Good afternoon, and welcome to Diageo. I'm Sonya Ghobrial, Head of Investor Relations, and I'm delighted to be here with you today. Thank you, everyone, for joining us in person, and obviously, we're delighted that we have a number of you online as well. I'm joined today by the Diageo Executive team and senior leaders, and we're looking forward through the course of the afternoon to take you through our strategy update. Firstly, I'd like to remind everyone online, and those who are not in the hall today, that the discussions today may contain certain forward-looking statements, which may refer to estimates, plans, or expectations. Please refer to today's release for more details, including factors that could lead actual results to materially differ from those forward-looking statements. With that, I'd like to hand over to our CEO, to Sir Dave Lewis .
Very good. Thank you, Sonya. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you very much for being here. On behalf of the Diageo Executive, I'd like to extend a very warm welcome. We're delighted you're here, but it's our responsibility, first and foremost, to make sure you're safe this afternoon. This is not a building that you know. There are no alarms. There are no anything planned. If you hear a signal, it means that something is happening, and you will need to evacuate the building. In every room you're going to be in, as we move you around the place, there will be someone there with a hi-vis if this were to happen. Please follow them out of the building. You know not to use the lifts. There are escape stairs on either end of the building. We'll escort you out of the building if there were to be.
It's very important to while you're with us, we make sure that you're always safe. Okay? Cool. This team you know to a large extent. Two new people that I want to call out. Natalie Bickford. Natalie, where are you? Where has she gone? There you go. Natalie joined us from Sanofi as Chief People Officer recently. This gentleman here hasn't officially joined us, Sujay, where are you? There we go. Sujay's joining us from Procter & Gamble on the 15th of August, and will be the President in our Asia Pacific region. This is the Diageo Executive. I'm not going to ask either of those guys to speak to you this afternoon. We'll let them get bedded in a little bit more before we do. You are going to hear from most of the other people in the course of this afternoon.
What are we going to share with you? We're going to share with you a plan that has two very clear focus. A focus on spirits, including RTDs. We see that as one market. We see it as a very robust category, and we think we can grow share in that growing category. We're going to continue the double-digit growth that we have on Guinness today, and we'll share with you the plans we have to continue that growth and indeed gain more share. The plan we'll share with you will talk about how we retain, very much retain the premiumization capability we have that has created so much value historically.
We are going to broaden and be a little bit more active with our portfolio and allow us to serve more consumers on more occasions as we become more active in category strategies as opposed to just brand-led strategies. You're going to see some of those this afternoon. We're really clear that we have a turnaround to execute in North America, but we need to do that whilst we continue to accelerate the growth elsewhere in the world. I think very importantly for investors, the way that we're going about this turnaround for Diageo doesn't require us to reset the profit in order to support the plan. You've heard me talk about the need for us to develop a more agile, more competitive operating framework. We've been working hard on that. It's also significantly more cost-effective than where we are today. We're investing $ 1.2 billion of restructuring.
$1.1 billion of that in the operating framework work and another $ 100 million in the supply chain. We've charged $ 752 million of that in FY 2026. Cash goes out in 2027. The balance will be spent and committed in 2027. That investment saves us $1 billion. All right? About $850 million of that comes from the operating framework work, and $150 million comes from the supply chain. The intention is that I'm going to invest that back into advancing some innovation, selectively improving our competitiveness, and indeed protecting that underlying profitability I talked about. I will come back to talk about what I mean by investing in competitiveness, because it seems that everybody thinks that's just price. It's not just price. In fact, it's actually quite a lot of not price activity.
You'll see it particularly in the North American plan that John will share with you, but I'm sure we can debate that later. This plan, including the restructuring charge, generates $ 8 billion of cash over that three-year period. With the sale of EABL and the conclusion of the RCB deal, we anticipate the leverage will drop into the middle of the range in 2027. If we weren't to change anything, this is obviously hypothetical, that would allow us to be down at two, i.e. below our current guidance, by 2029. That's whilst we increase the CapEx to $ 1.25 billion a year for three years. We'll share with you how we're going to spend that. We retain our capital allocation priorities, as we lower leverage, the board can then explore whether to change the dividend policy or indeed to think about share buybacks.
The other thing we'd like to be really clear with you about is the plan that we're sharing with you today is an organic turnaround. Very aware of lots of speculation, lots of things that people write in the marketplace. Being clear, we're not buying, we're not selling. This is an organic turnaround, we're basically, we have what we need to turn the business around. Finally, I'll share with you right at the end how we've simplified the incentive programs inside Diageo to align it to that investment case. That's what you're going to see from me and the team this afternoon. I think the summary of it is we've built a plan we believe in. We're really clear we've got an awful lot of work to do.
We're very confident as we do that work, that we can return this business to a very strong, very consistent creator of shareholder value. How are we going to share that plan with you? This is the agenda. It starts with me, I'm afraid. You've got me for a little while. I'm going to tell you what we've been doing over the last six months, particularly as it relates to strategy and particularly as it relates to the operating framework behind that restructuring plan. The rest of the day, this is not a I remember somebody telling me about previous Diageo Capital Markets Day, this is not a marketing show and tell. In fact, you're going to see very little, in terms of pure marketing sizzle reel from us today.
We've tried to construct the agenda through the lens of the investment thesis to try and address the questions that you ask us and other commentators comment on. We'll start with the market opportunity, Hannah, our strategy lead, will share with you our thinking on how we see this market evolving and the assumptions that we're making about each of the regions over the next three years. We'll also move to how we think we can win, and that really is the category strategy. Cristina will share with you a couple, and we'll share with you a couple because we've only got time to share with you a couple. And we'll share with you a couple with enough detail so you understand what we're doing, but not enough detail that we give anything competitively away.
Just be aware, we'll always try and walk that line, that we don't give too much away, whisky, tequila, RTDs. You're going to get a different sort of Guinness presentation. Ernie has got massive amount of marketing she could share with you. That's not what she's going to share with you. We're going to share with you the investment plan on Guinness and how it is we're going to drive capacity against that growth agenda. We'll take all of that work, we'll go to two regions. John's been in North America three months. He's going to share with you quite candidly, what he's found and what we need to do. It's fair to say our North American business has been underperforming for quite a while. The growth of tequila covered up some of that.
We now need to face into some of the realities, John will share with you exactly what we're thinking, what we're doing, and how we're going to phase ourselves as we turn around the North American business. I've asked Alvaro to share with you where we are in Latin America, because actually, of all of the regions in Diageo, the one that's most advanced down the category lens, that's most a reflection of where we're going, for the group in total, is actually in Latin America. Some really good and very clear examples of the direction of travel in what it is Alvaro has been leading for in Latin America.
Ewan will, the other question you've asked of me many times is the deployment of capital inside Diageo, Ewan will take you through how it is not only we're going to deploy that $1.25 billion of CapEx, he'll also talk to you about working capital, mature inventory, and we'll also finish by touching on how that supports customer service. We'll let Nik bring that all together in terms of the financial algorithm, and I'll pop back up right at the end to give you one slide on the incentive program and how we're changing that. We'll then have the opportunity for Q&As in this room. We're going to go downstairs. We've got an innovation showcase for you for half an hour, by which stage it'll be transformed up here, and we'll invite you back up here for a drink.
All the time able to answer any and all of your questions. Big thing for me and my team is we've got to be bang on time because we've got people on the webcast. We need to make sure that we hit. If there is any time in the sessions, we'll take questions, but only up to the limit of the time. Otherwise, we'll do it at the end of the day. Okay? Cool. We've been busy. We have been busy. It's been a busy six months. We shared some of this with you before. We started from a very objective review through the lens of multiple stakeholders, how we were performing from a market point of view, from a competitive point of view, a very extensive piece of work.
We, as an exec team, looked at five strategic alternatives for how we would develop Diageo going forward, evaluated all of them, made one clear recommendation. That's the recommendation we're going to share with you today. We then worked a lot on what does that mean in terms of a competitive operating framework. We started some active market testing. As we were thinking about the different strategies, we actually started testing some things, and I've asked Cristina to give you a little update on how some of those testings work, because we've been testing our own strategy as we develop it to see whether it's as effective as we would want it to be. That allowed us in April. You've got three of our board members, the chair, Susan, there's Sid and Karen, who are here today, and you can ask them.
We took the recommendation to the board in April. They bought into the proposal, including that operating framework I've talked to you about. Actually, from that, we appointed the leadership team. I know people today are talking about announcements going forward. The thing I want to land with you is we're quite a long way down the track in terms of the changes that we're talking about. The leadership team, i.e., below the exec, was appointed in May. That team of 90 came together in 20 and 21st in Edinburgh. We shared with them all the work that we had done, all the case for change, all the analysis we'd done, so to recruit them to what it was we were doing together.
Together, we designed the last bit of the operating framework. Through June, all of that operating framework was cascaded through the organization, including the budget guidelines that we'd given. By the 1st of July, important date for us, we not only had a reset of the strategy, we had targets, we had the operating framework live. Okay. Where we are today, September 1st, particularly in go-to-market organizations, we're about 90% of the way implemented. All businesses you cover will have their own frameworks for this. I'm going to articulate it through this lens. You'll see this chart a lot in Diageo going forward. How do we organize purpose, strategy, behavior? How do we operate as a complete entity, and the culture that comes as a result of all of that? I'm going to do this very quickly.
It's something that's very dear to my heart. As a person leading a business, the purpose and the way we set the magnetic north of the organization is massively important to me, and very important in terms of how I build the right culture. Some of the investors love to have that conversation with me, some not so much. Okay. I'm going to go for the not so much, and if you want to talk to me about it afterwards, I would love to. This is the purpose of Diageo as articulated a number of years ago. It served the business really very well. There was quite a lot of commentary as we did this.
We consulted with a huge amount of people as we did this inside the business, and there was a feeling that this had served its purpose, but it actually wasn't a fair reflection of who we were. Actually, now was perhaps the time to move on. Actually, in terms of every day, everywhere, is that where we want to be in terms of responsible going forward? While celebration is important in our category, it's only 40% of the occasions that people actually engage with our category, and therefore, were we somehow limiting ourselves. The other thing I should say to you is, as a team, we don't want a purpose that becomes a strap line for the business.
We want a purpose that articulates why this business exists and something that allows everybody that works here can see how it is they make a contribution to that. Here is the new purpose for Diageo: Crafting iconic drinks, chosen for life's moments. In a good purpose, every word needs to mean something. The element of craft, if you're new to this industry, one of the things you appreciate massively, just about everywhere, is how much care and craft and skill there is. If I go with you into Scotland and walk all of the capabilities in that effect, it's quite mind-blowing where the craft exists inside Diageo. If you look at the history of how some of our brands were created, craft is very strong in our business. This idea of iconic drinks, very important through the lens of consumers is the drinks.
Chosen, yes, i.e. to be asked for by name in a bar. Also to be chosen as a partner in customer and all other stakeholders places. For life, not just for celebration. Some little moments of joy, but there are other times when people want to enjoy our category, and the moments that matter. It's really important to us. It's important that you know about it. You want to talk to me any more about it, grab me in the bar later. Strategically, where do we get to? TBA is really quite misleading for us. You come to this market afresh. The fact that we think about all of our targets through the lens of TBA, not appropriate. The two categories we're in, full price, total spirits, not international spirits or premium spirits. Total spirits, full price ladder, including RTDs, right?
That's market number one for Diageo going forward. Premium beer with Guinness, market number two. All right? When you get to the analysis of why things are changing in here, it's very different across TBA. TBA doesn't help us. We're going to be really focused on winning in those two places. It's going to be non-negotiable across our business that we need to rebuild the capability in the on-trade. All right? It's patchy post-COVID around the world about recovering that. We don't want to leave that to local market decision-making. We're going to drive it through all of our operations. Saw this from me before. I talk about in terms of differentiating competencies, how do we win? Relevant brands, you know a lot about brands, but relevant brands means, across a price point, not just one part of a price point in competitive category strategies.
We've given you some examples, you're going to see some more. A key enabler of this strategy is the ability to do that. The second is that we engage with our customers and our channels in a way that actually, quite frankly, we haven't done before as Diageo. In how we go to market, how we partner going to market, a really key capability that we need to build. You'll speak to Ewan later, but the need for us to fully integrate our supply chain end to end. That might seem obvious to some of you, but if I'm candid, where we started from, really quite a big disconnect between the supply side of the organization and the demand side of the organization. A lot of duplication, a lot of waste, a lot of inefficiency.
We need to build these three capabilities to be world-class inside Diageo. The final thing I need to share with you is how do we design deliberately to extract the benefit, the leverage that comes from our scale? Right? We have big, for sure. We have very complicated. Every country is different, every process is different. I talked about that in the results. You want to get operational leverage, we need to design for it. The operating framework is designed in a way that allows us to simplify and scale. You know, complexity fails, simplicity scales. We've got a design for that, and you'll see that in the model I'm going to share with you in a second. What have we done?
From the 1st of July, there are 23 country or country cluster organizations, go-to-market organizations responsible for the sales and marketing of our brands in those geographies. Every single one of them has this organization design. Right. 1st of January this year, every single organization had their own bespoke design. Right. I don't think there's anything particularly unusual about any of those titles. In Diageo, we use commercial. For old people like me, that's sales. What is this organization responsible for? Market share performance in those two categories I've talked to you about, and the on-trade reach and capability in their geography. How are we looking for their outcome? The sales growth, the operating profit dollars And the free cash flow. 23 go-to-market organizations. Five regions. Our five regions, North America, LAC, EMEA. Africa becomes part of the European group again.
India, we break out. APAC is everything in Asia, ex-India. Those are the five regions going forward. You see here, each region has exactly the same composition. Exactly the same roles in each region. Most of them self-evident. The one you should focus on is the one that says transformation director. Each regional business president has one person responsible for driving that consolidation simplification back office that's going to be such a part of how we build this operating framework going forward. These guys are resource allocation, capability development, and making sure we get that organizational leverage that I talked about earlier. Let me get to the exec. You know this structure. We've got five regional presidents, one Chief Marketing Officer, so on and so forth. Importantly, all of the Global Business Services, including digital and technology as one organization, reports into Nik now.
I've got one really hard on the eye chart, but it's as simple as I could make it to make the point. Forgive me before I show it. Exec level, regional level, local level. If you think about the capabilities and how we get leverage, if I'm talking about sales and commercial, I've got one vertical. Likewise marketing, likewise supply chain. Finance, people, and transformation. This is where the transformation office comes. People, global council, CSO. Again, you probably don't need all of this detail, but the most important thing is we've designed it in such a way that the alignment is clear, the responsibilities are aligned, the measures are all aligned, and the forums are all aligned. Give you a tiny little output. Friday afternoon, Cristina and I sat down with the four heads of categories, I'll show you in a second, and the five regional marketing.
With 10 people in the room, we were able to lay out the brand innovation plan for all regions for the next three years over three hours. We'd never been able to do that in Diageo because up until now, it's been country by country, and that smallest board of 1,200 innovation projects is an outcome of the way that we organize ourselves because everybody was pitching for their own individual project. I'll give you this a little bit more detail. This is Diageo marketing under Cristina. There are four categories. Those are there at the top. There are five regions down the right-hand side. That's the contribution to sales. Interestingly for me, if I have a problem, I don't know, whiskey in Latin America, there are two people I need to speak to.
As I say, if I put those four people together with those five people and Cristina, I've got 10 people to run the marketing for Diageo. We've designed it in a way which allows us to have real direct accountability, responsibility, but also leverage. We've created one chief supply chain officer end-to-end, Ewan. In the past, we had different things in different regions, local supply chain directors. Local now is all about customer service. It's not about running the supply chain. That's with Ewan. He has complete responsibility across the world. Anybody who covers other FMCG players would see that a while ago. He basically has five regional heads, so that matrix works for all of the functions. With five people representing each of the regions, he can deliver the globe.
Likewise for Nik, five finance directors, one big Global Business Services, FP&A, and control, and the finance expertise. Massive simplification, massive reduction, taken out the duplication. People in Diageo told us we were very duplicative, very slow, no clear accountability. Actually, when you walk through this with all the people involved in designing it's really clear who's responsible for what. This is the bit you might be interested in. That's that organization. I put the numbers on there because otherwise you'll get the proportions, and I know you'll all be guessing. The total overheads budget we gave ourselves for the destination of this organization is 10.5% of sales. That would put us in the top 25% of all businesses that operate in this space.
