Good morning. My name is Dorothy, and I will be your conference Operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the second quarter fiscal 2019 conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Jay Koval, Vice President and Director of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.
Thanks, Dorothy. Good morning, everyone. I want to thank you for joining us for Brown-Forman's second quarter 2019 earnings call. Joining me today are Paul Varga, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Lawson Whiting, Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, and incoming Chief Executive Officer, and Jane Morreau, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. This morning's conference call contains forward-looking statements based on our current expectations. Numerous risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated or projected in these statements. Many of the factors that will determine future results are beyond the company's ability to control or predict. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements, and the company undertakes no obligation to update any of these statements, whether due to new information, future events, or otherwise.
This morning, we issued a press release containing our results for the second quarter of fiscal 2019, in addition to posting presentation materials that Jane will walk through momentarily. Both the release and the presentation can be found on our website under the section titled Investors, Events and Presentations. In the press release, we have listed a number of the risk factors that you should consider in conjunction with our forward-looking statements. Other significant risk factors are described in our Form 10-K, 8-K, and 10-Q reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During this call, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures. These measures are reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and the reasons management believes they provide useful information to investors regarding the company's financial conditions and results of operations are contained in the press release and investor presentation. One additional housekeeping item.
We evaluated changing today's call given the passing of former President George Bush, decided that the change would be more disruptive to everyone's calendars than keeping our originally scheduled date and time. That being said, we plan on ending our call today at 10:50 A.M. to ensure that all of our participants have adequate time to join the funeral ceremony for our 41st president at 11:00 A.M. EST. With that, let me turn the call over to Lawson.
Okay. Well, thank you, Jay, and good morning, everyone. Today, Jane and I will be talking about the first half of our fiscal year 2019, where Brown-Forman continued to deliver solid top-line growth. There are a couple of factors, most obviously and notably tariffs, that are causing fluctuations in our quarterly results. Overall, I'd characterize the first half as a continuation in the solid fundamental growth story that we have seen for much of the past decade. First, I just want to start off by thanking our 4,800 employees around the world for the solid start to fiscal 2019, delivering 5.5% top line underlying growth on top of last year's strong 7% top line gain. We're planning for modestly faster underlying sales growth in the back half of the year, due in part to easier prior year comps of 5% growth.
More details to follow from Jane. If not for the tariffs, we would be on track to not just deliver another great year of top-line results, but also bottom line where underlying operating income growth, ex tariffs, would be on track to be up in sort of the high single digits, consistent with our sort of our most recent historical 10-year numbers as well as the ambitions that we have going forward. Even so, we believe we've taken the appropriate measures that should position us for mid-single digit underlying operating income growth for the year, which would result in EPS growth in the range of 11%-18% for fiscal 2019.
These tariffs have certainly presented challenges across many areas of the company, including our production and supply chain operations and of course, our commercial teams in the affected markets across Europe, Mexico, and Canada, to name a few. We're in a unique position as the market leader in American whiskey, competing against so many non-impacted spirits categories. Over the short term, we're assuming the tariffs remain in place. In our first quarter earnings call, we've reduced the midpoint of our underlying operating income growth for the year by roughly three points or approximately $35 million-$40 million net impact due to tariffs. That has not changed. As a reminder, the cost of the tariffs is going to be largely a hit to our gross margin.
To date, we have chosen to largely absorb these costs so that we could maintain the solid commercial and consumer momentum through the critical OND period. As we communicated previously, we are and we will continue to evaluate pricing on a market-by-market, customer-by-customer basis. In other words, our approach is what I would describe as surgical, and we will continue to do this as long as the tariffs remain. Despite these short-term headwinds, our long-term goals and our growth ambitions remain unchanged, which is what we'll be talking about next week at the investor conference in New York. We'll spend the afternoon discussing our strategy and why we're so bullish on the global growth potential for our premium American whiskey brands and how we intend to lengthen our lead in a rapidly growing category.
