track record, the good news is our on-track record is the, is the opportunity to grow both consumer and participation occasions. We have shown during the past years that we have this path in both KPIs, and this gives us the confidence to continue expanding our category across our key markets. In MAS, during the last five years, we were able to reignite volume growth ahead of pre-pandemic levels. Now, the question is: How have we done that? In order to become true category developers, we have concentrated efforts one step deeper on the consumption expansion levers using POS model that Marcel also explained earlier today.
Enable the participation of more consumers in the category, creating more beer consumption occasions, and growing the total amount of servings, being the two first drivers, participation and occasions, the most relevant for us to continue expanding and continue developing a sustainable category moving forward. Within this context, we know that our portfolio development is a critical component to enable sustainable volume growth. So the five expansion levers that Marcel also outlined earlier during the morning are the backbone of our strategy here in MAS: category participation, core superiority, occasions development, premiumization, and beyond beer. The five pillars have had a very relevant role for Middle Americas's growth. Tomorrow, you will see in Mexico's presentation the strength of our core superior brands on one hand, and on the other hand, how we have expanding the premium and the beyond beer segment successfully.
All the examples that you will see in Mexico presentation and today are representations of what you consistently can find across our main markets in the zone. For now, let me give you more flavor about three of these pillars in which we have delivered high incremental volume growth across Middle Americas. Let's go with the first one, category participation. Across MAS, we have made our portfolio more accessible for all consumers. In our markets, we used to have few SKUs and few brands, almost mono SKU brands, a long time ago, and with limited solutions and price points to offer to our consumers. This impacted our ability to reduce the minutes a person needs to work to buy a beer. We have focused now on expanding our brand and pack assortment successfully, increasing both participation and occasions during the last few years.
Let's take a look at the Colombian case.
In 2017, 80% of our volume was concentrated in two core brands spanning across three SKUs and catering to just 3Price points. So the opportunity to diversify occasions, bringing new consumers to the beer category and offer more accessible price points, was there to be developed. Our challenge was clear: to lead the industry by expanding and developing the beer category. From a limited portfolio, we identified clear opportunities to expand and ensure inclusiveness, and we went for them. Sharing sizes to offer more for less to our consumers in their core social occasions. Entry price points below our core to stimulate low-income and younger drinking age consumers' participation. Cans assortment expansion to meet the convenience need for growing occasions at home. Small packs to accelerate the trade-up ladder to our premium brands.
Sharing sizes with our local premium to create new rituals and meals and social occasions with beer. We complemented our portfolio with an extension of our pricing ladder towards both ends, encompassing key price points from COP 1,800-COP 5,000. This enabled us to reduce the working minutes to buy a beer, develop new consumption occasions, overall expanding our customer base. All of the above led us to an accelerated volume growth, making the beer category more relevant and attractive for our consumers, being a key driver of Colombian positive momentum.
The second deep dive I want to present today is new occasions development, which has also been relevant for our growth in the last few years. Meals is one of the largest beverage occasions, and beer is clearly underdeveloped in our region. We have created a full portfolio approach. Our core brands are embracing daily local food. Our local premium brands are elevating meals by using line extension, and our global premium brand, Stella Artois, is developing the relevance of beer in more sophisticated meals. A good example of how we are building this platform is Cusqueña, our local premium brand in Peru. Let's take a look.
In Peru, we have many beers, but when we talk about premium beers, there's only one that rises above all others: Cusqueña, the local premium beer born in Cusco. With four unique varieties, more than 100 years of beer mastery, second one in brand love. For years, Cusqueña has been representing Peruvian origins. I mean, we have Machu Picchu imprinted on our label through music, culture, arts, and of course, food. Because when we talk about food, we Peruvians have the best gastronomy in the world. Exotic ingredients, the best female chef on the planet, winners of the 2022 world's leading culinary destination, and the number one restaurant on the 50 best.