If I told you today that it's way north of 14%, that gives you some idea of the change. If you look at where we deploy, the exec level rounds up to 0.2% of that. The regional teams, excluding the presidents, because they sit in my global budget, 0.2%. A really clear accountability framework, really clear budget framework. I said to you before, we're nearly complete, particularly in the go-to-market. I think that whilst that was a destination that we wanted to get to in two years' time, I think the regional presidents decided that they would want to go all in one. What you see here is the green. These changes in go-to-market are complete. They're done. They're behind us. What you see in Europe is the consultation process.
A legally binding consultation process, it takes certain time. We have to go through that. It means no problem, we'll do it. It just means that Europe will be slightly later for us to be able to give the certainty that we want to do to our people. I suppose the thing I wanted to point to is, whilst this is not something we're announcing we're going to do, this is something that actually quite a lot of it, particularly in the country level, is already behind us. Some of the things to Nik's area in terms of global business, that will take quite some time. There's some tech enablement, there's all that sort of stuff. That will take a different time. The go-to-market one's done, and we're focused, and everybody started the year in a clear way.
Final thing I've got to share with you, it comes to behavior. If you go back to my chart in terms of the triangle. I am sure my Diageo colleagues won't mind me saying this because we had this conversation. If you look on the left-hand side, in January, we had different programs in our business which talked about purpose, ambition, strategy, enablers, outcomes. We had four values. We had three leadership ambition areas with all the things you can read here. Again, lots of feedback from our colleagues that this had got really quite complicated, it wasn't clear enough, so on and so forth. Going forward, what we've agreed, we've just seen what I said about the purpose, you've seen what I said about the strategy. We articulate that actually to bring all of that alive, we're going to focus on three things, three behaviors in the organization.
One team, competitiveness, and decisiveness. I could talk at length. You should ask me and the exec as you engage with them over the next wee while. I think the biggest single one here is team, right? What this operating framework needs to make it work is we have to behave as a team. Diageo historically has been more fragmented, diffuse, use your language, siloed, some people do. It doesn't really matter. The exec has to work as a team. I said on my first day in Diageo that I believe that business is a team sport. The exec team need to be truly a team. If I told you that in January, my exec team only physically met twice a year, you'd be surprised. Right? Because we had it all so diffuse. This comes back together.
Being one team is massively important, the people that have to demonstrate that most is myself and the exec team in order to demonstrate a completely different set of behaviors going forward. We don't get the leverage unless we start specializing and relying on other people to deliver. You don't have your own solution to every problem and that duplication I talked about before. A lot change in six months in sort of 23 minutes or so, but that's to bring you up to speed. That's what we've done in terms of an articulation of purpose, strategy, operating framework, and the behaviors that are going to bring it alive. We now need to get on and do it. As I said at the start, we've got a lot of work to do.
We've got a lot of work to do, we're confident about what we are able to deliver. That's it from me. I'm now going to pass you over to Hannah, who will take you through how we're thinking about this. That's the background. Now it's the investment thesis. We'll start with the market opportunity. Two sessions, Hannah first, then Cristina, and then we get into some breakouts. Okay? Thank you very much.
Thank you, Dave. All right. Good afternoon, everybody. I am going to spend time today on three things. First, what are the factors that drive our market? Second, how do we think they're going to evolve? Third, what does that mean for our market growth expectations regionally and globally? To get us started, I just want to set the context of where we are today. If you look back over 15 years, I am conscious many people have studied this industry for a long time, three distinct cycles. We had a long-standing premiumization cycle. There was COVID acceleration, most recently, a consumer reset that's been largely affordability driven. Despite recent pressure, especially in the U.S., spirits, including RTD, has been in long-term growth.
Through this period, especially most recently, RTD has been a really significant growth contributor, which you can actually see quite clearly by the divergence of the two spirits lines on the chart. Premium beer, also in long-term growth. I am going to spend most of the time today on spirits, including RTD, given that's the majority of our business. Question for us isn't, is this market going to grow? We're confident the market's going to grow. Question much more is, what's driving it, making sure we take that understanding to inform our strategy and inform our plans. For us, there are three fundamental drivers of market growth: demographics, wallets, and behaviors. Demographics, put most simply, how many people and who are they? Just a point of nomenclature, you'll see through the slides either LPA, LDA. It's legal purchasing age, legal drinking age.
As populations grow, it expands the LPA consumer base. As people age, they drink differently. We track both on a market-by-market basis. Wallets, how much money do people have? Alcohol ultimately is a discretionary category. If you see affordability pressure, you see people getting squeezed, you see discretionary spend come down, alcohol is impacted. On the other side of this, though, in markets where there's economic growth, emerging middle class Category participation broadens, we see premiumization, we see tailwinds. Again, we track both on a market-by-market basis. We use publicly available macro data, we'll also get custom polls to really get under cohort dynamics, especially age and income. On the behavioral side, we study all sorts of different things. The three primary things we're looking at are the evolving attitudes to socializing and alcohol's role within that, growth of GLP-1s, and the rise of convenience.
We use a range of studies, we do here have proprietary research, especially against the attitudes to socializing. We field 17 markets twice a year, some of the information from that I'll share with you today. Let's start with demographics. Without question, demographics are a tailwind. Information on the left panel here is looking by region at go-forward population growth expectations. I draw your attention a moment to the U.S. number at the top. This is forward looking at 0.5%. This year, forecast to be 0.6%. Interestingly, as recently as 2024, it was 1.2%. That drop is primarily due to net migration. In fact, historically, immigration has been at least a 50 basis point tailwind in the U.S. If immigration policy were to be in a different place in the U.S., we would expect that population growth number to be different.
The other thing I'd say, looking at the left panel, it's not just is the population growing, are they engaging with our category? Spirits penetration across leading markets remains at or above pre-COVID levels, people are engaged in the category. What we look at is, well, how are people spending? How are they spending on spirits? How does that change by age? We look at the average, then we look at the age brackets relative to that. You can see in this green corridor here where the elevated spend against spirits ranging from 35 through to 74. Interestingly, if you looked at this for just the whole of alcohol, you'd see it more condensed. That green corridor stops at 64. We're quite confident from a spirits perspective, as populations do age, we do have that little bit more protection.
Second, there is a lot of conversation at the lower end of the spectrum, I'm going to talk about Gen Z in a moment. Interestingly, higher age cohorts, whether you look at the percentage of their spend out of their total expenditure, or if you look at the dollar they're spending, they are spending more on spirits, more on alcohol than they used to. There's increasing spend per age cohort at the high end. We said, "Okay, let's make sure we're tracking how the population is going to shift relative to that elevated spend corridor over time." What we show on the right is the middle 50% of the population of the LPA population. It's the interquartile range for those who like statistics. The dark box is where we are today. The dashed box is where the population will move to by 2029.
Punchline being not much, actually. Not much shift. This moves quite slowly. If you look where the populations are relative to where they're heading, we feel pretty good about where we're sitting as populations age. Let's, however, talk for a moment about Gen Z. The first thing I actually want to call out is in the lead of the slide. We look at LPA+ Gen Z. I bring that up because it is important when we're doing the analysis to make sure we cut the right age cohorts. Especially in the U.S., quite a lot of data sources will have an under 25 age bracket, if you just pile that in of itself, it will lead to some, technical term, wonky math in terms of what you're getting out of the results.
We really do make sure we hone in on the LPA+ consumers. If we do that, a few things. Firstly, penetration. Again, how are Gen Z engaging with our category relative to general population? Whether it's spirits or RTD, we see Gen Z penetration is higher than general population across a range of markets. We also look at how are they spending, what percentage of their total expenditure goes on alcohol compared with other age brackets. U.S. example, answer, very consistently. We see this in other markets as well. They're not spending, once you account for income and expenditure, differently than other cohorts. How are they actually consuming? Look at this. We blend intensity and frequency data. We've looked at 2026, recent data, back to 2023 to compare what's actually been happening.
In most markets it has been increasing, claimed consumption is up. The interesting example here, obviously, is Australia. For those familiar with Australia, high inflationary environment, excise is linked to inflation there was a pretty recent excise hike. It's hurting everybody, but Gen Z disproportionately. What we also look at is claimed moderation Gen Z are also claiming to moderate less than other cohorts, especially in the U.S. Switching gears from demographics into wallets. Without question, the most acute pressure, but very definitely more of a developed market phenomena than emerging. Let's talk about the developed markets. What we're seeing, if you look at income versus inflation, quite simply, it hasn't kept pace. For the last four years, we've seen income growth lagging inflation growth across markets like U.K., U.S., and Australia.
We've also looked at this by cohort, really dug in to understand what's happening. As many know, low income have been struggling for a while across these markets. They're in monthly deficit. Their incomes don't match what they actually have to pay on regular expenditure. Higher income, a bit more protective, but still protecting experiences perhaps within that discretionary spend. What's really interesting is in the middle bucket, the middle-income consumers. About 12 months ago, those consumers in both the U.S. and G.B. would've been in surplus. They would have slightly more money per month coming in than going out. That has flipped in the past 12 months. This is a consumer group that's now very stretched, increasingly using debt to protect lifestyle, but they are feeling squeezed.
Back in Q1, we actually spent some time out with consumers across a range of markets, it was really telling in those conversations, hearing the trade-offs people were making about holidays, about socializing trips with friends, even about how they're prioritizing different house improvements versus what they might have done in the past. What was also really interesting is they were trying to protect their engagement with alcohol. People were looking for happy hours to make trips to the pub more affordable. They were really looking at small formats, which you'll hear us talk about today, but it was really notable how people were trying to stay in the brands they love, but they were looking for a smaller format. Interestingly, when they were looking at RTDs, which many were, they were comparing to the price in the pub.
Relative to a price in the pub or a bar, that RTD was very affordable. How have things changed since Q1? I'm going to take you to the right side of the page. Q2 versus Q1, we have some data here about the net intent to spend, how is that changing? Clearly not helped by the situation in Iran. This is a U.S. example. The intent to spend on gasoline, way up. Essentials, whichever one you picked, you would see this picture. It's still becoming more and more of the wallet, more and more squeeze. Discretionary, getting squeezed more and more, alcohol is within that bracket. On the flip side, as I said, emerging markets, different story. Incomes outpacing inflation, solid amount of discretionary spend. Again, when we did interviews with those consumers, it felt like a very, very different world.
If that's where we are, I'm sure the question is, okay, developed markets, especially U.S., when is this going to get better? I sadly don't have a crystal ball, but knowing that within the U.S., it's Spirits ex RTDs that's really the segment that's being challenged. We dug in back through 25 years of data to figure out what patterns could we see. What was it that had greatest correlation across different factors? What we actually found is if you look at that U.S. Spirits volume, year-over-year changes in that U.S. Spirits volume, it's quite highly correlated with consumer sentiment at about a 0.4 R squared. If you look at real value, year-over-year growth, really then you're getting volume, but you're also capturing price mix. We're capturing mix, stripping out inflation, even higher R squared.
There is a linkage, or historically for sure, has been a linkage between sentiment and what's been driving growth of volume and mix in the U.S. Timing, of course, is then the uncertain question about when is this gonna come back? Macros need to come back, for sure. As many of you know, there is also currently a dislocation in the U.S. between macros and sentiment. There's other factors, geopolitical, domestic policy, and frankly, the fact that consumers just don't like inflation. That's all compounding. We would expect, if historic correlation does hold true, that as these consumer sentiment pieces come back, we would start to see more volume and value growth come back into the U.S. We're not sitting around waiting for it.
John will talk to you more about how we're planning to compete going forward, this is a relationship we've seen hold true. I'm gonna switch gears to behaviors. While the numbers do vary by market, we are definitely seeing consumers telling us they are claiming to drink less. A couple of things I'd call out, though. One, that isn't necessarily new news. That has been happening for a while. Second, what consumers tell us isn't always what they do. This is one of those places actually where the proprietary research we have is very helpful to get underneath a little bit more of what has been going on. The middle panel is when we've asked consumers, "Okay, why are you moderating? What is it that's causing the behavior?" Without question, health and wellness related concerns are an issue.
They're an issue across all the markets where we talk to the consumer. Interestingly, financial considerations also come up a lot as well. In the U.S., 26% of consumers are citing financial considerations. In G.B. and Australia, it's as high as 34%. The other thing for the U.S. that's probably worth dwelling on for a moment. Many of you may well know or have seen some of the Gallup studies. They actually ask all sorts of interesting questions back for decades. If you've ever got a spare moment, worth a look. The one we track a lot is around perception to alcohol. There's a question in there about whether you think it's good for you, the same for you, bad for you. That hit an inflection point in 2015 and actually started to go, people thinking it's worse.
Between 2015 and 2021, spirits per caps went up. RTD per caps went up. Even though consumers may have been feeling or perceiving alcohol as being worse for them, there was still a significant growth in the industry. The other thing we use our research for is to understand what are people's moderation strategies. Interestingly, people aren't disengaging with the category. They are using things within our category, our brands, to actually still go out and socialize. It might be zero zero, it might be lower ABV. I talked about smaller formats, RTDs. These are all things that consumers are looking to as ways to moderate if they do want to drink less. Clearly, as an industry leader, we have an opportunity to lead, shape and provide that choice for consumers.
Let's talk for a moment on GLP-1s, because that's a question that we get a lot, and rightly so. Firstly, adoption. You're probably tracking this as much as we are. Data is much better in the U.S. We know around 10%-12% today, penetration. Expectation is that goes up somewhere to 20%-25% by 2029. Europe, rest of world, the data is a little bit harder to come by. We would assume, per the U.S., that it will grow over the course of the plan period. Perhaps more important than adoption, though, is behavior. What are we seeing? To get underneath this, we use Numerator data, which is purchase panel data. It's 100,000 households. The data we have here is across four waves, from January 2025 through to January 2026. What does that minus two mean?
That minus two represents the difference between people who were on GLP-1s and people who weren't. People on GLP-1s spent two percent less on spirits than the people who weren't on GLP-1. That corresponds to the four on beer, the five on wine. I think to understand this one, it's also helpful to take an edge case. Humor me for a moment, assume 100% of the population went on to GLP-1s in the U.S. tomorrow. That would mean all those people spent two percent less than they do today. That is a one time level effect. Doesn't compound. Realistically, one number I'm definitely confident to say is it will not be 100% of people in the U.S. on GLP-1s tomorrow. In fact, it's already 10%. Over the plan period, it's potentially an incremental 15%, if adoption goes from 10%- 25%.
If the impact stays around that minus two, that is a manageable headwind. Of course, we monitor this very closely. There are some more qualitative factors from all the research out there that also gives us confidence that we think it may well stay as a fairly muted impact to spirits. First, people are still socializing. At least 50% of people on GLP-1s still go to the pub or a bar at least once a week. People are protecting special occasions. We know spirits over-indexes in special occasions. People will also tend to be culling out the more habitual boredom snacking, eating and drinking. That's not where our brands and categories play. I think interestingly, just from a psyche point of view, people are sometimes creating occasions to go out, and they want to showcase their progress. There is still a socializing environment.
When they do go out, unsurprisingly perhaps, they're looking for lower calorie, they're looking for lower volume, especially if they're having some of the side effects that people report. RTDs actually also do very well because people are looking for control. Speaking of RTDs, let's spend a moment on convenience. What we've seen, this is actually looking back 10 years in the U.S. at occasions. Won't be a surprise to anybody, this growth of a third space. We talk about it a lot, but it has actually gone up 3x in the U.S. in terms of number of occasions. That means alcohol is not necessarily the center of occasion the same way as it would have been if you'd gone to the pub. It doesn't mean people don't want to drink. They just need a format that's accessible, which is RTDs.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, we're seeing RTD per capita growth significantly across many regions. RTD as a share of total spirits remains pretty low. Even in markets like the U.S., where it is more penetrated, we all know that's a segment that's still growing strongly. We think convenience will be a persistent tailwind, both to volume and to price mix. Stepping back across the trends. Demographics, tailwind. Wallets, we do think significant near term pressure in developed markets. Emerging markets, it's actually a tailwind. Behaviors, while there are some challenges, we also see significant opportunity. What I'm going to do now is switch gears and say, okay, what does that mean for what we're expecting market. I want to be really clear, market, not Diageo, market growth to be by region over the next three years. Let's start with North America.
Without question, North America will remain a challenging region through the next three years. Over the plan period, I did not press one, I think. It has scooted to India. If someone could pull it back. Or I can do it.
Three-year growth, value growth for the U.S., we are expecting to be -2% to 0%. While there is some behavioral pressure, affordability is the predominant pressure. As we talked about, we see correlation with consumer confidence and volume and value. If the consumer confidence piece picks back up, we would expect to see a comeback come through faster. Equally, if the comeback in confidence is also associated or there is a simultaneous change in immigration policy to the data I shared earlier, we would expect that to be an additional tailwind, especially given we also know the Hispanic community in the U.S. right now is not socializing as much as they were. Irrespective of sentiment and population, we expect RTDs to be a significant tailwind driving both volume and price mix.