I'll introduce our strategic framework as well as discuss how we have organized our teams to better focus and execute our strategy. Our Chief Brands Officer will focus on some new thinking on how we build our brands and share more specifics on how we intend to capitalize on the global demand for our premium American whiskey brands. We'll hear from our commercial leaders on where we see the greatest growth opportunities and how we'll seize them. Jane will share how we invest to fuel growth and deliver returns for shareholders. Garvin will also be there to talk about the Brown family and their ongoing commitment to building forever at Brown-Forman. Finally, Paul will be there, in his final appearance as CEO, to lead some bourbon tastings with the investment community. Easy.
Now I'm going to hand the call over to Jane, let her walk you through the first half of the year results, and then give you some more color on our reconfirmed guidance for fiscal 2019.
Okay. Thanks, Lawson, good morning, everyone. During my comments today, I will reference the slides we posted to our website this morning. This will help me walk you through the two main areas of focus that I plan on covering in my prepared remarks. These two areas include, first, a review of our first half results, and second, our outlook of fiscal 2019, which we reaffirm this morning. After I complete my prepared remarks, we'll open the call up to Q&A. Let's begin with slide three, and it highlights our first half results, reflecting solid top and bottom line underlying growth, even after considering the impact that the cost of tariffs began to have on our growth margin in the second quarter. First half underlying net sales grew about 5.5%, as Lawson said a moment ago.
Tariff-related inventory buy-ins, largely in Europe, give backs associated with these buy-ins, created quite a bit of noise in our underlying rate of sales growth for both quarters. On our last quarterly call, we estimated that tariff-driven retailer and wholesaler inventory buy-ins had contributed roughly two to three points to our 9% underlying net sales growth in the first quarter. We had anticipated that the buy-in effect would reverse by the end of the fiscal year, indeed it did, as essentially the entire give back occurred during the second quarter, negatively impacting second quarter sales growth by about two points. In other words, our underlying net sales growth of 3% in the second quarter was equally as unrepresentative of our trends and our business as was the first quarter's 9% growth.
The first half growth rate of 5.5% on top of last year's first half growth of 7% equates to an over 6% CAGR, as illustrated on slide four. As we look over the balance of the fiscal year, it should be noted that the second half comparison eased considerably to +5% underlying net sales growth, implying that we should see modestly higher net sales growth in the back half, given our current business trends, and that'll keep us on track to deliver another year of 6%-7% growth in underlying net sales. The difference between the underlying operating income growth in the first half versus the second half is even larger. We grew underlying operating income by 4% in the first half of this fiscal year, on top of a very strong 14% underlying growth registered in the same period a year ago.
The combined impact of lower gross margins, due in part to tariff costs, as well as the fact that the A&P investments have been front-loaded this year, pulled down our year-to-date underlying operating income growth to 4%. These factors were partially offset by the continued tight management of SG&A spend. The company remains focused on efficiency programs and reallocation efforts to ensure that we are both leveraging prior investments and positioning our brands for long-term success in the marketplace. Moving on to slides five and six. You'll see our reported net sales growth was pulled down by about 2 points due to foreign exchange and one point due to the adoption of the new revenue recognition standard. Slide seven and eight dig into our results by geography. Let's start with the U.S.
We delivered 3% growth in underlying net sales during the first half of this year. The second quarter growth accelerated modestly despite a drastic consumer change in the market and tough comparisons against last year's first half, where our U.S. business grew 6%, up on last year's first half heavy timing of promotional activities. As a result, our two-year average growth in the U.S. in the first half is in the 4%-5% range, as shown on slide nine. Acknowledging that there are always short-term fluctuations in three-month takeaway trends, we believe our business in the U.S. is growing in the mid-single digits, and that's supported by the blended Nielsen and NABCA value takeaway trends during the first half of the year, as well as the 12-month trends. Our emerging markets delivered excellent underlying net sales growth.
They were up 10% on top of 15% gains in the first half of last year. Our growth in emerging markets remained broad-based, including strong contributions from Mexico, Brazil, Ukraine, China, Sub-Saharan Africa, and India. Similar to the first quarter, it was in our developed international markets that tariffs had the largest impact on our growth rates. The tale of two quarters, if you will. The first quarter benefited significantly from retail and wholesaler-driven buy-ins in several developed markets in Europe. The second quarter experienced a giveback from those buy-ins. Given our estimates that inventories are now largely in line with historical levels, we believe that the first half underlying net sales growth of 5% is roughly indicative of the trends we have seen in our developed international markets over the last several years. Germany, Australia, and Spain were standout performers.