That's why Cusqueña has developed a solid bond with Peruvian gastronomy, creating strong initiatives like Maestros de Sabor, cooking show for the web that made a successful leap to television and today has become an iconic gastronomic festival. Or like the Gastronomic Terraces program, in which we demonstrate our commitment to our restaurant partners, expanding their venue capacities in times they needed us the most. And even our cans have the most representative dishes on them, illustrated by great Peruvian artists. Through bold and consistent platforms, today, the brand has achieved, in the last three years, number one beer brand in participation within meals occasions, 22% uplift in association with the attribute, "Goes well with food," highest growing brand in Peru. Cusqueña, the Peruvian premium beer.
Finally, the third pillar I want to cover today is premiumization. The premiumization opportunity across our zone is huge, given its middle growing class population and the relatively low penetration of premium beer brands. In mass, we are building a portfolio ladder that allow our consumers to easily trade up when we're consuming beer. The first step of this ladder is our local premium brands, and the next step of the ladder is our global brands. With the local brands, we are building on their relevance and their high value perception. With our global premium brands, we are bringing value propositions ahead of our current stage of development. Together, our premium brands have become the highest growing segment of our portfolio, and within this segment, Corona is clearly the leading brand that we have in our markets.
It is a brand that has a power ahead of its current market share. So we still have a big opportunity to convert power into growth and unlocking its full potential. That is why we're executing a bold moves across the region to make this brand more available and accessible to our consumers. First, we are localizing its production in some key markets to depend less on imports and, of course, gain flexibility. Second, this flexibility is allowing us to develop a broader pack assortment, allowing us to introduce entry pack sizes, both in bottles and in cans. And finally, our markets in Middle America are predominantly returnable glass bottle markets. So the question was: Why can't Corona participate with our largest and most profitable pack segment? So local production also unlocks this opportunity and allow us to really scale the brand.
This initiative must be implemented in the right way to protect our strong image that we have with Corona. Let me share with you an example of how we are executing Corona returnable bottle in our markets. Let's see. Tomorrow, you will see additional detail on how we are implementing our five category expansion levers in Mexico. I want to close this section with some key takeaways. The first one: We have a significant opportunity for growing beer consumption. The second, especially by reaching more consumers and developing more consumption occasions. The third one: We have a proven replicable model leveraging from our global strategy. And finally, our own performance is our strongest reason to believe that we can do it.
With that, thank you for your time, and now I turn over to my colleague, Pedro Garavito, our VP of Technology and Transformation, who will share the progress and ambition that we have in our second strategic pillar, digitize and monetize our ecosystem.
Good afternoon. I'm Pedro Garavito. I joined the company 16 years ago in Colombia. I held different finance positions between the U.S. and Colombia with SAP, and for the past seven years, I've been lucky to be part of ABI, its culture, and entrepreneurial essence. I have a mixed background between finance, technology, and entrepreneurial mindset myself, which really allows me to be grateful and enjoy the deep transformation that we are undergoing. It is a pleasure to walk you through our progress in our second pillar, digitize and monetize our ecosystem. So let's start with BEES and with how it has transformed our business. The BEES platform was developed by our global team and launched for the first time in one of the countries of our zone, the Dominican Republic. As Nick shared with you earlier, BEES is much more than an order-taking app.
It's a platform, a global, robust product. In about two years, we were able to scale the BEES platform to the entire zone, driving the change management from the top to the bottom of the organization. Today, we've digitized more than 90% of the zone's annual net revenue, with more than 1.2 million monthly active users benefiting from it. Why? Because BEES is solving real problems for the traditional trade. BEES is giving store owners back their time, allowing them to order when it's convenient for them, 24/7, empowering them with the view of the entire portfolio, promotions, and innovations, giving them access to credit, more than doubling the credit reach each year since 2020... and even allowing store owners to select their delivery dates. Our NPS trend reflects this, growing 34 points since 2019.
Let's take a look at what they have to say.
[Foreign language]Al principio, todo era muy difícil porque me tocaba que ir hasta la bodega Camellón, y cuando ya me despachaban para localizar una moto, muy duro para llegar hasta acá.
[Foreign language]BEES me cambió mi vida.
[Foreign language]BEES me cambió la vida!
[Foreign language]Puedo anticipar mis pedidos, puedo programarme, puedo proyectar a un pedido.