We are expecting the market in North America to remain soft and challenged in FY 2027, and there will be slow and gradual improvement from there. John will share shortly how we are going to play in that market. EMEA, actually a tale of three EMEAs. It nets out to a +2%- 4% on value growth. G.B., we expect to follow much more of a U.S. trajectory, although that comeback is much more hard dollars in wallet than it is sentiment. Developed Europe, per caps have been soft for over a decade, actually, it is much more of a price mix-driven story anyway. As affordability comes back, we would expect to see getting back to flat or slightly positive growth in developed Europe. The growth story here is emerging EMEA, both the Middle East and Africa, where there is population growth, economic development, and emerging middle class. APAC, the market.
We are expecting a return to modest growth over the plan period. The wild card here is really China. China, excluding Chinese white spirits, all these numbers here, excluding Chinese white spirits, has actually been down double-digit the last two years. That is going to take some time to recover. The rest of the region remains pretty resilient. Even Australia, where, as I said earlier, inflation economic is not necessarily great, immigration remains very positive. LAC, very strong growth opportunity. We are forecasting the market at 4%-6%. Always some consumer wallet volatility in LAC, we see very strong fundamentals. Population growth, economic development driving category participation, strong engagement in spirits, strong tailwind on RTDs. The growth, however, will be largely price mix. There is a huge amount of local spirit penetration in South America.
Whether it is Cachaça in Brazil, Aguardiente in Colombia, local rums, et cetera, we are expecting trade out of local spirits. Hence, volume itself is flat. Price mix driving the growth. India, another very strong growth story from a market perspective. Again, a +4%- 6% over the plan period. Very similar reasons around economic development and population growth, also, of course, a very strong and buoyant whiskey market, which will hopefully be further supported by the tariff reduction. If I pull all that together, regionally, what we are seeing is still a bit of divergence. North America will be a drag, as will China within APAC, strong emerging market growth. I am going to spend just a moment on premium beer because that is our reference market for Guinness.
As we've talked to you guys a lot about, we play pretty uniquely in Guinness, we haven't built proprietary models to forecast the industry. We're taking IWSR and using that to inform what we think. There's some range by region, but overall, globally, a value of +1% to +3%. Clearly with Guinness, we'd expect to outbeat that significantly. If I pull it all back to where we started, we see strong growth across the portfolio where we compete. As we just said, premium beer, we're expecting to be +1% to +3% over the plan period for the market. Spirits, including RTDs, also +1% to +3%. Consumers continue to engage with our category across markets. We continue to expect and see growth. We plan to beat it.
I'm going to pass to Cristina, who's going to tell you how we're going to do exactly that.
Thank you, Hannah. Good afternoon, everybody, and to those of you online as well. I'm going to now introduce you to how we see our category strategies, which is essentially all about how we will win. There's a number of aspects of how we approach category strategy that makes it a very different approach to doing this work. Before I do that, I want to share with you briefly the part of the category studies that is not changing, and that is the value of premiumization, which you know has been present in our work for many years, has been a source of value creation, and it will continue to be a source of value creation. For those of you in London, you will have the opportunity to see some of these products later on in our Innovation Showcase.
Here's some examples of the work that we have done over the past few months. You will see a lot of it in whiskey, some of it in tequila, more and more so, and also in other categories. From just the Johnnie Walker, the Vol Couture Blend, as an example, or work that we did with Olivier Rousteing, to very special Port Ellen Prism, which went in auction for a half million dollars, to Don Julio Ultima Reserva. This one you will see later on, which essentially is a product that comes from the last harvest of Don Julio González himself. This is my intro to say the part that is not changing. Premiumization will continue. It's a value creator, no doubt. Now, what is new in regards to our category strategies?
The work that we have done, you will see how this comes to life, specifically in whiskey, tequila, and in RTDs later on in our breakouts, has four aspects that are specific and different from how we've done things in the past. The first is our consumer and competitive lens, which is the real ability to map for each one of our categories through the lens of not only pricing, but other drivers of choice that we have been able to identify through our data that really determine how each category is mapped. Again, you will see examples later on on how this comes to life. Essentially, this allows us to segment the category. It allows us to determine what white spaces we have. It allows us to see how we rate or how we place ourselves vis-à-vis a competitive landscape.
The second piece is a clear portfolio architecture with defined roles and price positioning. For each one of our trademarks in a given category, you will see how this lays out, and the category itself, you can see how it lays out. Again, I'll give you some examples in a minute. The third point, very important and actually very new, is we are including RTDs as part of the trademark strategy. You will see an end-to-end approach to this trademark and to the category. What we are then looking at is how do we serve consumers across different occasions, across different price points, to satisfy the needs of that particular consumer.
The fourth point is indeed, this all links back to the markets, each one of the markets will have that particular category strategy in practice, in sourced with the data points that are particular to that location. Let me give you an example of how this translates. This is specific to a test that we ran in the Middle East and specifically around our whiskey portfolio. Let me give you a little bit of context. The Middle East has for a long time, for a while, this being a very premium-focused environment with very premium consumers. Certainly, our approach to whiskey in the Middle East has been addressing that opportunity. You see that graphic on top of this chart.
What we realized is by doing the work that I just referenced earlier, by mapping the consumer landscape, by mapping the competitive context, that there were a number of consumers and occasions that were being underserved. In particular, an opportunity for our value whiskeys, which hadn't been activated in that manner in the past. We took action on an intervention across brands including Black & White, VAT 69, and J&B, which allowed us to create a wider stretch of pricing opportunities and different brand choices for various consumer groups that actually in the Middle East had some knowledge of these brands in different stages and perhaps some of their home countries. By doing this, we allowed for those brands to actually grow.
Also it gave us opportunity to fill in some white spaces with innovation, including Johnnie Walker Red Label or the launch of Johnnie Walker Black Ruby, or indeed the launch of Bulleit Bourbon. The real leverage of our whiskey portfolio more broadly, occupying more consumer spaces, occupying more price points. That test resulted in a fiscal 2026 impact that you see there, which was positive. We then took these learnings and tested actually in more places. I just want to say that these were very surgical interventions. I hope it became clear from my chart before. Really looking, as I said, to the mapping of the category, to the price points that were being occupied or unoccupied, to the white spaces that we could identify.
Just to give you a sense of dimensions, in total EMEA, this number of tests that we ran on interventions was of 80 in total. In Latin America, these number of interventions were 20 in total. As you can imagine, running these interventions in H2 produced different sets of results, some stronger, some less so. The aggregates of those interventions deliver an increase in volume in both instances, both EMEA and Latin America, of the magnitude that you see there, +26 volume in EMEA, +25 in LAC. The total aggregate gross profit dollar actually was superior to that period the year before. Net the contribution to the total region was positive in both instances. This is something that I hope it will become more clear when you see more details on our whiskey strategy later on, our tequila strategy later on, and also the RTDs.
I'm going to pause here, and I have to say, for the webcast, that we're going to pause the recording. You will, however, I'm asking you not to switch off and stay on the link. There's going to be a countdown because that will tell us we're going to go into the breakouts, and that counter is going to tell us when to come back for the Guinness session. With that, I think I'm going to hand over to Sonya.
Hello, everybody, and to those rejoining on our webcast, you're all very welcome to this session. I'm delighted to talk to you about Guinness this afternoon. It's a brand that's very dear to my heart. It's part of my DNA as a Dubliner. My father also had a pub right at the gates of the St. James's Gate Brewery in Dublin. I'm going to talk you through the progress that we've been making on Guinness, why we believe that the brand is one of the most attractive growth opportunities within beer, and how we are positioning Guinness to deliver a long runway of growth and further success. Starting first off with the market and with our performance. Guinness plays within the premium beer segment. It's a $135 billion market, I should say, and the fastest-growing premium beer segment for the past three years.
Within that, Guinness has significantly outperformed. We have delivered 13% NSV CAGR, well ahead of premium beer growth of 5%. G.B. grew 22% CAGR, whilst both Ireland and North America grew in high single digits. Across the board, we've delivered near universal share gains, strengthening our position within premium beer globally. This growth is also extremely high-quality growth. Guinness generates more than 60% of gross margin and delivers ROIC of 30%, which is roughly twice Diageo group. Looking ahead, we're continuing to see very attractive fundamental growth for premium beer, with Guinness extremely well positioned to continue taking share within that segment. Why are we excited by the opportunity ahead? Today, our top three markets, G.B., Ireland, and the U.S., represent two-thirds of NSV. Even in those core markets, we are significantly under-penetrated.
13% penetration in G.B., only 5% in the U.S., and that compares to 24% in Ireland. That shows there's considerable headroom for growth in terms of attracting both new consumers and increasing our penetration within their growing occasions. These three markets will, therefore, continue to drive the majority of Guinness' growth up to FY 2030. However, although we're sold in over 150 countries around the world, outside of G.B. and Ireland, where we have those market-leading positions, we are very small in many of the premium beer markets in the world. In many markets as well, we're actually not represented at all. For example, even in the U.S., Guinness is only number 12 within premium beer, so significant headroom for us to grow further within those markets.
To capture the global opportunity efficiently and effectively for Guinness, we operate three distinct route-to-market models, which I'm going to walk through in turn. The benefit of this is these three models give us a lot of flexibility, because rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, we can select the structure that maximizes growth, maximizes profitability, capital efficiency, and speed to market in each geography. This operating flexibility is a major competitive advantage for Guinness and an important enabler of our global expansion plans. Let's talk first about the direct-to-market model, which includes most of our large strategic markets like G.B., Ireland, and the U.S. Here, we directly control distribution, our customer relationships, and our commercial execution.
We will continue to invest behind those markets, particularly in expanding our route to market capabilities in both G.B. and North America, with increased sales resource to expand both outlet coverage and call frequency. In G.B., growth will also be driven by continued growth of Guinness Draught, expansion of Guinness 0.0, and further innovation, and that will also be the case in Ireland. In North America, further growth will come through adding around 150,000 new accounts, both on and off trade by FY 2030. The second model is our third-party distribution, this approach is particularly relevant for Continental Europe, where we can leverage the reach and the local expertise of strategic partners. It provides broad geographic coverage and improves our ability to execute.
In Europe, we are simplifying our partner network, working with fewer, stronger distributors, which is enabling us to improve our pricing, our customer service, and our commercial activation. Within Europe, France and Germany are particularly exciting opportunities given their scale of the large premium beer markets that they represent. This model is already delivering results. We have achieved double-digit growth while significantly increasing distribution, including more than 25% growth in our on-trade presence. Going forward, we intend to continue to increase our outlet reach to 100,000 outlets by FY 2031, strengthening our execution and building Guinness into a much larger premium beer player across Europe. Finally, our third model, where we operate via third parties through licensed local production with royalty payments. This is particularly valuable where Guinness is underserved and where local partners offer faster and more cost-effective expansion.
These trusted partners brew Guinness under license using Guinness Foreign Extra Stout and adhering to our exacting quality standards. The key advantage here is really scalability, because without requiring additional significant CapEx, we can leverage the partner's manufacturing capabilities and their extensive distribution networks. While profit per hectoliter is obviously lower than in our direct-to-market model, the trade-off is significantly broader geographical reach and very attractive returns with very modest capital requirements. Importantly, this model is also proven. In Australia, since moving to our new partnership with Lion, we have seen strong double-digit growth and increased distribution. In Nigeria, since our transition to our new brewing partnership, Guinness has significantly improved its financial performance, its return to profitability, its growing share, and expanding distribution.
Taken together, these examples really show how this licensing model can unlock growth efficiently while creating value for both Guinness and our partners. When we bring those three operating models together, we are really creating a powerful platform for global growth in terms of both the breadth of the markets covered, but also the strength in existing markets. Our ambition is for Guinness to become a top 10 premium beer brand in the U.S. and to further strengthen our position in key European markets. Beyond that, we obviously also see further exciting opportunities to expand in growing premium beer markets such as India and Brazil. Of course, that growth is only possible if we have the supply capacity. In recent years, we have expanded capacity to meet growing demands, and we will continue to do so in support of these bold growth ambitions.
Between FY 2026 and FY 2029, Guinness production capacity will have increased by more than 50%. We opened the new Littleconnell Brewery in April 2026, which added circa 25% more capacity for both Guinness Draught and for Guinness 0.0. A second phase of Littleconnell expansion is planned for FY 2028, and that includes further focus on non-alc production capability. Beyond those already planned investments, we remain confident in our ability to be able to expand further in a modular way, in line with those demand requirements. Between FY 2026 and FY 2030, we will invest just under $1 billion in CapEx. Around $670 million of that will be directed towards supply infrastructure, including the Littleconnell Brewery expansion, packaging capabilities, and additional Guinness 0.0 processing capability.
The remaining investment supports in-market equipment such as taps and kegs for that beer to go through, as well as brand growth initiatives such as investments in our brand homes and other strategic projects. Given Guinness's growth potential, its profitability, and its very high ROIC, we believe this is a highly attractive deployment of capital. Guinness has also a strong track record of successful innovation, and our approach when it comes to innovation is very simple. We want to bring Guinness to more people, in more places, in more of their occasions, and Guinness 0.0 is a great example. The brand has already established strong momentum in core markets and is contributing materially to Guinness growth, especially in G.B. This year, we added over 1,000 Guinness 0.0 outlets in Ireland. We've added 3,500 MicroDraught points for Guinness 0.0 in G.B, and North America still remains largely untapped.
As this production capacity increases, we're going to extend distribution across more outlets, more channels, and more markets. At the same time, our Future Serve Program has really expanded the way that consumers can enjoy the craft and ritual of the distinctive Guinness experience. Guinness NitroSurge brings the iconic Guinness surge and settle right into the hands of consumers, no matter where they are. It has achieved impressive penetration in Ireland. Already, almost one in four households have a Guinness NitroSurge. MicroDraught is very interesting because it unlocks on-trade distribution for those outlets where a keg and draught traditional setup may not be practical or appropriate, and it helps those customers serve a perfect pint of Guinness to their customers. It has also been a big part of supporting the Guinness 0.0 rollout, as about a third of the volume for MicroDraught is actually Guinness 0.0.
All of those innovations together really strengthen the Guinness brand whilst increasing accessibility in more consumption occasions. We're not going to stop there, and today, I'm delighted to share the next stage of this journey with us. Building on other successful Guinness innovations, we're excited to introduce this, the next step in our Future Serve Program, Guinness NitroSurge Tap. It's going to launch in 2027, and it is built on the same ultrasonic technology as Nitro Surge, but it takes the experience much further. The device attaches to a 4.75-L Guinness keg, which really allows consumers to pour and serve perfectly fresh-draft Guinness in their homes with their friends. Consumers will enjoy the complete iconic surge and settle ritual with this innovation. Initially, we're going to launch Guinness NitroSurge Tap in Great Britain, in Ireland, and the U.S.
In other markets, our priority remains extending distribution of Guinness 0.0, extending distribution of Nitro Surge, and extending, of course, MicroDraught. This represents really, I suppose, another example of how Guinness's innovation is staying true to everything that makes the Guinness brand and product so distinctive and magical for our consumers, but also continuing to drive incremental occasions as well. In summary, Guinness combines an attractive category position. It's got strong momentum. It's got substantial global headroom. We're going to service this through our flexible route to market model with disciplined investment and supported by a strong innovation pipeline. This gives us confidence that Guinness can continue to deliver sustainable, profitable growth and create significant value over the years ahead. Thanks for your time today. Next, I would like to introduce John O'Keeffe, who will present our North America business. John.
Thanks, Sonya. Let's talk about North America. As many of you know, the North American market has been difficult. Within that, our performance has been deteriorating, with us losing share declines across around 65% of our business. Actually, before I get to talking about my first 100 days, I just do want to call out that Canada within that has been quite robust with strong top-line growth, good share growth. Really, I'm going to just focus this presentation on the U.S. I've been about 100 days in role. I've carried out a deep diagnostic on the business and already begun to make some interventions to course-correct and to make this business more competitive.
The drivers of underperformance range from long-term declines in some of our core brands due to overexposure to premium, underexposure to RTD and small formats, and an operating model that is quite cumbersome. I'm going to unpack each one of these drivers during the course of my presentation. Let me first of all, though, start with the first issue, which is a number of brands, I'm going to talk about three in particular, that have been in long-term decline. Let's talk about Crown Royal. It's our second biggest brand in the U.S. The strong growth of flavors has masked the underlying growth in this business. Crown Royal Deluxe is losing heartland consumers. Those heartland consumers are in very specific states. About 12 states in the U.S. account for 70% of the Deluxe decline.