While we also registered solid growth from the U.K. and France. Finally, travel retail continued to grow well into the double digits, with underlying net sales growth of 14% on top of last year's first half growth of 11%. This growth was fueled by an increase in travelers, growing demand for the American whiskey portfolio, and new product introductions such as Jack Daniel's Bottled-in-Bond. Moving on to slide 10, you can see how our well balanced delivery of growth by brand with the Jack Daniel's family of brands underlying net sales up 5%, and our premium bourbons including Old Forester and Woodford Reserve up 24%. We're particularly pleased with the continued U.S. leadership of Woodford Reserve in the super premium bourbon category, and very optimistic as we ramp up our investment and focus globally on Woodford, as well as our super premium whiskey portfolio.
Further, tequilas, including Herradura and El Jimador, as well as New Mix, continue to grow nicely at 12%. Slides 11 and 12 examine our margins and other rates of growth. What I thought I might do now is spend just a moment talking about gross margin, which, as expected, began to experience the cost of tariffs during the second quarter. Specifically, when we started the fiscal year, and in the absence of tariffs, we expected modest declines in gross margins, similar to what we had experienced in fiscal 2018. You'll recall, this anticipated decline was due to higher input costs, including wood and agave, as well as the incremental depreciation expense associated with our multi-year capacity expansion program.
You may also recall on our first quarter call in August, we revised our outlook for gross margin declines to over 200 basis points for the full year, reflecting the net impact of tariff-related costs as we sought to invest behind maintaining the consumer momentum in our business. As a reminder, as one of our tariff mitigation items, we shifted a couple of months of inventory to Europe, which in conjunction with our normal inventory levels and considering the timing of tariffs when they took effect, protected the majority of our business in Europe through the first five months of fiscal 2019. Thus, during our second quarter, we began to realize the net tariff-related costs as the expected increase in input costs.
These factors, combined with the impact from the adoption of the revenue recognition standard, reduced our gross margin during the second quarter by 200 basis points, resulting in a 100 basis point decline during the first half. You can see this all illustrated on slide 12. Now moving on to our operating expenses. Our underlying A&P investment grew 7% in the first half, a few points above sales growth due to the timing of the spend. Underlying SG&A grew 3%, driven in part by costs associated with organization-related changes and the early retirement program the company offered in the first quarter. In the aggregate, our underlying operating income growth through the first half was up 4% and was negatively impacted by roughly two percentage points due to the incremental costs associated with tariffs.
A 19% effective tax rate fueled by tax reform helped drive the 8% growth in earnings per share to $0.93. Now let me move on to my second topic and share with you our reaffirmed outlook for fiscal 2019, which you can see on slide 13. Despite the tariff-driven lumpiness in our first and second quarter results, the underlying net sales growth in the first half keeps us on track to deliver another year of strong top-line growth at Brown-Forman. Our takeaway trends for the brands remain solid and supportive of our growth ambitions. Second half results in the U.S. should benefit from the focused promotional support that we had planned for the large holiday selling season. As a reminder, top-line comparisons ease by two percentage points in the back half.
In total, our outlook remains unchanged from our first quarter call, as we expect another year of 6%-7% growth in our underlying net sales in fiscal 2019. Also unchanged from our first quarter guidance, we're assuming that tariffs, as Lawson said a moment ago, remain in effect throughout the remainder of fiscal 2019 in the EU, China, Mexico, Canada, and Turkey.
We continue to assess the timing and the amount of additional price increases on a market-by-market basis, but we do not expect that additional increases would offset the cost of the tariffs or the higher cost of goods we had already anticipated for the full fiscal year. As a result, we believe the growth margin pressure will continue during the second half of the fiscal year and cause an over 200 basis point decline for the full year, which is really consistent with what we communicated to you in August. While first half underlying A&P growth came in well ahead of our underlying net sales growth, we anticipate that these two metrics will grow roughly in line on a full-year basis. We expect tight management of SG&A should result in flat spend for the year, creating some modest operating leverage from gross profit to operating income.