[Foreign language]Me ahorra tiempo. Entro, pido y ya está.
[Foreign language]Yo soy la que manejo el tiempo en que quiera recibir mis productos de BEES.
[Foreign language]Podemos encontrar las promociones de liga, la promoción de la semana.
[Foreign language]Y así van ganando puntos.
[Foreign language]Hacer pedidos, como es de la cerveza, sino que también otros productos de primera necesidad.
But how is this transforming our business? With BEES, we have the data required to better understand our customers and to personalize our offer at scale, which is only possible because BEES enables personalized tracking, communication, and execution. We have more than 300 variables, attributes per customer. They combine with our commercial strategy, result in personalized portfolio and promotion offerings per customer. This means that each customer receives a unique offer, pretty much as you do when you use Netflix. By personalizing at scale, we're able to direct investment to the highest return opportunities, and we're just starting with this journey. We continue developing products that are making our ecosystem stronger, benefiting our customers, our partners, and the communities where we operate. Products that bring traffic to the stores, products that grow their business.
We already enabled the two marketplace models in the zone, the 1P and 3P. 1P model, where we buy, sell, and distribute products from other CPGs like Kraft Heinz. 3P model, which we offer the BEES platform as a service for other CPGs, as you saw in the example that Nick presented today about Gloria. More recently, we enabled the sale of products through the platform, of digital products through the platform, and you will see those in real life during the market visit tomorrow. Today, more than 65% of our BEES customers buy marketplace products across the zone, and in some countries, marketplace sales already represent more than 10% of the total net revenue. We are also really encouraged about the different opportunities that this direct communication with our customer brings.
We have several upskilling programs targeting business acumen within the platform under a single umbrella, our Emprendedores program, which is designed to help them grow their business, understanding that if they grow, we grow. Through this process, we also learn that the traditional channel does not want to be traditional anymore, and we are here to help them in the journey. Three main aspects of BEES. First, it's replicable, solving real customer pain points. Second, it enables personalization through analytics. And third, it brings new growth avenues for our customers and for us. Now, shifting gears to our direct-to-consumer platform, let's take a look at what we're doing with Ta-Da!, a strong digital mega brand, another strong global platform, as you saw today with Lucas. A success story from Brazil that we adopted in Middle Americas in 2022.
A platform designed to solve consumer problems in its mission: for me, for now. Ta-Da! is already present in all the main markets of the zone, with a replicable model that leverages our existing assets. We want to provide the best beer experience online, and we are obsessed about delivering our value proposition: cold, fast, at a fair price, and with the right assortment. Let's take a look at a video in the next slide. ... In the first half of 2023, we already delivered 2.8 million orders, serving 600,000 consumers. This is already four times as much as what we did in the first half of 2021 - of 2022, sorry.
We have an ambitious plan for TaDa in the coming years, aiming at generating all the possible insights from our consumers while growing the platform in a sustainable way, tapping into new consumer missions and occasions, and bringing the portfolio of the future to life. With that, it's a pleasure for me to welcome Miguel González, our VP of Finance, to walk us through our third pillar, Optimize Our Business.
Thank you, Pedro. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Miguel González, VP Finance Services, and Operations for Middle Americas. I joined ABI a little over eight years ago here in Mexico, and I've had the good fortune of participating in our Grupo Modelo and SABMiller integrations. For the past four years, I led the FP&A department for MAS. It is my pleasure to talk to you today about how we in MAS are bringing to life the third pillar of our strategy: optimize our business. Financial discipline is part of our culture. It is embedded in all of our activities. As Fernando mentioned earlier, a key element in optimizing our business is efficient resource allocation. We always seek common sense cost efficiencies to free up resources to invest behind our growth. Fernando also showed how tightly we've managed overheads to help mitigate the pressures of the recent inflationary environment.