Our number one strategic priority on Crown Deluxe is to stop the hemorrhaging and to hold on to those loyal consumers. How are we going to do that? First of all, we're going to introduce a unified, cohesive trademark campaign, which we've just launched in June, called Bring It. What I like about this campaign is it allows to activate two important platforms for those heartland consumers. NFL football, where we sponsor 18 NFL teams, we can activate locally, put drinks in hands, and secondly, country music lifestyle. This visual on the left, Realtree, is a hunting lifestyle brand. You may not be au fait with it. Our LCO sold $25 million. It's that kind of heartland activation that I think is going to be strategically important for us moving forward. When I look at the packaging, I think we can improve a lot.
On the one hand, I like the premium glass iconic bottle that we have. On the other hand, we've cheapened it by adding a plastic cap to it. We will be rectifying that. We have the inconsistent use of the purple iconic box on shelf, which reduces our on-shelf impact. We will further reduce that on-shelf impact by introducing a range of flavors with different colors. We need to implement a more cohesive brand identity, dialing up the iconic Deluxe purple. There is a role for flavors. It does bring in new consumers, we need to be more disciplined in how we do that. I'm particularly interested in the role for flavors and innovation in what it can do to support our core Deluxe brand in holding on to those heartland consumers.
Of course, putting Deluxe and flavors into much higher quality, especially higher quality small formats than what we've been doing thus far. The second brand, which has been in long-term decline, is Smirnoff. It's been losing share for eight years. Let's start with fixing the proposition. This is what we put out in the last five years. Inconsistency of campaign, chopping and changing it a lot. You cannot build brand distinctivity when you're that inconsistent. We are urgently working on a new cohesive trademark campaign that will start to rebuild the distinctivity of this brand the way we've done in other markets. Critically, we're going to start managing Smirnoff as a single trademark, both Smirnoff Core and Smirnoff Ice together. That's particularly important in the U.S., where we have historically been running them in two different divisions run by two different leaders, which is no longer the case.
I'll come back and talk about the operating model in a little while. As I've traveled around the U.S. in the last two months, I've been struck by how poor on shelf we look with Smirnoff. There's a number of packaging missteps that we've taken, which I'm currently undoing. We're going to move from recycled PET, which is cloudy and opaque, hard to see through, to virgin PET. Purity, after all, is at the heart of this proposition. We're going to have both Virgin PET and glass on shelves together. After all, different consumers require different packaging for different occasions. Finally, we're going to add back the handle on our biggest SKU, the 175, which frankly, without it, is too heavy to lift, not portable, and difficult to pour. In addition, we've had an array of flavors, 24 flavors.
It's too complex for a customer, it's too complex for a supply chain, and frankly, it's too complex for our consumer. We're going to have to deploy a more disciplined approach to how we use flavors within Smirnoff. I've also inherited a capacity constraint on small formats. I've approved a $20 million investment in CapEx, which has gone live, which means that not just for Smirnoff, but in fact for a number of our brands, including Crown, we will now have unlimited ability to go after our small format opportunity starting from the second half of this fiscal and closing out those distribution gaps. The third brand, which has been in long-term decline, is Captain Morgan. For the better part of a decade, we have been losing consumers. In fact, I feel we've lost a generation. Our legal drinking age of 29 is half of what that was in FY 2013.
I feel strongly we need to go back to the core DNA of what this brand is about. In its heyday in the U.S., Captain Morgan was about the instigator of good times, party, high energy. We are going to be bringing the captain back, starting with things like this 40-foot ship that we roll in on match day into various urban areas, getting drinks on hand, starting the party. We're going to bring the captain back on our core point of sale, even on our label, where we've lost the color and vibrancy and vitality of this brand, we are making changes. We're going back to simple serves. The number 1 serve for any rum drink in the U.S. is cola. We had that territory. We're going to regain it. We also need to crack RTDs. The latest innovation we have is Smirnoff Captain Morgan Sliced Coladas.
On the one hand, I like the fact that we're getting into coladas, which is an authentic rum offering. When you look at this packaging, I feel it doesn't pay enough rent to Captain Morgan. It doesn't amplify. In fact, you might be hard-pressed to actually identify it is from Captain Morgan. There's something in how we brought the mixes together that we need to significantly improve going forward, and we have started on that already. Three brands in long-term decline that require some fundamental fixes, and we're on the case. Let me talk to you about a different kind of brand, Don Julio. It's a fantastic brand that grew 40% in FY 2025. Okay. I recognize we're now in decline and losing share. I feel it's critical to regain and expand our quality and craft credentials.
Questions have been asked in the U.S. specifically about the quality of Don Julio. We've been at pains to answer it. We've spoken, and we've engaged in advocacy programs with tens of thousands of bar staff, thousands of influencers, and 124 million consumers in the last 12 months. I'm encouraged now that the consumer sentiment towards Don Julio is now at the levels it was 18 months ago. The other thing we need to do with Don Julio is keep it really culturally cool. Don Julio is the number 1 talked about spirit brand in the U.S., not tequila brand, spirit brand. We need to continue to work hard at keeping its cultural cachet.
Whether that's things like the FIFA 1942 pack, $35 million, sold out within two weeks, through to Lunar New Year packaging, which Stephanie would have shown you upstairs earlier, all the way through to 1942 being toasted at big celebratory moments like the Oscars. Working hard to keep its cultural credentials is an utmost priority. It's good to see that on the back of FIFA, we've gone back into share growth in the last seven to eight weeks in those markets where we've activated. We've seen the whole industry move towards small formats. We have a fantastic, distinctive set of small packaging for Don Julio. It's also really important we lean into this opportunity because Don Julio is the most multicultural brand that we have in the U.S., and that cohort of consumers right now is under particular economic stress.
This is a way to allow those consumers access what is a very aspirational brand. Again, closing out those distribution opportunities is top of mind, top of focus. Let's talk about the other tequila brand in our portfolio, which really is in different shape because it's been on the slide for longer. I would argue a lot of that is self-inflicted as we took multiple price increases after COVID. What I've been encouraged by really is this interesting combination of a competitive value proposition combines with awareness building. What FIFA has demonstrated to me is that when you activate at scale, you get out of a lock box, you get on the floor, you get close to consumers at the right price point, it can be resonant.
In fact, that FIFA activation has turned around a three-year share decline to winning share of total spirits for the last seven to eight weeks. I'm not declaring success in Casamigos, but this is an encouraging formula for us to pursue. I'm also encouraged about the traction we're getting with Casamigos Margaritas in the cocktail collection, which is growing high double-digit growth. In addition to Casamigos Margaritas in the 200 ml can, which when launched, was in the top 20 RTD spirit launches that year. Unfortunately, we had some packaging issues with our can, with the liner. It leaked. We've had to withdraw it from the market. Right thing to do. We're fixing it. We're getting it back out there before the year-end.
My bigger point, though, is that Casamigos, great tasting Casamigos Margaritas, whether it's in ready to serve or ready to drink, put a bartender quality in the right packaging format is very resonant with our consumers in getting traction. Let's talk and move beyond the portfolio and talk about our go-to-model organization. I mentioned that I found it cumbersome when I moved there. We're fixing that. Here are the fixes we're doing. We're moving from two divisions, Spirits and Beer, to moving to under a single commercial leader, where we have those reporting in, supported by a single set of support functions and one set of key accounts. That is going to improve our agility immensely.
Secondly, we're moving from organizing our Spirits divisions by regulatory market, open control franchise states, to organizing it by geography at state level, where we're going to have state-level decision rights, allowing us to be much more customer focused and agile. We're going to move from having Spirits and Beer, not having any synergy, to Spirits and Beer being sold by the one team to our national key accounts. Okay? We're going to have four Spirits divisions, one Guinness division, reporting into one commercial leader, supported by one set of support functions and one national key accounts. More agile, more efficient, more nimble. We're going to go from dedicated resource in our distributors, have been very focused on driving distribution, to reorganizing our distributor, rewiring them, and reincentivizing them to not just drive distribution, but to also drive point of sale.
All of that is going to be supported by a significant change in the leadership teams across North America and in the capabilities that I feel we need to go forward. Let's talk about growth. We have a number of brands growing. Gráinne mentioned Guinness. In its fourteenth consecutive quarter of share growth in North America, growing since 2023. Guinness Draught is the number one tap handle in New York, number one tap handle in Boston. We are still chasing a lot of growth. As Gráinne said, we haven't really gone after the Guinness 0.0 opportunity yet. We're getting after that in earnest. Ketel One, phenomenal brand. I really like the growth drivers that we have, the mid to cocktail platform, the fact that we use a lot of brand ambassadors in the on-premise through to the Espresso Martini machines that we've deployed widely across the U.S.
We can lean more into that. We're beginning to get a little bit of traction with Johnnie Walker. Right? Growing both the top line and share. Leaning into those areas of growth will also be a priority. Let's talk about RTDs. I'll be the first to admit that we're underexposed on the RTD category. It wasn't a priority in the past. It is now. Smirnoff Ice is almost a half a billion-dollar brand in the U.S., growing share on the top line 6%. I spoke about the cocktail collection through the prism of Casamigos Margaritas, but it's not just for Casamigos. We also have Ketel One and Bulleit and so forth. That's an interesting collection for us that's beginning to scale and get traction. Of course, I've talked about Casamigos Margarita in a can.
I feel the blueprint beginning to emerge on how we can play a bigger game in ready to drink and ready to serve in North America. How is all that going to come together? In FY 2027, my focus is on stemming share loss, becoming more competitive. We deliver that, we anticipate, and these are our assumptions. This is my assumptions, by the way, that we'll deliver mid-single digit NSV decline. In FY 2028, as we address some of those fundamental issues, we're going to move to holding share and deliver within that context, low single digit, and then FY 2029, start winning share.
Within Spirits, we're going to restore competitiveness to some of those fundamental fixes I've just talked about and some of those brands that are long-term decline, as well as get growth back in those more recently declining Spirit brands, as well as leaning into where we have momentum. RTD, we've got good growth, good momentum. We need to scale it. Finally, we need to lean in on that momentum we have in Guinness. My focus is on the next 12 months on making the interventions across the portfolio, making the interventions across the brand and the operating model, and make interventions across the leadership team, all in service of getting this business more competitive again. Thank you. With that, I'm going to hand to Alvaro. Thank you.
Thank you, John. Hi, everybody. Let's go into Latin America and Caribbean. I want to leave you with four key messages. First, the prize. Latin America is a dynamic RTD and Spirits market, and we lead the categories that are growing. Second, the proof. The category strategies that Cristina and her team outlined during today, we have been already executing that across many markets in Latin America. We have rebuilt our portfolio, and as a consequence of that, we are growing volume and value together, and we have expanded operating profit dollars faster than NSV. Third, the runway. We have over $10 billion of locally produced spirits in Latin America, an opportunity that historically we haven't tapped into it, but we are doing it now, and we are continuing making progress on that.
Last one, this is one of the most important takeaways that I really want you to take, is the system, our operating model. We have been building and investing in capabilities across the region to build a more resilient business, a business that can perform when we have tailwinds, but also a business that can perform in economic downturns where the consumer is under pressure. Let's get into the market and the price and our performance. This is a $25 billion market. We hold 22% of market share. We have almost 3x the market share of our next competitor across the region, and we continue outperforming the market. We've been really focused during the last couple of years on bringing back volume as part of our top-line growth equation, and we are making progress on that as well.
The market was down in volume and spirits 1%, we were up 3%. Spirits and RTD combined, the market was up 2%, and we were up 8%. Now moving into our performance of fiscal year 2026. We were up 3% in volume, 7.7% in top line, and operating profit growing almost twice the rate over our top-line number. That performance did not come from everywhere. It mainly come from three categories. Before getting to the specific numbers here, one of the most important decisions that we have been taking across Latin America is to be really focused on fewer priorities, but to invest to drive the scale and the impact that we need. 90% of our marketing spend in Latin America is behind five trademarks: Johnnie Walker, Buchanan's, Old Parr, Don Julio, and Smirnoff, and Cachaça in Brazil.
That concentration is really helping us to drive share gains across the core categories at once instead of trying to be friends everywhere. Whiskey is our number one category. We are the number one player. We are gaining share, in a few seconds, I'm gonna tell you what are we doing in whiskey as a category. Vodka growing 19%, gaining 269 basis points of market share, and this is Smirnoff plus RTD. Now this is the fastest gaining share category that we have in our portfolio. Tequila, growing, but we are number two. We are not satisfied. This has been one of the strategic tension points that we have been dealing actually during the last three years. I will come back to it to let you know what are we doing about it. Let's start with whiskey, our heartland.
Whiskey is by far the largest category in Latin America, over $6 billion in retail sales value. Julie, during the breakout, showed the category strategy. I'm gonna tell you what are we doing and how we are executing that across Latin America. We rebuilt the entire portfolio across mainly three price tiers. Below $10 to drive accessibility with formats and with two strategic value plays, White Horse and Black & White, which is really helping us to drive recruitment into the category. Between $ 10 and $20 with real intentional focus behind Johnnie Walker Red Label. This is the segment of the market in which the majority of the volume sits. Johnnie Walker Red Label and formats with Old Parr are really helping us to really capture, and to re-recruit more consumers into this price tier.
Between $ 20 and $80, which is the core part of our portfolio, Johnnie Walker Black, Buchanan's, and our super-premium variants across the region, which the most relevant ones are Johnnie Walker Gold Label and Buchanan's 18. Three priority trademarks, two very strategic value plays. Here is an example of what the price and pack architecture has returned to us. This is very important for me to take you through. This is not just about pricing repositioning. This is having the right brand and the right format with the right price in the right channel. This is beyond just repositioning pricing. You can see here the results. Volume up 28%, NSV up 21%, and gross profit dollars up 18%. In whisky, we have rebuilt our leadership. Now let us talk about vodka, including RTDs.
This is one of the most exciting categories right now in the region. First, RTDs. In RTDs, right now we are focusing on driving the scale. We are now in Latin America, the number one player in RTD, and Smirnoff Ice is the number one brand and the fastest-growing brand across the region. Second, we've been focusing on creating iconic drinks to really recruit consumers from local espresso spirits. Brazil is a great example of that with Caipiroska. Potentially, many of you are familiar with that serve. That is one of the most popular serves in Brazil. What it's doing is really disrupting cachaça. Cachaça is cane. In the on-trade, it's really helping us to recruit consumers at a scale just by driving that serve consistently across the market. Third, flavors.
Flavors, we're being very intentional to design products to disrupt, again, these local consumption occasions. This is the example of Smirnoff Summer in Colombia, which is really doing that. 60% of buyers of Smirnoff Summer in Colombia are new to vodka category, and 40% of them are switching from Aguardiente. Finally, with innovation, we're very excited about this project, which is Smirnoff Ultra. Again, with the intent of recruit from out of vodka category. It's a smoother version of Smirnoff, lower ABV, with a splash of coconut water. Thinking about not just the liquid, thinking about the serve, and how that serve and that drink will continue recruiting from that massive value pool, which is cane in Brazil. The summary on vodka is, this is not vodka gaining share of vodka.
This is Smirnoff really tapping into local consumer consumption occasions, especially in Colombia and in Brazil. Tequila. As I said at the beginning, this has been one of the biggest tension points, but we are making progress. The main issue with tequila Sorry, I'm not doing anything. Can we go back to tequila, please? In tequila, we were clearly over-indexed to super-premium. Don Julio, as a trademark in Mexico, used to be mainly one variant, which was Don Julio 70, which played just in the super-premium segment of the market. We were overexposed, especially in a category that was in decline and where the consumer was under pressure. 51% of the total volume of the market sits below the $30 price tier, and we were not playing there. That was one of the few pockets of growth of spirits in Mexico.
What we did, we did three moves. We repositioned Don Julio 70 to be more competitive with Maestro Dobel, which is the leader of the premium segment. Second, we repositioned Don Julio Blanco to be the most aspirational variant and the entry premium price point in the market. Third, we launched formats, specifically two formats, 375 ml on Don Julio 70 and Don Julio Blanco to play in the $25 price tier and in the $15 price tier. With that, now we are maximizing the power of Don Julio as a trademark, but also we are competing across all price tiers in the category. What have been the outcome of that, or the results? It's early stages, but it's promising. Since December, every single month, we have been outperforming the market. The market share moved from 13% in July 2025 to 17% in May 2026.