As a result, we are reaffirming our full-year expectations for 4%-6% underlying operating income growth for fiscal 2019. Our earnings per share outlook is also unchanged at $1.65-$1.75, and this range represents a growth of 11%-18% over last year's EPS of $1.48. As a sensitivity, EPS over the balance of the year will be impacted by roughly $0.04 if foreign exchange rates move 10% in either direction. In summary, our company continues to register solid top-line momentum. As Lawson also said a few moments ago, in the absence of tariffs, we would be on track for another year of high single-digit underlying operating growth in operating income. Despite this short-term challenge, we continue to manage the business as we always have for the long term.
We believe we have some of the best premium American whiskey brands and assets in the world, which when combined with our whiskey-making know-how and brand-building skills, position us well to continue creating shareholder value. Our results are well-balanced, helped by our fast-growing business outside of the U.S. Our business in the U.S. continues to benefit from our portfolio skewed towards the fastest-growing categories, including American whiskey and tequila. We believe our portfolio, including our leading premium American whiskey brands, are significantly under-penetrated today relative to their long-term potential. Our teams are working hard at executing our 2025 strategy to capture this growth, which by the way, you'll hear more about next week at our investor day.
Equally important, we have invested significant capital in the U.S. to expand our business to fuel the growing demand we expect from current and future consumers of our brands around the world. This includes a multi-year period of stepped-up CapEx and inventory investment, which has been a significant use of cash over the last several years. We expect to leverage these working capital investments in the coming years to drive additional free cash flow generation and provide opportunities to return cash to shareholders as we always have, thoughtfully, disciplined, and opportunistically sensitive to the broader environment, including our recent dividend increase of 5.1% and our share repurchase activity in the second quarter. With that, wraps up my remarks. Dorothy, we can please open up the call for some questions.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Brett Cooper with Consumer Edge Research.
Good morning. Thank you. Two questions from me. I was just hoping you could help us understand, I guess, from your perspective, the puts and takes on timing-related items that are a little bit harder for us to see. Specifically, call-out and release promotional timing and distributor changeover. Just trying to get a sense. I appreciate that the three is against the six a year ago. If you put those together, you're growing roughly in line with the category. Given your portfolio, at least I would expect it to grow a little bit better. Then the second is really on the topic you brought up last call, and that's with respect to the creation of the emerging brands group. The brands that are in that group probably get a heightened focus.
I suspect Jack Daniel's and Woodford in the U.S. make a lot of money for everybody. Those don't get left behind. I was just wondering if you could offer your take, if there's a transition period in terms of shifting of responsibilities before you get the impact from those changes in a similar way that the reallocation of Southern Comfort resources took a bit to show through in results. Finally, just what comes of the non-focus brands as a result of the shift? Thank you.
Thank you, Brett.
You want to start?
Thank you, Brett. Let me start with the United States and see if I can help. There is a lot of noise, as we said, in the numbers. If you look at the first half, just to reiterate, our growth in the business was 3% at the top line. There's a couple things I called out. One, there was a distributor change in one state. It pulled our numbers down about a point. That's behind us. There's some other timing activities that did happen. I'd like to focus specifically timing being on our really heavy promotional activities that we did across the board last year on Jack Daniel's, Gentleman Jack, Honey, and Fire. We chose to push that through the holiday period and later this fiscal year.
When we consider both of those factors, we think our business is running in the U.S. in the 4%-5% range. Again, that is consistent with the syndicated data growth. One thing that we don't have that we've had in the past, perhaps, I think this is getting to your question, we do have rye out there. We can talk about that in a little bit more detail. The innovation lift to our business that we had for so many years with Honey and Fire, which are both, by the way, growing still very nicely in the U.S. The new innovation is not propelling us above the TBS growth at this point. I don't know if that helps a bit on the puts and takes as it relates to the U.S. business.