Middle Americas is no exception. Over the last five years, we have consistently delivered overhead efficiencies, increasing our overhead productivity per hectoliter by approximately 20%. To deliver these efficiencies, we transformed our business, finding new ways of operating in a rapidly evolving digital world, capturing those productivity gains. You see, our quest to transform our business goes beyond BEES, Vendo, and TaDa. It extends all the way to our daily activities and our back-office operations. Back in 2013, we created our Shared Services Center in Aguascalientes, Mexico, to drive our productivity program. Initially, the center was focused on centralizing back-office finance operations, driving efficiencies through the centralization and automation of routine tasks. Starting in 2019, we embarked on a transformation agenda to expand the way of working of Aguascalientes to more areas of our business, and we called it the Center for Transformational Services.
Since then, we have expanded the catalog of services to areas such as people and procurement services, and we haven't stopped there. Our transformation momentum and our capabilities in technology, data, and analytics now have opened up new opportunities within logistics and sales as well. Let me start by sharing with you what we've done in logistics, because we have completely transformed the way in which we manage our deliveries. We created a centralized, standardized, technology-enabled logistics control tower to optimize our inventory picking, our routing, and our delivery tracking. We now plan and monitor over 60% of our deliveries across our top four markets from a state-of-the-art facility that continues to leverage data and algorithms to further improve service level and cost efficiency. Now, moving on to how we've transformed our sales function.
Building on the success of our logistics control tower and the digitization of our customer-facing activities through BEES, we created our customer hub, a centralized customer connection center. From Aguascalientes, we now provide sales calls, customer service, fridge maintenance coordination, and collection for over 30,000 customers on a daily basis. Using our cross-functional approach and leveraging data and algorithms, we revolutionized how we interact with our customers, improving customer satisfaction and driving sales growth. Let me give you a real-life example of how we achieve this. Today, we register and transact with a new customer in under 4 hours, a process that used to take us between one and two weeks.
The results of these efforts are the following: 12 percentage points increase in Net Promoter Score in less than one year, improved overhead productivity per hectoliter of 20%, and $1.4 billion in nominal EBITDA growth over the last five years. This is the power of our approach to financial discipline, an approach that's fully embedded across all of the areas in our company and an approach that leverages our digital transformation. Now, I would like to invite Carlos Lisboa back to share some closing thoughts on the zone. Thank you.
... Thank you, Miguel, Pedro, Angelica. I think I'm the last person between you and the opportunity to enjoy an amazing beer together at our first Mexican brewery, the birthplace of Corona. So I'll keep this closing very, very brief. If you're going to take away something about this overview of Middle America Zone, I hope it is the following. First, we are a one big developing region. Second, we have a solid track record of growth and financial discipline. Third, we are proven examples of how successful and replicable our global growth strategy is. Fourth, we have an amazing volume growth opportunity. We have the scale, we have the brands, we have the team. We are MAS. We are Middle Americas Zone, internally known as the most amazing zone. Thank you very much. See you guys soon.
Please welcome back, Shaun Fullalove.
Okay. So Lisboa was the second last person between you guys and a beer. I'm the last, so we'll keep this, this brief. Thanks, Lisboa and team, for the presentation. It's fantastic. That wraps us up for day one, and we will say goodbye until tomorrow to the webcast audience. Thanks very much for joining us. Before we head off, just a quick note on the logistics for this evening. Going back to your overly complex name badges that we gave you, you should have each have a brewery number in the middle and a departure time for this evening. This corresponds to your group, and the time to meet in the lobby to head to the Corona brewery for our dinner and brand immersion event this evening.
Maybe plan to be there 5 minutes advance of what's on your badge, just so we can make sure the logistics run on time. So depending on which group you're in, you probably have anywhere from 1 hour 15- 1.5 hour break from now until when we leave. So I would invite you to head to the hotel gym, check out the local attractions guide that we shared, or perhaps catch up on all of the emails that you guys have been ignoring during the day. These are the vans which are gonna be leaving from the lobby later today. So find your group. This is gonna be your group leader, who's gonna go with you towards the brewery and also lead you through the brand immersion experience. One last thing.
If you guys have an interest in doing the 6:00 A.M. sunrise spinning class with us tomorrow morning, and you haven't yet signed up, but have an interest, then please reach out to Masha, Cyrus, and we'll have you registered. That is it for today. Thanks very much for the participation, the questions. Appreciate it. We'll see you guys in about an hour and a half at the brewery.