We are making progress. The job is not done yet in tequila in Mexico, but we will continue delivering the strategy, executing the strategy, to make sure that we are playing and recruiting consumers and index into the brand. Now, let's move into the system, which is the operating framework. The slide that you are seeing here is an example of Brazil, but we are running the same system, the same operating framework across all markets in Latin America. We've been focusing on building and investing behind three core capabilities: RGM, revenue growth management, IBP, integrated business planning, and commercial excellence. On RGM, as I said at the beginning, it's a holistic approach in how we are going to meet the consumer where the consumer is, which is way beyond just price and reposition.
On IBP, with integrated business planning, we are having a better pulse of the real consumption demand of the market, which is helping us to have better predictability, to be more agile in how we are reacting to how the consumer is behaving and changing, and more importantly, to have one commercial end-to-end system, marketing, sales, and supply working as one single unit. Now, let me pause on stock in trade. You can see the results of the different capabilities that we are delivering in the market. On stock in trade, we've been expanding our stock in trade monitoring. You can see the example in Brazil, moving from 67%- 83%. We have removed $20 million of stock in trade in Tier 1 customers. As a consequence of that, we have moved from 70 days to 50 days of days of coverage.
In Latin America, just to give you an example of what is happening in Latin America, our coverage right now is 91%. We have removed around $130 million over the last two years on stock in trade in Tier 1 customers, and we have moved from 105 days to 75 days of days of coverage. The capabilities that we are building Plus the robustness of our control environment has given us the confidence that we will continue sustaining this in the future. Going back to the commercial excellence, on-trade has been a key priority area for us. As Dave said at the beginning, it's a priority for the company, it's a priority for Latin America. We have improved our outlet segmentation. We have more feet on the street. We have now prioritized 40,000 outlets, and you can see the KPIs and the improvement there.
More than 13% of sell-in growth, 3x the rate of sale versus the outlets that we are not covering. As a consequence of that, we are improving our service, 94% of OTIF, but more importantly, what the real feedback is, what the customers are saying. In the Advanta survey, Brazil moved from the 20th place to 11th place in one year. Still a lot of room for improvement. This is, for me, what really gives me the confidence around how we are going to continue shaping the future of the region. As you can see, the results are not a consequence of a good year. It's the output of a consistent system across the region. Now, what is the future? What is the runway? What we are excited about. We will continue. There are three things that are not a forecast.
One, the first one, we will continue scaling the category strategies to the rest of the markets in Latin America. Second, RTDs. Exciting market, $3 .5 billion, growing at 24%, and we have the number one brand. Third, which is one of the most exciting ones, as I said at the beginning, locally produced spirits. Cachaça in Brazil, aguardente in Colombia, rum across the region. This is not a promise. It's happening right now. As I said at the beginning, Aguardiente is recruiting consumers from Cane Aguardiente in Colombia. The Caipiroska is recruiting from Cachaça in Brazil, and Black & White and Old Parr are recruiting rum consumers. The strategy is in action. That is what we are doing in Latin America. We are moving from being an international leaders player to be the most competitive player in total spirits and RTD.
With that, I will hand over to Ewan. Thank you.
Thank you, Alvaro. Okay, good afternoon, everyone. Capital deployment. I'm going to share with you over just five slides how we are looking at improving capital deployment alongside customer service to drive improved returns and deliver a much more competitive Diageo. Every drop of liquid we distill, every barrel we choose to fill, every pallet that we make and move around the world has to work harder for returns on the capital, our capital, your capital invested in this business. It's an investment portfolio and needs to be managed accordingly. I'm going to unpack for you across how we are resizing and reshaping our operational footprint and the returns that will come with that. Our capital deployment, where is that CapEx going, and what returns are we expecting?
Our working capital, I will talk about full working capital, so finished goods in our days inventory, but I will also highlight, in particular, something you're all interested in, which is a large amount of capital that's already invested in our distilled spirits and maturing liquids. I'll finish with customer service and give you an update from Dave's comments at the half year, where we sit and what work we've still got to do. Okay. First up, as demand and the market has changed and our growth assumptions have changed, we have to take the difficult decisions around about our operational footprint. Those decisions are based on the right asset utilization, structurally getting the cost right for the future, improving the resilience of our business, and improving customer service. They are the principles that lie behind that decision.
We've had to take some of those difficult decisions that put us into $ 300 million of cost, including some of the impairment charges that you heard Dave and Nik talk about earlier today. That's involved impairing three of 34 sites in Scotland around our Scotch distilling footprint, one of three tequila sites, and two of five North American distilling sites. Alongside that, we've been running over the last few years, you've heard about the supply agility program that became part of Accelerate. As you look at the delivery on that, this is in our spirits packaging network in the center of the presentation. We've been against those principles I outlined, optimizing that for the future. Quite significant changes in North America, moving from seven to three sites, including the new site that was built in Alabama.
Europe, the sale of the Santa Vittoria site, but consolidating into highly utilized, high performing assets with a lot of supply chain agility in Scotland. In India, a pretty remarkable scale of transformation, which did include, in this occasion, some third-party partner sites. We're moving from 100 - 35 sites, that is all delivered and in place. Only eight of those 35 are Diageo owned. The rest are our partners that we work with across India to deliver our service to customer. Having done all of that delivers the returns on the savings where about $135 million is already in the recurring savings as we close FY 2026. As you'll hear from Nik later, as part of the overall savings delivery, there's $150 million that will come through over the three-year plan period.
There's more that actually comes through against that because we've been impacting our distilled and the working capital on our balance sheet that will flow off the balance sheet as the liquid hits the P&L in the future. Okay. Disciplined, dynamic, and returns-based capital deployment on CapEx. That's the approach that we continue to take, and we are strengthening as part of the strategy and the operating framework. You've heard already from Dave and Nik around it being at $1.25 billion. Broadly, half of it will be supporting growth. Of the $3.75 billion that goes in over the next three years of invested capital, just under $1 billion of that is invested in Guinness and the rest is supporting growth.
Some highlights that I called out were particularly around, you heard in the breakout with Mark Sandys, unless you were online, that we are investing very selectively in RTD. We have good capacity and strong networks en route to markets. There are some selective investments, particularly in G.B. market, in Europe, where we'll strengthen that. In North America, you heard from John about the importance of that investment in small formats that's already underway, and that cash will go through this year as we bring that capability online. Also, as you'll hear as I talk in a further slide around maturing inventory, as we've been looking at our inventories and the amount of liquid that we will choose to still distill, we're reducing our barrel versus the prior three-year period. We're reducing it by more than 50% in the forward three-year cycle.
A significant intervention that looks at what the right sizing is as we move through. Very selective capabilities around our cost reduction and the capabilities to make us a more competitive organization, they need to come through. They're absolutely increasing in the digital space as the SAP S/4HANA costs come down. We're making sure that we are selectively returns-based, driving the right prioritization of those investments in the business in line with the deliverable of the three-year plan. Working capital efficiency. As it stands today, we have moved from 110 DIO. We've moved it to 90. We've got a little bit that sat in today that Nik explained earlier today, where we had the SAP S/4HANA inventory to manage through the period of downtime in production during July. We also had some Middle East protection that was in. Underlying is at 90 days.
The move from 110 to 90 days essentially is moving us from just over three turns to four over inventory in the year. Making that capital work much harder for us in terms of how we're delivering that. That is coming from the investments that we've been making in advanced supply and demand planning, the IBP process, so the integrated business planning process, and ensuring that we are using machine learning, artificial intelligence, having the right data feeds that are combining with market intelligence to make the choices and decisions for our business. When we make choices to put in place that working capital, it has to make sure that it's delivering strongly.
When I come to the customer service slide, you'll see how that's not necessarily been the case because of the maturity of some of our processes and capabilities and competency in the organization, and how we're fixing that. I will say that already the go-to-market organization has significantly shifted the culture in the company and the approach to moving things. We still, as John has said, and as Alvaro said, we've still got a long way to go, but already those signs are coming through strongly that people understand in the business that when we take decisions around shareholder capital and we invest it to get the returns, we have to make sure that is done with very clear discipline building blocks that we have then belief will come through. We don't generate the slow and obsolete type goods that we're driving here, almost double-digit DIO. Right.
That is an opportunity. We're confident in the work that we're doing around the portfolio segmentation, the rationalization and focus of that portfolio, and the systems and the people capabilities that will take that to 85 days. Each day is worth about $20 million. We have an ambition to take that below 80, but we need to prove that we can do that, and we need to bring that through. I look forward to talking to you in the future on how we move that through. Go-to-market is strengthening that point of accountability and making sure the decisions are much more integrated with the customer at the center of it. When I started around about working capital returns, customer service, they come together to make us have better returns and a more competitive business.
I said earlier, I commented around the mindset and how we think about this. This is already deployed shareholder capital, $8.5 billion of maturing stock. It's a sizable competitive advantage if it is deployed correctly. It's already deployed. It doesn't mean that we can't make the returns even better than the choices we've already made. One of the areas I wanted to highlight was something I am very proud of. It's already delivered results. It was recognized with the Gartner Power of the Profession across all industries and sectors this year in 2026, which was our Scotch Intelligence Platform that is very quickly now elevating and extending into being our Spirits Intelligence Platform. What that has already done in FY 2026 is give us $100 million in our P&L of further NSP. How has it done that?
We've been able to take our allocated Scotch, which tend to be some of our single malts and some of our deeper aged, so the higher gross profit dollar parts of our portfolio. As that's allocated out at the start of a year, we need to make sure we're remaining dynamic in that year to the changing market conditions, the impact of our activations in the markets, and is it selling through and stopping it being at risk of sitting in a warehouse after it's been bottled and tying up capital. Pre-bottling, the allocation is done dynamically with precision engines and artificial intelligence within that platform. It looks at what's happening in rate of sale in every market in the world, looks at pricing, and it automatically recommends decisions through to then change the allocations.
It's an online trading marketplace between the markets where they can move inventory away because they can't sell it and someone else can take it. That's given us $ 100 million of additional sales in FY 2026 and will continue to scale and give benefit. The second thing that the Scotch or now the Spirits Intelligence Platform does is it looks at and it's built with the relevant digital twin information, and it will get better and better. We are now confident to see that as we take decisions on how we put liquid into barrel and into our warehousing network in Scotland, it now understands the angel share and the losses and how that changes in different parts of a warehouse individually from top to bottom or in different locations and geographies. It directs our highest value, highest return inventories to the right locations to minimize the losses.
That is happening automatically with decisions and artificial intelligence and learning. There is still humans in the loop. We will get more and more confident for them to start to move out, but it is a lot of capital, so we need to make sure that we make really great decisions. As I said, we will take that across tequila and North American whiskeys and be able to then take and harvest those benefits, which are on shorter time cycles. The second piece is, we have clearly been taking some decisions on the assets that we will have, but the utilization of those assets, we have had to accept that some of them will be running at lower utilizations. That is the capital discipline that we need to make sure that we are taking the business, even though some of those decisions are hard.
Okay, we are here to protect capital, and sometimes that means that the assets have to be adjusted. Moving forward, you can see in the central chart the shape of the capital that we have had historically. This is, if you think of net fill, as we empty out of that maturing inventory for bottling, how much are we choosing to kind of then reduce the inventory or how much are we choosing to put in? You will see that in FY 2025, we were forced to put in significant incremental in. There is been a big correction in FY 2026, but the sustainable approach, as you see, this is an estimate because bottling changes and then you have got to stay dynamic with how you distill through the year, and we are doing that much more frequently. We estimate around $700 million will go in over the three-year pilot period into the right areas for returns.
We scaled back production and distillation. That has been done across, in particular, I would call out Scotch, North American whiskeys, and tequila. We are at the minimum requirements for future blends and support of growth. Given the competitive advantage that we have in that, we want to make sure that for great brands like Johnnie Walker, Don Julio, Crown, Bulleit, that we have the liquids available to deliver the quality of liquid and the quantities for future growth. A very disciplined approach, and we adjust and look at that on a very frequent basis. Tequila monthly, Scotch biannually, and North American whiskey is quarterly. Okay? You have to make sure you look at the whole value stream and how we do that, but that is driven, and those decisions are taken at CEO, CFO, and supply level on a regular basis and now centralized globally.
I will finish on bringing it together under customer service. It is clear, Dave was very honest and transparent, that the business has not been running in an end-to-end fashion with its strategy and its operating model to look at how we deliver best for our customer. We have been focused on that over the last six months. We have been able to make some improvements around integrated business planning, simplifying and standardizing KPIs globally, bringing more visibility to the improvement plans and where the challenges are to drive quick improvements. We have got some more systemic things to be able to fix that will take us a bit longer. Whilst there is some green shoots, it is not good enough, and it has to get a lot better. By doing that, we will improve our working capital, and we will be able to drive the competitiveness of the business.
I would call out in particular forecast bias. As a business globally, we were running at 10%, and it was 10% biased to overset. Essentially, we're putting in place inventory for a much more ambitious plan than the realities, and we're carrying the working capital inefficiencies, whether it be in slow, obsolete, or potentially written off goods, or it be the cost of the warehousing, the efficiency of that warehousing, and the transport networks. We need to get a lot leaner, and we need to deliver the value and the returns from getting a lot leaner. We've made quite a dramatic improvement. Needs to be sustained and needs to be underpinned to make sure that that can be delivered, and in particular through the Integrated Business Planning process and the execution.
Alvaro did talk to some of the major improvements that came through in Latin America and the Caribbean. They are further ahead. They've been working on it quite, with a lot of discipline, a lot of sponsorship from Alvaro and the team to make sure as an end-to-end business, everybody is focused on it. They've had the earlier investments when it comes to the advanced supply and demand planning tools. They've up-weighted their capabilities and the seniority of some of the people taking the decisions, particularly in demand planning and the discipline to ensure you've got the activations and the building blocks that will deliver from the working capital that gets put in place. If I look at how they left this fiscal year, they're up at 98% on time, 97% in full. Very strong performance. The forecast accuracy is one of the best that we've got globally.
It's over 70%, and its forecast bias has improved from pretty high double digit to low single digit across Latin America. The big focus has been, as Alvaro said, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, but the culture is there across that region, and we need to learn from that and take those learnings very quickly across the rest of Diageo, and that's where we're focused. A couple of grounding in some of the realities in big markets in terms of the improvement we've still got to drive. If you did forecast bias in North America, it was 6%, again, biased to then underselling against it in each one, 7% in Q3. John has gone in very quickly to make sure that the discipline is there in terms of the decision-making, and ensuring that we can then quickly correct to something that's much more realistic to the demand that's coming through.
Therefore, the working capital and the returns can sit from a capital deployment against that. In G.B., the example is more around execution. The biggest example on that Pareto chart of where the biggest loss on time in full, in Q4, was on fulfillment execution. Our order to cash process, our customer operations, and our supply chain execution when it comes to case pick, running of the transport network. There are significant areas of improvement, and that will drive the returns on the working capital improvement as well. Not somewhere to be proud, not somewhere to be satisfied, but very clear on where the improvements can come, and the operating model is again driving the early shift in the business, and now we need to kick on and deliver against that.
As I started, essentially every barrel, every drop, every case that gets made to then move around the world has to have discipline, has to have returns on capital, and has to be dynamically reviewed so that it adjusts to what's happening and what's playing out in front of us with the market. That's me. Thank you. I'll hand over to Nik.
A lot to digest there over the last several hours. What I'm going to try and do is bring this together in terms of how we look at the next three years in terms of our financials, and what that means in terms of an investment case, an investment thesis. As you all can look at Diageo from an angle of being a more competitive but more focused on returns and value creation for our shareholders. If you start at the top line, and we all know growth is critically important, right? It's critically important that we're focused on sustainable growth and profitable growth. When we're looking at it from an angle of what are the building blocks, you've heard from John, right? Talking about North America.
It has been challenged, but there's clearly some strong interventions around how do we build for a more competitive offering in that market, as well as a simplified go-to market structure. The focus of the plan is to start stemming the share loss, get to holding share, and then growing share. Right? Clearly, as John highlighted, we are looking at a mid-single-digit decline to a low single-digit decline, and then getting to a flat performance in North America over the three years. That's what this algorithm starts with in terms of that first big market for us, North America. When we look at the rest of the world, clearly, we are seeing 3%-5% growth on a sustainable level across those markets. All right? This is also about continuing to gain share in those markets, all right, across the board. You've seen some examples of that.
Alvaro brought that to life in terms of how we're looking at both volume and value share. Very importantly, too, keep in mind that particularly in India, supported by what we're seeing as good tailwinds from a demographic perspective, as well as the FTA, as well as Latin America, these are volume-led plans as well. I think that's very important for you to keep in mind. What does that mean then for the group as a whole? We're looking at circa flat to growing 1.5%, growing 2.5%. If you really look at it from an angle of where will we be when we exit 2029, we're looking at an exit 2029 of about 2.5%-3% top-line growth, but that is with North America flat. Keep that in mind as we go back to some of the stuff that Hannah talked about.