You know that when we look at our U.S. business, we also had the easy comps next year, so we were comparing the 3%-6% growth in the first half. If you look at the second, that's driven in part by this change in Ralphs consumer and the promotional timing. You flip it to the last half of growth, the last half is 4%. We're flipping our timing and promotional activities back there and have the change in the distributor state change behind this. That's the U.S. I don't know if Lawson-
Let me add-
has any emerging brands or add anything else to the U.S.
Let me add just one more point on the U.S. timing promotional calendar differences. One of the other results of the shifting of our promotional calendar is that our pricing, relative price positioning went up over the last few months. We were going up a bit, and our competitors are going down, the differential got spread and that hurts volumes a bit. We're getting a little bit sharper with that now, it's just one more reason why we think the second half of the year, you'll see an acceleration. I'd also want to point out too that Woodford, which you mentioned in your question, remains very strong. It's actually become now the number one incremental growth driver, as tracked in Nielsen. It's the number one growth driver in the entire American whiskey category.
It has become very meaningful to our business and continues to really look good. The other bourbon brands, really Old Forester, the tequila brands, particularly Herradura, also sort of accelerate our growth rate. We feel pretty good about the premiumization wave that continues to happen in the U.S. and how it is benefiting some of those brands. One sort of a final point on the U.S., is really, I think we have to admit that after a summer of digesting a number of organizational changes, which started with me but trickled down through the organization, that's now behind us. The entire U.S. organization is very focused, really on delivering OND in the rest of the fiscal year, and they're in a good place. Which brings in the topic of the emerging brands team, and how that's going.
We put it in place, really didn't get I would say the first meeting wasn't really until August. I have a hard time saying that's the reason some of those brands are accelerating right now. The good news is that they are. If we look through not only Herradura and Old Forester, which are sort of the anchor brands within that division, but thankfully, GlenDronach, in particular, is starting to accelerate its growth rate in the U.S. It took us a little bit longer maybe than when we would like to get it, to sort of get the momentum behind it. It is happening now, and we feel pretty good about that. Same thing on Slane, where some dedicated resources and focus we think is what it needed, and it's also beginning to accelerate. We feel pretty good about the direction it's going.
It's just like it's so new still, that it's tough to cite that as the reason that many of these brands are accelerating, but it has to be a contributor. Did we answer?
Yes.
Thank you.
One of the non-
Okay.
Your next question comes from the line of Dara Mohsenian from Morgan Stanley.
Hi, good morning.
Morning, Dara.
Morning.
Obviously there's been a lot of concern about macros in Asia and in travel retail. It seemed like your travel retail results were still pretty strong in the quarter. Was just hoping you could give us an update on those areas. What you're seeing on your own business in travel retail, maybe what you're hearing from an industry perspective as well as China. Any changes sequentially as you move through the quarter, any signs of weakness so far in fiscal Q3? Maybe just general thoughts on the level of macro risk in those areas.
I always like to start off with our business just in general, our concentration of our emerging markets group. I think that's what you're focusing on when you say Asia. Really parts of global travel retail are pretty broad for us. It's not the same as perhaps some of our other competitors. It's broad-based. If I look at the growth we had in the first half, we're very pleased with it on top of the 15% growth we had last year. Double digit on top of double digit. We're forecasting for the year for that not to change, or continue to be very strong contribution. We're not seeing things slowing down, if you will. I will say that China is a very small business for us.
We've talked about this before, I'm excited about some of the things that we're testing and doing there as it relates to the e-com premise business. In fact, we had a wonderful Singles' Day. Perhaps we'll talk about this next week at our investor conference on 11.11, where our volumes doubled in one day versus the same period a year ago. Just a little touch of stuff. As it relates to the global travel retail business, it remains strong. I guess travel's still up, as we've said. Some of it's driven by us and new introductions there, as we said, innovation, and it's doing well as innovation being Bottled-in-Bond. The scotches, as Lawson was referring to in the U.S., actually are doing very well in our global travel retail business.
As we continue to introduce travelers around the world, and they become more familiar with American whiskeys, our American whiskey portfolios continue to do well there. As I look again to the full year for the travel retail business, I would expect it to remain a strong contributor to our growth.