Clearly, if we see consumer confidence come back, there is that correlation that she talked about that we have seen historically, if that historic bias plays out into the future as well, there could be some incremental improvements there. At least for now, this is what we see as the top-line growth algorithm. Let me now start walking down through the P&L, because I want to make sure you'll get grounded in each one of the lines through. Gross profit. All right. I think there's a couple of myths that have been out there in terms of the fact that gross margin percentages are going to decline. Let me come back to that. Very importantly, we are focused on growing gross profit dollars. All right?
In fact, gross margin percentage obsession, you'll have heard me talk about, has created a lot of issues for us in the past. That's not to say it's not an important metric, but again, it's always an outcome. It's a mathematical calculation. We want to grow our gross profit dollars, all right? Why is there a belief that with RTDs and playing a broader portfolio, we are going to drop our gross profit dollars? No, we're going to grow our gross profit dollars. All right? That is very clear in our plan. Why do we also feel the gross margin percentage at 60% + can be maintained and growing going forward as we look at this post the three-year period? There is volume growth that is coming through in this plan. That volume growth supports fixed cost recovery. Clearly that supports margin percentage and gross profit dollars.
You have got a very strong focus as you think about an improving mix, both from a category perspective as well as a country mix perspective, as North America continues to recover, right? Remember, we are playing the full spectrum, so that doesn't mean it's an either/or strategy. It's an and strategy. All right? The third element is the productivity savings that Ewan talked about that will also support that. We believe gross profit dollars growing and most importantly, maintaining that 60%+ gross profit margin is what we have for the next three years. All right. As we look further down, let's go to the next big line, which is A&P. Do we have the right levels of investment? More importantly, a question around have we cut too deep? Let me first start with the second element. We have not cut too deep.
We've talked a lot about the fact that there was a lot of non-working dollars that was duplication, waste, that we've been able to pull out through the Accelerate program and a strong focus across the business around eliminating that. That's been about $ 300 million that we've been able to take out from the business. That's not to say there isn't more to go for as we continue to think about the opportunities in that space. We have also reprioritized investments for where we see the growth. We have been returns-focused. We have pulled back on investments where I've talked about the fact that it was actually losing money for us and losing money for our customers. Clearly not a good use of cash or capital or investments.
Clearly, having done all that, we feel the level that we are at is very much a sustainable level of dollar spend. I am talking about roughly in this ballpark, right? It is not about an absolute dollar staying at $3.2 billion or $3.1 billion or $3 billion. Ballpark, we are in the right area. What does that mean? You guys love to model. An outcome or an output of that is a circa 16%, right? We are not driving for a 16% or a 17% or a 15%. We are talking about the dollars that we spend and how well does that generate returns, sufficiency through the line, both above the line and below the line. End-to-end is the way we are looking at it. Overheads or SG&A.
I am going to break this out a little bit over here just to make sure that it will be grounded and clear. We are talking, as Dave highlighted, getting to an overhead as a percentage of our revenue of about 10.5%, putting us in that top quartile group of companies. What have we done? Well, Dave talked about the fact that we have made significant progress already to be able to implement that and move at speed. There will be some areas that will take a little longer, particularly as we look at the GDS piece, but these will start coming through as well. That is about $1 billion of savings that we are going to have. $850 of that is in what we are calling overheads, both in COGS and in SG&A. There is an element of overhead that sits in COGS as well.
That is about $850 million in total. We have got another productivity element that Ewan talked about of another $150 million. In total, you are looking at $1 billion for an overall cost of about $1.2 billion. I am going to come back to that when I talk about cash. We have already taken a big chunk of that. About 70% of that has gone through our P&L in 2026 that we talked about this morning, about circa $752 million of a charge on restructuring. This will really help as well as we look at the next line of our P&L, which is what does that mean in terms of operating profit. For us, when we are looking at operating profit, again, operating profit dollars will grow. Top line growth, we talked about, but most importantly, gross profit dollars improving.
You have got the investment that we need in A&P, and you have got significant savings coming out of your SG&A line. That supports operating profit dollars growth at a mid-single-digit range over that three-year period on a CAGR basis. There will be slight ups and downs, and I will talk about why that is. If you looked at that previous slide, just remind yourselves that we talked about that savings coming through. About 40% of that will come through in 2027. Another 55% of that will come through in 2028. You have got the bulk of that coming through in the next two years to really support that operating profit growth of circa mid-single-digit. Again, mathematically, that means our operating margin percentage will expand.
Again, the fact that people talk about the fact that our margins need to suffer, our margins do not need to suffer. All right. Both at the gross profit level, more importantly, growing operating profit margin, critically, dollar growth. Free cash flow. Let me just ground everybody again here in terms of what we're talking about. 2026 was a great year. We had a strong focus on cash. We were able to deliver $ 3.2 billion. Two things I would call out to make sure that we're grounded on the right number as we look at this on a recurring basis going forward. All the numbers that I've talked to you about so far are on the basis as if the EABL divestiture has happened as of July 1. Okay.
When you look at this on a go-forward basis, keep in mind there's about $ 300 million of free cash flow that is delivered from the EABL business. That automatically brings that $ 3.2 billion number down to $ 2.9 billion. We did have a one-off tax benefit in terms of historic refunds that we received in 2026, which obviously will not recur. Your baseline is at $ 2.8 billion when you exclude EABL and that historic item. When you look at 2027, clearly 2027 is going to be impacted by the cash costs of the restructuring program of about $ 850 million. Right. When you look forward, you're going to see that number grow. I've seen some notes come out already that talk about, oh, cash is coming down by $2 billion.
Keep in mind, $ 900 million of that is just that rebasing when you take out EABL. That's just a like for like. You do have an $ 850 million restructuring charge. Let's step back and look at this from a payback perspective. We're delivering about $1 billion in savings for an $ 850 million cash charge. I don't think that's a bad use of capital in terms of a payback and a return. To make this business more competitive, more agile as we look forward. You heard Ewan talk about being disciplined and dynamic around our CapEx. Returns focused. You could already seen that in 2026, where we brought our CapEx down to circa just under $ 1.2 billion. We have the ability to do that. A lot of our investments that we're looking at going forward is very much around capacity, capability building, cost reduction programs.
There is a regulatory maintenance piece, et cetera, that's in there as well, but that's all well-funded in that $ 1.25 billion that we've put into the model for the next three years, and we're working towards that target. What does that mean when you pull it all together in terms of a growth algorithm? You're looking at low single-digit organic net sales growth. I talked about that. Flat, 1.5%, 2.5%, a CAGR of somewhere around that 1.5% with that assumption around North America. Mid single-digit operating profit growth. I walked you through that.
We would expect EPS growth to be ahead of operating profit growth on an FX neutral basis for translation, and that cumulative free cash flow that I explained of circa $8 billion, but you've got that like for like piece as well as the impact built in for the $ 850 million of restructuring cost. We've had a very disciplined and clear capital allocation focus. I think we've actually just not stuck to it as we should have. I don't think it's really a change in how we think about it outside of the fact that I think when we're thinking about investment for growth, we're very much returns focused, right?
If you think about that first bucket, where we talked about what we need to do for A&P, we've talked about what we need to do for CapEx, we've talked about what we need to do for maturing liquid. That maturing liquid piece you've seen come through in terms of what we've done, in terms of a correction of that baseline, but more importantly, a process that's a lot more dynamic and flexible as we think about what we're laying down for the future. And Ewan talked about that, whether it's monthly, quarterly, or biannual cadences with which we're looking at it. A lot more dynamic in terms of what we're doing. Clearly, we've got a plan that is well-funded from the perspective of investment that we want to make in the business. We want to return cash to shareholders.
There's a value creation opportunity here as we continue to look at that, and I'll come back to that in a moment. I think it would have been if I didn't have that last box on the chart, because you all would automatically assume that we're trying to not talk about it, but let me be very clear. This is an organic turnaround story. This is not about us going out to do any acquisitions. All right? It's really the first two boxes that we're talking about. The first box is fully funded. What does that mean in terms of that second box? Dave talked about this in the opening.
The fact that we've been able to, with strong free cash flow generation and a rebasing of our dividend policy, be able to bring down our leverage from 3.4 x at the end of 2025 to 3.1 x at the end of 2026. All right? More importantly, as we know that disposal proceeds are going to come in for the two transactions that we have announced, about a 0.25 x from the EABL transaction, and about a 0.1 x benefit from the RCD transaction. That, along with the free cash flow delivery, will help us get to the midpoint of our target range. This is about a year earlier than what we had even communicated to you all last year. Strong progress in that area.
More importantly, absent any actions, which as Dave said That's a nice problem for our board members to have as we look forward, right? We can actually get down to 2 x by the end of 2029. All right? I don't expect we'd do that. Why? Because quite honestly, we don't want to have an inefficient capital structure either, right? We do believe that 2.5x- 3 x net debt to adjusted EBITDA is the right target leverage, but it is one that we will review annually and make sure is it fit for purpose as we continue to look at the macro environment. For today, with that, we clearly have a lot more financial flexibility to make the right choices and allow the board to make the right choices to think about how do we return excess cash to shareholders.
I.e., do we increase our dividend payout? Do we do share buybacks? I don't think it's a binary or decision. Again, it could be a combination, so it could be an end decision as well. More to come on that. I'm sure you're looking to want to build things into your model. Don't ask us more about it. When we get to that point, we will be able to share with you in a very nice way how we will think about that. The whole focus around cash returns to shareholders and a capital allocation policy that's clear and disciplined is very much intact. 2027 guidance. No surprise from some of the stuff that you've seen that I've highlighted.
We are guiding for broadly flat organic net sales growth, supported by low to mid single digit operating profit growth and free cash flow of $2 billion after the cash charge for the restructuring. We expect the leverage, as I said, to be set at the midpoint of our stated range of 2.5x-3x . With that, I'm going to leave you with three things, right? 2027 profit growth and operating profit dollars growth in that low to mid single digit. Number two, we do not need a long-term margin reset. Hopefully, I've been able to demonstrate that to you from both a gross and a growing over the three-year operating profit perspective, dollars and margin.
Three, we are going to have a lot more flexibility when you think about the leverage coming down at a much faster pace to allow us to do the right things for our shareholders as we look forward. With that, Dave, I'm going to hand over back to you.
All right. Here we go. All right. Thank you. The last, little bit, really, and we're running up, dare I say, ahead of time, after all that focus on being timely. We're on time, which is good. The final thing I said this morning was the simplification and the alignment of incentives. What you see on this one chart is how we were in FY 2026, both at the leadership and the broader team level from an annual and a long-term perspective on what it is we're moving to in terms of 2027. From a REM policy point of view, Susan is out consulting at the minute. Our new strategy for Nik and I will be voted on in November. Notwithstanding whatever might happen in that space, this is what we're doing for the teams inside Diageo.
At the leadership level, I've already told you NSV operating profit and those individual objectives. If you're a business group president, your first individual objective is the delivery of your region as part of that total. Longer-term incentives, cumulative cash flow, EPS, and return on invested capital. That's it. Importantly, elsewhere in our business, we're putting the accountability and the alignment where the activity is. If you're sitting in our go-to-market organization, you will get your bonus based on how you delivered your part of the organization and not be linked to what's going on somewhere else in the business that you can have no impact on whatsoever. I think at the leadership level, you'll see the massive simplification that the board are trying to drive for the long-term key performance indicators. We haven't really changed our REM policy for, I think it's 12 years.
There's quite a simplification involved in the long-term incentive. Hopefully, you see on the right-hand side a simplification and alignment to what it is we've talked about as the investment thesis for Diageo. Okay. In the old model, when you were taught communications, you had that thing, which is, at the start, you tell them what you're going to tell them, then you tell them, then you come back, and you tell them what you told them. Anybody else have that training? Cool. Just to recap, what did we say at the start? I hope you Two strategic battlegrounds, Spirits, including RTD, and Guinness. We see growth in both, and we see an ability to win share in both. A number of you have said to me before, "Do you think you can win in RTDs?" Hopefully, you now realize that we're number two.
We're growing strong double digits, and we're in the fastest-growing part of the market, and we're committed to do it. We've got to do more. You understand why we see RTDs very much part of the Spirit occasion, and that's a big change for us. Reassurance for you that premiumization is still very much part of it. You will see some more when you go down to the innovation center, but we are going to think about how we activate a broader portfolio. We have a unique portfolio as Diageo, and we want to use it much more proactively than perhaps we've done in the past. The way that we do that is we bring those category strategies, that category lens on top of those brilliant brands in order to manage the portfolio much more proactively. John was very open with you.
I said at the start, we're going to be very transparent. We have some challenges in North America. Some of them are longstanding, some of them are more recent. We know what we want to do. It's going to take some time. We've got a very committed team there. We've made some very big interventions. North America is a big market. Making changes takes some time, but we're not shy about recognizing where we start from. As we lean in and do that and support John in the turnaround, we continue to accelerate growth in the rest of the world. Nik said it again, we're not looking for a profit reset as we walk through that turnaround. Given what we've done across the business both this year but going forward, we're going to invest $ 1.2 billion, as you heard, in that restructuring program.
The details you've seen and Nik has just talked about, but that saves us $1 billion. That $1 billion allows us to invest in the innovation, some of which you've seen, some of which you'll see downstairs, but also to invest in competitiveness. Again, that's not about price. There's some tweaking of prices of that category strategy, but really in the scheme of things, compared to what some people wrote, we're talking about tiny things. The investment in competitiveness is small packs. Better packaging on Smirnoff. Addressing some of the issues that John talked about, that's investing in the competitiveness of Mix. On Crown Royal, putting the quality back into the packaging is investing in competitiveness. When I say that, I'm not talking just about price. Okay? Please understand that. It also allows us, let's be clear, to protect that underlying profitability.
Cash generation, leverage, Nik has been super clear on. We'll invest $ 1.25 billion of CapEx over those periods, and you've now seen the breakdown of where we're going to spend it. Big expansion on Guinness. If you looked at it historically, you see what's going to happen over the next wee while. We really are going to open the supply chain on Guinness. Capital allocation unchanged. As Nik says, we hope to give our board a problem going forward of how best to think about returning funds to shareholders, but we've got to deliver it first. The focus is on organic. We don't want to be part of the speculation that's out there. This turnaround is based on us rolling our sleeves up and doing the best job we can possibly do with the business and the assets that we've got.
We've simplified the incentive schemes, as I've told you, and it aligns completely to what drives our view in the business case. Okay? A lot to do. We've done a lot already, I think. There's a lot to do. If you haven't tested it out already, do so in the breakouts as a team. We're confident we have a plan that we can deliver. We're confident that that delivers value for our shareholders, and it puts Diageo back in the place we all want it to be a long-term compounder of value for our shareholders. We've got some work to do. That's okay. All right. That's it. We're now to the Q&A part of the session. Because we can't get everybody up here, what we thought we would do is Nik and I will, up here, we'll sort of steward your questions.
Where it's appropriate, I'm going to ask one of my exec colleagues to give you an answer if they're better placed than Nik or I. What I suggest we do is we run for the half an hour that we said we were going to, and if we're running out of steam at that point, we'll call it, and we'll go downstairs and then come back up and have a drink, but if we've got a little bit more time, if we need it in terms of questions. Is that okay? Right. Let me put this down before all the hands go up. Nik, would you like a seat?
Sure.
I'll grab one.
There you go.
No, you stay.
I'll grab the other one.
Okay. Actually, with the lights, it's really hard to see who is who. Go for it.
You really don't want to see who is who.
Go for it.
Hi, Simon Hales from Citi. Just two questions. Firstly, you talked a lot about simplification—
Yeah.
At the same time, you're talking about sort of expanding the price points, especially across categories, moving from RTD, moving from pack sizes. There's more complexity coming in to that side of the organization, more SKUs. What are you doing to help your customers manage that transition? Obviously, you don't operate in a vacuum. Other players are also investing in SKUs, making the whole system a lot more complex. How do you win and ensure you're getting a prominent share of the shelf there? That's my first question.
Okay. Ewan, I'm going to probably ask you to augment what I'm about to say. Simon, ordinarily, I might directionally agree with you. In this case, it's not the case. If you look at the complexity we have today in terms of SKUs, and you look at the complexity we have today in terms of innovation, it's colossal. It's colossal. 1,200 innovation projects in Diageo in a year is colossal. Actually, I told you about the session we had with the marketeers. The project size is going up as we cull that portfolio. The SKUs are going down as we simplify. Actually getting bigger, more impactful innovation, whilst it is, yes, in that portfolio or it is in RTDs, overall, we're taking a massive amount of complexity out of Diageo as we make these changes.
It's very important that we've got a strategy that allows us to make those decisions against it. Ewan, you wouldn't believe the complexity in the organization today In the things that you've just mentioned. I'm really very confident we're going to be a much simpler business as we go through this change with better innovation and better productivity by project and by SKU. Mate, do you want to add to that?
Yeah, sure. I think the innovation line is one of the best examples. Here we go. We spend our time here across the value chain when it comes to innovation. We're always chasing where you haven't necessarily got the capacity deeper in the value chain, and you're trying to solve and establish it, and just a lot of the resource and effort goes into problem-solving. There are some things that my teams are particularly quite good at. The relationship with finding the appropriate end-to-end means a lot of resource. This approach which goes more into the simplification of the operating model, from the language to the accountabilities to the integration on an end-to-end basis, is such a big simplification. I've been in the organization 30 years. It is a massive tying together of how the business makes decisions. Thank you. Mic's on.
Essentially, I believe deeply what that's going to do is essentially make sure that our resources are more focused on saying, as you develop an innovation, you are setting it up with confidence from its inception, and the accountability is through the business, through delivery to customer. Not that you develop things and then it gets thrown over to supply to solve how you scale it and deal with all that complexity of scaling it on time for the customer. This is one example that can be kind of played across even the business planning that we spoke about, where essentially, you're planning for many things that are never going to be a reality.
Therefore, I think having a much more streamlined portfolio to then play it across the price ladder, it just means that you're much more confident then the decisions that you take will play through in the reality of the activation of our value chain. Just a couple of examples.
Simon, I'd just add on the piece that Ewan was talking about, and particularly from a customer perspective, I think we also are getting much better in terms of our offering that's occasion-based into the fact that the outlet and a brand pack architecture that works as well, right? You heard Alvaro talk about that in terms of how important that is as well. In fact, we're bringing for simplification to them, too, in terms of what's relevant and what's going to move, right, with a broader offering of what we have on packs, formats that is occasion-led and channel specific.
Okay.
Simon, how do you want us to do this? What's the best way?
Yeah, why don't you.
I can move.
Yeah, go for it. There you go.
Thank you, Simon. Thank you, Jamie. By focusing on the U.S., first of all, you expect the market to re-accelerate from -3% to flattish. What's driving that? I know since one of your competitor was talking about the market at -5%, so I don't know if you could help us reconcile those numbers. Can you talk about when you think about the growth of your performance and closing the gap in market share, how we should think about pricing versus volume?
Lastly, I think SG&A to sales in the U.S. is 6% or 7%, if I am right, over it. How do we think about organic EBIT in the U.S. if you are going to be negative and feel quite flat and negative to be flat over the next 9-12 months?
Why don't you take the last one, then we'll ask Hannah to—
Yeah.
To come back on it.
On that last one, if you look at our algorithm of circa mid-single digit growth on the operating profit, that is assuming with what we have already put into place, that John has moved on the operating framework. A lot of those savings will come through in 2027. Again, remember, top-line growth, down mid-single digit. Our assumption here, again, I am not giving you broad direction, but assumption here for North America underlying that mid-single digit operating profit CAGR is low single digit down for the next two years and then getting to a flat to slightly positive in year three on operating profit for North America. Okay? We are not expecting that there is suddenly going to be great profit growth coming out of that because we have got to invest for that capability, that simplification, and that competitiveness.
Indeed. Hannah, do you want to come back on that?
Yeah.
Yeah, go for it. No. Can we put the mic on, please?
On now?
Yeah.
Yep. I think from the consumer perspective, we were quite clear in North America, there is a significant affordability pressure that is the major headwind right now. That therefore is a discretionary income challenge. You're especially seeing that in the middle income where they have the deficits. As macros return, as consumer sentiment returns, we'd expect discretionary income to come back, and we would see then higher spend on alcohol. It's that series of events that needs to come through, along with, as I said earlier, if population changes, the immigration fees change, we see additional tailwinds as well.
Yeah, very good.
The number you referred to of that 5% that you said competitive, that's really more on the U.S. spirit side. Remember the number that Hannah's putting for North America is total.
Yeah.
It also factors in what you're looking at in terms of beer, Canada, et cetera.
Yeah. Indeed.
Oh. Okay.
Hi. Am I on? Right. So sorry. It's Mitch Collett from Deutsche Bank. Nik, in your slides on marketing, I think you showed that most of the reduction in marketing in fiscal 2026 came from that non-working money. The guidance you gave in terms of organic sales growth looks, I guess, quite prudent. I'm sure there was a point where you thought about whether the best creator of value would've been to reinvest those savings, potentially to try and get the top line growing a bit quicker, a bit sooner. I guess I'd be really interested in your perspectives on how you came up with the right sort of level is about 16, and that's the sort of glide path to growth. Dave, I think you probably won't want to answer this, but I think at one point you talked about there being five strategic alternatives.
I'd be really interested to know what the other four were or what the five were, but if you can't say, I understand.
I'm sure you would, but we won't be sharing those with you. I just wanted to demonstrate the completeness of the exercise, that we challenged ourselves in a number of different ways, shared them with the board. We make the decision. That's what we're sharing with you now. Can I start on the one you've set for Nik, and then he can come back financially, which is, look, the critical thing is, let's look at our history. Let's look at the history of Diageo. We stepped it up from 16%- 18% in 2021- 2025, roughly. Got no growth for it, right?
The reason why Nik is emphasizing, I think so much, that the 16% is an outcome, is the way we're doing it now is we're taking the strategy, we're taking the brands, we're taking the innovation, to use the term, the jobs to be done, and then saying, "Actually, how much money do we need to extract the growth from the innovation that we've got available in this year, that year, and the other?" The outcome to that is 16%. The idea that suddenly, without the right assets, without the right innovation, and without the right talent, I could just take 16%, turn it to 18%, and accelerate the top line more quickly, too simplistic. Way too simplistic.
We now need to be much more surgical, to use the word, about the investment that we make in different parts of the portfolio to get the return that we want. It's evolving as a methodology for us. It's all quite new. The outcome of that is the 16% that Nik was talking about feels about right for the next three years, and we would actually destroy value if we were just spending more money on things that we know wouldn't return.
The only thing I would add to that is, again, keep in mind, if you think about what you saw from an angle of what Cristina laid out and what you heard in terms of the category strategies. We are talking about a more harmonized and standardized approach. If you also think about the spend that was there. Keeping aside the non-working element of the duplication and the waste that we had, there is an opportunity from scale and harmonization as you think about spirits and RTDs across those categories as well. I think you have to look at it from an angle that says, back to the point, do we have the right assets, and are we investing behind those assets with a returns focus? Clearly, if there's better returns, and we can put some more in, we'll find the money.
We're not gonna not put the money in. I think for now, we believe we have that.
Yeah.
Andrea from Bank of America. Two for me, please. An important lever, stepping up your commercial execution in the U.S. is about re-energizing sort of the relationship with your distributors, and you referred to that in the presentation. Can you talk a bit more about some of the changes you're doing, also how you're going to incentivize them differently to focus more on rate of sale, and when are these changes actually taking place? A question on the balance sheet for Nik, please. You're maintaining the balance sheet target at 2.5x-3x . I mean, this has been the target for many years at Diageo, particularly at times before COVID, when top line was growing mid-single digit, Diageo targeting 5%-7% even growth. What's the thought process in thinking that is still the right target in a more difficult environment?
Historically, when you've been towards the mid of that range, that would've triggered buybacks. Is that the way to think about it?
John, do you want to I can say some. Go for it.
I would say, we're very advanced in terms of our conversations. Look, the big thing is, when I went to the U.S., I found that we have exclusive dedicated sales force, which I really, really like with our distributors, the distributor side of the house. They were pretty much focused on point of distribution. The conversation we've been having with our distributors is, how do we take that dedicated resource and put them to work harder on not just getting distribution, but actually getting velocity and rate of sale driving, whether that's in how we merchandise, how we do shelves, how we actually drive the package into people's hands. Of course, incentives play a big part in that. I won't get into specifics because you'd appreciate that.
I think that's a really important shift for our distributors, and I think it mimics what we're doing with our own internal model as well. That shift of distribution plus rate of sale velocity is going to be a really key unlock for us.
Balance sheet. Let me just remind you what I said. I said, right now, we believe that 2.5x-3x Is the right leverage range. We review that annually, as a part of the organization with my treasury team and with Dave. We have a finance committee. We also review that annually with the board, right? This is not a static number for now, we believe. In the past, last year, when someone asked me, and I said, "Does it really matter? I'm so far out of my range." Now I'm coming back towards my range, right? It's a good problem to have for us to look at it. I'm not gonna comment on what Diageo has done historically when they've got to their midpoint or what actions they've taken.
All we've said is this is a nice problem for our board to have to think about once we're well within range. Well, clearly, well within range could even be if we change it to 2x-2.5x . I'm not saying we are. It's a nice problem for them to have to think about how we return cash to shareholders. The priority of returning cash to shareholders is unchanged. Right? I won't get drawn into timing or anything else. I don't know if you want to add into that.
Definitely not, no.
Okay. Please.
Chris Pitcher from Rothschild & Co. Two parts to the same question, really, Dave. One thing I'd be really interested in learning more about is how you're changing the culture of the organization around planning and response. I was really intrigued to hear about the idea of forecast bias, particularly positive. I'm a sell side analyst, I empathize. Diageo has historically had a propensity for forecast bias. I was surprised to see in your outlook that you've got the standard two-point range across all the regions, because the industry is more volatile than that. Are you planning more extreme scenario environments if U.S. stays down three, five, you know what you're going to do? Mid-single digit is actually quite a narrow range to deliver organically. The second part of the question is, currencies are one of the structural problems in your business.
What are you doing to reduce the currency volatility in terms of local sourcing, local production where it's possible, liabilities, and so forth? You haven't talked about currencies all day, and that's ultimately what's quite often eroded the opportunity on the screen.
Why don't I take the first, and you take the second, and you, and please feel free. Look, I think we are making quite a fundamental shift in changing what we're looking for in terms of operational discipline and delivery across the piece. Giving you an end-to-end responsibility and being clear what value different parts of that end to end deliver in terms of that operational excellence is new in Diageo. Right? What we've talked about is what's the right way to make interventions, change the culture, invite the right behavior, right? One of the very easy ones is saying to those 23 go-to-market organizations, "Actually, what I need from you is a very, very good, the best you can do, quality forecast. Don't play any games. I want to roll it." Now I ask them every month, what's a rolling 12-month by month forecast?
Forget month ends, forget quarter ends, forget year ends, not interested. You are now. I will judge you, if you want to be like that, as a local managing director on your ability to read your markets and forecast demand. What we think is a reasonable range is here. We've kept it really simple for the first intervention. We know there's more volatility in different places. If I'm honest, I would say Latin America's historically been one of the more volatile places, but the improvement that's happened there, been going on for longer, fantastic. Elsewhere, we've got other challenges. It's about picking the right measure, first and foremost, inviting a change in behavior, but where necessary, putting the right discipline and the guardrails in if that's not being responded to in the way that we would want it to be.
By being able to talk about the end-to-end process, by being able to give the data that shows actually why have we had all of this wastage in our supply chain and what's contributed, that invites the right conversation to happen. Process by process, we've intervened ever so slightly differently in each one, but that's the exercise of how do we nudge the business to change. The big thing is to give the responsibilities really clearly, which is why I talked about the operating framework earlier, right?
Currency. Firstly, there is a mention of currency. It's just in the appendix because I didn't want to bore you with it. From an angle that, one, when you look at it, and I want to separate out two elements. I'm going to come back to transaction exposure in a moment, and then translation exposure. What we just put into the appendix over there is what we see at current spot rates, and right now it's pretty negligible. That will continue to evolve. Let me come back on translation in a moment. Let's talk about transaction for a moment. I say that because when I came into Diageo, and Dave and I are both very much aligned as we thought about this going forward, is there was one, a confusion of the two. All right?
We were actually, particularly when we moved to U.S. dollar reporting, we were actually hedging at cross ends with each other based on our supply flows of what was happening when you think about Scotch moves and sterling, tequila moves, and the peso and the dollar. What we've done is really gone to a netting process to really make that much simpler. More importantly, with that netting process, we've also ensured that accountability lies in the performance management for each of the markets and the regions. All right?
That means more actions being taken based on not just a budgeted rate of what you're seeing, but actually a monthly flow-through of what does that mean in terms of how transaction exposure is moving, and how you're thinking about that from a competitive angle as well, and what do you need to do to be able to manage through that. On the translation piece, we're not going to get into speculative hedging. All right? What are the actions that we're taking? A couple of things that we've done. How are we looking at liability management, and how are we looking at some net investment hedges to be able to reduce some of that volatility? That work is ongoing, but that's where we are.
Okay.
Good morning, Olivier Nicolai from Goldman Sachs. Just two questions for you. Going back to RTD in the U.S., when would you expect to get the full distribution, and is it a critical element to improve your market share? Secondly, most of the leading brands in RTDs today are actually not necessarily linked to a spirits brand, and they are often owned by a brewer. How do you explain this? I know you said no M&A, but would you need to do any small bolt-ons in the category?
No. Okay. Answer the last bit first, no? I'll give a marketing call, and John, if you want to add something to this, please feel free. I think the way I see North America is, as Mark said before, we were one of the first, if not the first to start this category. We then backed away, deprioritized it for a number of reasons, doesn't matter, it's history. I think therefore in North America, it left a space and others entered into it, and therefore you get these new to old brands and you see the churn that is there in new to old brands. Some of them are successful, a lot of them are very short-lived. I think the question for us is what is the opportunity in ready-to-drink, that consumer occasion, when you think through the lens of our brand, right? What is it we have?
We have fantastic, well-differentiated, market-leading brands, which, by the way, most people on many occasions make into cocktails. The opportunity therefore is for us to serve that consumer need ourselves in a very convenient way as part of that RTD movement and category. We've done it on some, we haven't done it on others. We think that's the opportunity. The critical thing is that we show up in those categories using our differential strength, and that's our brands. We won't do any other brands until we've done our brands. I'm not saying there won't be new to old brands, but we've got a massive opportunity, as Mark showed upstairs, to actually be much better about giving consumers what they want with our brands.
Do me a favor, at the breakout when we finally give you a drink, try that Bulleit Old Fashioned he was talking about and see what we mean when we talk about real RTDs from spirits brands. That is where the growth is. That is where our brands sit. We just need to apply ourselves to it. I think in terms of distribution, John talked about it was definitely an opportunity. Two things I would say, and then I will ask John to add onto it, is you should have got from everybody this idea that we now need to be managing RTDs as part of the spirit brand. Historically, Diageo has split that, and it is particularly prevalent in North America, given the two divisions that John was talking about. If you are not careful, you end up having sort of internal friction between the two.
Getting the brands together coherently, what John is doing in terms of the go-to-market organization will help us. Look, we have got great distribution on some. We have hurt ourselves with the quality issue we have in Casamigos, but we showed that we could get good distribution on that really quite rapidly. The capability is there. We could do more. Put the brands together. What John is doing in the operating framework drives the distribution, and then the share comes from there. Okay? Why don't you just pass it along? We will pass—
Yeah. Thanks for the question. Edward Mundy from Jefferies. I have got two questions, please. The first is around culture. I think in your final slide, you pointed to this importance of developing a very strong, robust, performance culture. I guess the question is, where are we in that journey? Has this plan been solved internally to drive that followership? Is my first question. My second one is a sort of more philosophical question around, Diageo has been fantastic at premiumization over the last couple of decades. You are obviously pivoting a bit more to affordability with the small packs, with the RTDs, with some of the selective price resets, et cetera. You can do all of this with the same amount of A&P dollars, but do you need more salespeople? Is it a case of giving your salespeople the right instructions and just doing more with the same?
Okay. Look, where are we in terms of culture? I think, look, you should ask people who have been in Diageo longer than I, you will have chance over a drink to do that. I think the desire to have a performance culture, the desire to improve performance, I have been really very encouraged with what I feel inside Diageo. People are disappointed that we have not been performing better over the last four or five years. There has been a thirst for change, but then there has been the difficulty of making the change. We are definitely at a point where we are going through. Most of it is behind us in terms of the go-to-market, but in Europe, we have still got the consultation that I shared with you at the start. I would say we are in the early stages of building that performance culture.
The wind is at our back in terms of what it is people want. We just need to be clear and support that performance culture, and that is what all the things this morning were about. When you talk about the, I look at the portfolio you just described, that feels much more balanced to me than the one you described before. As much as I love the premiumization, trust me, we won't step away from it, actually, the portfolio of all the things you mentioned feels more robust. Actually, I do not worry at all that we do not have the money we require to be able to do that. I think if you go back to Mark's presentation, he talked about those four focus markets where, and in the Guinness presentation, certain markets, we are putting more feet on the street.
Depending on the model, Dial and in Europe has put more feet on the street, be it Guinness or indeed some of the on-trade. In John's area, we have put where it returns and where it adds to that portfolio, if that is the right way to do it, that is the right way to support the brand. It is not A&P in the way that we traditionally talked about it, the flex is there in the portfolio and the money is there in the 16% that Nik highlighted. Okay. There you go.
Sanjeet Aujla from UBS. Two from me, please. Firstly, John, when you have diagnosed the issues on Crown's Smirnoff and Captain Morgan, did you ever think that the brands were taking too much pricing versus their competitive set, or were you happy with the relative price positioning on those brands, and it is just more a case of packaging and other things to fix? My second question is just going back to the medium-term algo. Dave, if, Nik, if you are exiting by fiscal 2029 with 3% organic sales growth, by that point, if the cost savings are done, is the business capable of still delivering mid-single digit organic EBITDA growth and EPS out of that?
I love it. We give you three years, you want this. Four just saves. John, you.
Yeah, look, as I said, I think Casamigos was the outlier where I think we definitely took too much price COVID. We have course-corrected that. I think in terms of the other brands that I spoke to. Look, we're in seven, eight-year declines. I always start with the proposition, right? That is what we're getting because that's really what the kind of core DNA of the brand is. That's what we're going to overhaul. Much more than just that, into the packaging, into fundamental architecture of the brand. Flavors, we got carried away on Smirnoff. I feel we got too focused on flavors in Crown to the detriment of the core. If you've noticed, I haven't mentioned price, Sanjeet, at any of those points. That's why these brands need a bit of a fundamental reset.
That's why we've kind of given the expectations that we've given. I think that's much more important on the longer-term declines that I've seen.
If I build on John's answer. Look, we've been trying to leverage all of the capability of Diageo into North America. We had our first exec meeting together was in North America, we deliberately did it in a way where every person in the exec went to North America a couple of days earlier. I invited the other business group presidents to go to different parts of North America. Everybody else with their functional teams spent some time, come and have a session with John, when John was saying, "This is what I found, this is what I'm thinking," all of the exec were able and knowledgeable about North America. We'd never done that as a team before, how do we all lean in and help John?
That led to a second session, which Cristina, myself, Hannah, and John did with the team in North America, which the Diageo phrase for is a teardown. Is basically take the mix apart from the shelf back and look at every element. We sat in and we did it. For the three brands you're talking about, that was product quality versus competition, price versus competition, proposition versus competition, packaging versus competition. Really took it apart bit by bit by bit by bit. What John is sharing with you in a summarized phrase is saying, actually, it's not a price issue per se. It's a proposition issue. We've lost some of that focus, and we've not invested in the other elements of the mix commensurate with what we want at a time when there's been inflation in the category.
He's going to go back and fix the things which from that teardown looked like being the big issues, and price wasn't one of them in those three brands. Okay? Your crystal ball?
My crystal ball.
Yes, price plus anti-fraud.
The simple answer is yes. Why? We're changing the way we're fundamentally looking at the spirits category and the premium beer category, spirits plus RTD, full portfolio, strong OBPPC, strong RGM capabilities, continuing to build on RGM, being surgical with where we see opportunities. Here, these are the interventions to actually broaden our portfolio. I think going forward, there will be opportunity as we're much more competitive, we're much more customer-centric to be able to continue driving value. What does that mean? With that top-line growth, even if it stayed at that level, yeah, we should be able to support the mid-single-digit operating profit growth. Keep in mind, productivity never ends. What we've done is some big interventions with Accelerate and now with the operating framework, right?
That doesn't mean the mindset of continuing to improve and what we can drive from an efficiency and effectiveness purpose goes away. Is it going to be at the same scale? Absolutely not.
Indeed. Trevor, do you have a microphone? You've had your hand up for a while, but not a microphone. There we go.
Thanks, Dave. Two questions, Dave. One is, of your three medium-term priorities, heard a lot about number one, a lot about number three. My impression is slightly less on number two. We've touched on it indirectly around customer service levels and things, but a little bit less color there. If that's a fair impression, maybe why is more to come down the road on Priority 2 ? Second question is, you've been through an awful lot very quickly, and there's probably an awful lot of hurt around. Are there things that you can do to help the organization heal?
Okay, two things. I think you're quite right. We've talked more about Priority 1 and Priority 3 than we have about Priority 2. When you think about two, when I think about Priority 2, Trevor, and how I want to have conversations with our customers, the conversation needs to be, what are our category strategies? How do we show up when the U.K. at Tesco and Sainsbury's and say, "Actually, this is what we are thinking about your category. We've never done that to you before. They've never looked at us before." There's a real shared understanding of the category that needs to be built. Diane and I have been to both of the two customers I've talked to you about.
We've talked to them both about the fact that we're going to come, but really we need what you've seen from Cristina is we have to have a point of view about the category. We have to have an innovation plan for the next, not just six months, but the next three years, and I talked about that earlier. Before we can even engage top to top about that category. It's there, but it's in time. We've got to get it. I don't want to show up when we're not ready because that will just be a false start. I think in immediate terms, it's actually how do we service our customers? Because to be honest, we used to have this rule in Tesco.
We used to have this chart in Tesco, which is, if you were outside the parameters of service, I don't want to talk to you about any innovation. I don't want to talk to you about anything about category development, because if you can't do the basics now, I don't want to talk to you about what wonderful things might happen tomorrow. I think we have to make sure we earn the right from the service of the business today to go and have that conversation with them tomorrow. There's a lot, Ewan was very open, there's a lot of capability, information that we need to build inside Diageo before we're going to front up with people who are very data-rich and very immediate in what they're going to need from us, and we can't disappoint when we go. It's about timing, not a change in focus.
Look, I think your second question, there is a lot of hurt, and it's a big change for Diageo. It is a big change for Diageo. What have we tried to do, Trevor? Look, you've seen little bits here and there, but we deliberately chose not to make any announcements ourselves about the changes that we were making. We've very deliberately, at every stage, been very transparent with all of our people about the diagnosis of what the case for change was, about the fact that we were going to have to change. We walked them through all of that. We were very open about the selection processes, and we've been very, very open. Now, everybody, if you ask people appreciate that, but when you come to the changes and the decisions, it's hard, right? It's really hard.
Have we been as appropriate as we can be in the way that we thought about that restructuring? Yes, we have. Are we doing everything we can to help people through that transition? If it means they don't have a role with us, what else it is they could do? As I said to you before, the feedback we get universally, but don't just check with me, check with the others is, nobody's saying you're doing the wrong thing. I don't like it's happening to me, but you're not doing the right thing. Everywhere else in the world, I get myself into trouble for what I'm about to say. In my experience with these things, being very open, being very honest, but being very quick is ultimately to the benefit of our colleagues.
If I think about Latin America, if I think about North America, it's been an engagement, it's through, and it moves on. It's quicker. In Europe, the consultation process is really hard on our people. I know it's supposed to be there to protect, but actually, when you look at the stages, and there's very little we can do in that time period apart from respect the process that's there. The thing that we are doing and the balancing is for the people who are staying, we're talking about that purpose and the business we're going to build because there's a time when you have to focus very closely on the people who are leaving the organization, but there's also a time when you have to be very clear about the motivation of the people who are staying. Trying to get that right.
We are, again, we've done a lot of communicating. It's very open. The thing I'm enjoying is the fact that Diageo colleagues who when I started, people would say, "You'll never get anything. Nobody will ever ask you a question. We need to plant some." Right? Nobody's holding back. Right? The feedback mechanism is working really very well, so I know where the problems are, and that's something that we know we're getting that feedback. In most places, that's done already. In Europe, we're still in that consultation period. We're doing what we can, and trying to be as empathetic as we can as we walk through the change.
Thank you very much.
Yeah. One at the back and one here. We've gone over time, but given we've still got eight minutes to the end, we'll try and keep going. Okay.
Sarah Simon from Morgan Stanley. I've got two very unrelated ones. The first one is, you were being quite explicit that you think this is mainly, really a cyclical issue. How do you explain the strength of Guinness 0.0 if there isn't a desire for drinking less? Should we interpret the fact you haven't talked about Ritual or Seedlip or anything as those are now de-emphasized? The second question is around exceptionals, because if we look back at Diageo over the last 10 years, just this constant restructuring and write-downs and cash outflows. In your remuneration, will you be remunerated on a pre or a post-exceptional basis? Because ROIC goes up the year after you've written something down. I'm interested to know how you think about the impact.
How you align the shareholders in that.
Okay. Why don't I take the first? You have a go at the second. Look, I think you've got different things going on. Let's just scale this very openly. When you look at no alcohol inside Diageo, 94% of it is Guinness 0.0 . If I look at, it's important we have it available. It's part of a category portfolio, so it's not deprioritized where it's relevant. It shows up. It's part of a category. Non-alc spirits of spirits is less than 1%. It's there. We have it there. We will continue to, but it will be proportionate to that opportunity. I think what Guinness 0.0 is benefiting from is the power and the strength and the cultural relevance of the brand. The quality of the Guinness 0.0 versus, let's call it the parent brand, is exceptional. That's not us talking. That's consumers feeding back.
People are using. They're still getting the taste and the experience they enjoy, and they can moderate it, and they can stripe it, and they can do things with it. I think we're talking about two very, very different things. The bit that we've got to keep reminding ourselves is non-alcohol spirits is still really very small. It's growing nicely, but it's growing from a very small base in a very limited geography. We just need to be proportionate in the way that we think about it.
To your question on incentives, we will not be incentivized to actually impair things and bring our ROIC down. Just to be clear, if it's a in-train LTIP award, we would actually neutralize so that would not be a benefit for a payout. Clearly, as you set the new targets, you would have a new invested capital base going forward, right? That is on your new base going forward. No incentives for that.
One more at the back, I'm going to give you two the last question.
[inaudible]
Thank you. Carlos Laboy at HSBC. We heard a lot about demand creation and about capital allocation. It was very helpful. I was hoping you could expand a little bit more on demand fulfillment, and about the reinforcing loops between your firm and third-party fulfillment distributors, right?
Sorry.
The culture you're trying to drive in the organization, how that plumbing works, how that gets down to how those relationships are managed and influenced, and maybe a little bit about the philosophy that you have about how you see that moving forward.
All right. Why don't I start, and please add in terms of Look, in that organization that we shared with you quickly at the start, you should have known that in the local organization, it's a customer service director. It's not a supply chain director. That's different. At the place where the customers buy and where we service, the focus of all of that resource is on customer service. Ewan, I think, gave you the example in the U.K. that actually, when we look at what the loss is, actually it's that execution that's the problem. I know because I've been involved in the U.K., one of those was very specifically logistics and delivery routing and what have you. In the old model, that wouldn't have been a priority for that local supply chain director.
In the new model, the customer service person absolutely needs to be fixing, working that out. If it's through a partnership, through the partnership, if it's totally wholly owned, then in our own operation. Whether it is a third party or whether it's ours, the responsibility for the quality of those fulfillment type arrangements are with the local customer service director, he or she responsible for customer service, particularly when it comes to that final mile fulfillment. Okay? Got two more questions. Two gentlemen down here, and then you can close it. Have you got mic? Good. Great stuff.
Lawrence Whyatt here at Barclays. Dave, you talked about a number of price repositionings that we've seen on a number of brands at Diageo and the success that that's brought. How can you be confident that that price repositioning boost is going to be sustained after we've seen a sort of initial reaction from consumers from that price repositioning? Nik, when you joined Diageo, the original medium-term guidance was removed at that time, I just remember you talking about the lack of visibility in the market at the time, and why it wouldn't make sense at that time to put a medium-term guidance in place. Could you compare how you see the visibility today versus how you've seen visibility in the spirits market over your time at Diageo?
If I start, I think, look, when you get into the details of the interventions we're talking about, what you see is that most of the things that we're addressing are either, let's be candid, a place where we lost our discipline in relative pricing to the competitive set through some of the cycles that Hannah was talking about, and we've lost volume as a result of that. By going back and addressing those price positions, we've gone back and won so far the volume that we used to have, right, when we had the relative prices to the competitive set in the right place. Hypothesis, we'll see over time, is that actually having won that volume back, you keep that volume because you've kept the relative price in the same way. Easy example, because we're in the U.K., Bell's versus Grouse.
Anybody I speak to in Diageo, Paul, or anybody who's ever been, Bell's and Grouse should be here. Right? Ivan's smiling because he's the one who inherited the fact that suddenly we got to a place where Bell's is here and Grouse is here, and we lost volume. Right? Don't know all the decisions, neither did he wasn't there, but that's where we are. We put it back at that right price. The volume growth on Bell's is significant. Will we keep that volume? The marketeer in me says we will. Right? Time will tell.
Two things I would say to you. When I came in, I think, one, we had an algorithm that just no one believed in. It was more important to withdraw that than keep that. It wasn't just about visibility. It was clearly, even if we had all the visibility, we weren't going to be making those numbers. That was the real reason to pull that away, because that just literally dominated the conversation, right. I think from a visibility perspective, I think there's a couple of things I would call out. One, I think during the course of the last 18 months or so, there's been a lot of work that's been done on the rest of world, and I'll come back to North America.
I think everything that we've been doing from a portfolio expansion perspective, from how we're thinking about that business without that margin percentage obsession, et cetera, you've seen how the rest of world has performed, right. You've seen that over the last 18 months or so, right. I think we have much better visibility when we think about those markets and what can be delivered there, right. North America, I don't think we have better visibility. I think what Hannah laid out for you is the most important piece of understanding what's happening with the consumer and what's causing that stress. Right. Marry that up with how we see some of the self-inflicted issues and what we can do to try and control those and change, are things that we have within our control. Right.
It's not so much about having this crystal ball and the visibility of the market. I think better data on the consumer side and understanding, and a better understanding of our issues in North America and what we can go after. Does that help?
Very good. Ladies and gents, thank you very much. We're going to cut it there. Bang on six o'clock.
Oh.
That's one, James.
Oh, I did. Sorry. No, you're right. It was flashing at me. I was under pressure to the six o'clock. Please go ahead. Sorry.
Ross from BNP Paribas. I actually want to follow up on Chris's earlier question about FX. I guess one of the historical attractions of the Diageo investment case is actually strong conversion from the organic numbers to your hard currency numbers. If we look at your new medium-term algorithm, it's clearly a bit more driven by the rest of the world, which obviously can be a bit more inflationary. I just wonder if you could talk us through how you think about the kind of drop-down from as you exit in FY 2028, FY 2029, when some of those hard currency cost savings are maybe reducing a little bit. How you're managing the business between aiming for organic growth versus aiming for dollar growth.
Linked to that, just in the very simplified annual incentives that you have, is the revenue and EBIT, I assume that's based on organic numbers. Thank you.
It's organic numbers, but including transaction exposure.
All right.
Quite honestly, right now, as I said, we're trying to minimize what we can do from a net investment hedge perspective, liability management on translation. Translation risk does not go away, and we would not be speculative and start hedging for that. Right? We will continue to take the right actions to protect hard currency savings, hard currency delivery of earnings. To Dave's point, listen, hypothesizing now beyond 2029 is a little early. We're going to deliver the savings. We feel good about what we can do over the next three years, and we'll continue to refine our view on how do we minimize the volatility through translation.
Yeah. I think that's right.
Okay, I am going to cut it there. We're just past six o'clock , so we're three minutes late. Ladies and gents, two couple of quick things, if I may. First and foremost, thank you very much. We brought you in, we sat you in a room. We've given you a lot in the last four hours. The intention was to try and be as open and as transparent as we can be about what we know, what we're trying to do, in a way that helps you think through the investment case. Rather than just present at you to try and think about the questions you had. We hope it's been useful. I'm sure hopefully you'll stay for the innovation showcase downstairs and a drink thereafter.
Can I just put on record my thanks to the exec team who, with me talking, we've been busy in the first six months. We've all been very busy, and as a team, I'm very delighted that we've got ourselves here. We are all very clear we've got a lot to do. Please take the opportunity to talk to them in the showcase. Two practical things, if I may. When you go downstairs, you need to take all your things with you, because this room will be stripped while you're gone. Please don't leave anything up here, because who knows where it might end up, right? Take your stuff with you. Second thing, when you go downstairs, please be disciplined and make sure you don't just stop at the Guinness tap. Okay?
Please go have a look at all the innovation that's down there, and we'll see you back here in 30 minutes. Okay? Thank you very much.