On the emerging markets question, Dara, I know you largely know this, the markets that are driving that sort of double-digit sales growth around Brown-Forman are different than the markets that drive most of our competitive emerging markets buckets. Mexico, Poland, really Eastern Europe, which no one really ever talks about, is a sizable business for us and growing at very nice rates. Brazil has been a star for years now and continues to grow very nicely, and then Russia. We have a different set of markets than is a little more common in the India, China world. One, we think that's a big opportunity and something we will be talking about that next week. That's an area we see in the future being a decent growth driver for us.
For now, those core markets of Mexico, Poland, Brazil really are driving our emerging markets business.
I want to just build one more point on. When we combine our emerging markets and travel retail, they're well over 20% of our business now, and some people take it for granted. That's a pretty good chunk of our business. When it's growing double digits, it begins to be very meaningful for Brown-Forman. When we consider other places of the world, I think we cannot lose sight of the nice growth there and the size these businesses have become.
That's helpful. Just, Jane, one quick clarification. It sounds like SG&A may be a little more favorable in your full-year guidance based on the release. Is that being offset elsewhere by gross margins maybe being a little worse than expected? Does that just sort of put you in a better place in terms of your EPS range? Albeit unchanged, maybe looking like you're more favorably placed within that EPS range?
Yeah, Dara. Thank you. I started off the year, I think we expected SG&A to be flat I made changes modestly with it. Really, it's just tightening and continuing management of our costs and taking a closer look at our full-year forecast. I'm back to where I was at the beginning of the year, really. It keeps us firmly in our range.
Okay. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Peter Grom with JPMorgan.
Hey, good morning, everyone.
Morning, Peter.
Morning, Peter.
The tone on tariffs seems to have changed since August. At the time, it seems as if one of the reasons you decided to absorb the tariffs in August was a result of the positive commentary in the press. I understand you guys are still planning to absorb the tariffs for now, but is there anything out there that may alter your strategy as you move into the back half of the year? Has there been any positive developments of late? Thanks.
Yeah. I wish I could say there were positive developments. I think there's obviously the Mexico-Canada has been moving in the right direction, or it feels that way. China seems to be a roller coaster a little bit. Europe's gotten quiet. For us, Europe is the largest of all those buckets for sure. In terms of tone changing a little bit, you're probably right in saying that when we were in, I guess it was August call, we were optimistic that the tariffs may get settled a little faster than they seem to be. We're sticking with it, and we do continue to absorb the cost for now as we would say we are investing in the momentum of the brand.
As we move farther into the fiscal year and into the summertime, we're going to be more motivated to recoup at least a portion of these tariff costs. We're starting those conversations now. We will see. I don't think our overall position has really changed very much, but we're trying to stay agile as the situation is pretty fluid, and the entire tariff discussion remains a very big part of how this fiscal year is unveiling.
It's definitely a balancing act, I think, for us, as you consider the affordability of our product to our consumers and then just the relative pricing when you consider the competitive set that's not subject to these tariffs. Then we're considering our margins. It's a balancing act with all of those factors as we look ahead. We have actually taken some pricing in a handful of markets. I'm sure that you understand we have taken some. We took it earlier this year.
Great. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Vivien Azer with Cowen.
Hey, good morning. This is Brian Valez on for Vivien.
Hello, Brian from Vivien.
This weekend at the G20 Summit, we saw the U.S., Canada, and Mexico essentially sign NAFTA 2.0. Are there any implications for your Mexican operations or import businesses into either geography?
No. There's not any implications from. Matter of fact, just so we understand, the signing of the tariff, it's actually got a period of time before it actually becomes effective. It's got to go through Congress and other things to fully be approved before it comes in place. That is separate and apart from the steel and aluminum tariff, and the retaliatory tariffs that were put on American whiskey in response. That's the first step, and then the second step would have to be the resending of those tariffs. That part's still impacting our business, the retaliatory tariffs are still on aluminum.
Great. Woodford continues to outperform, despite higher ASP relative to its peers. Can you just comment on the price gap evolution in super premium bourbon, and whether these price points are increasingly bifurcated?
We have been steadily increasing the price on Woodford now, at a very low single-digit rates for quite some time. There's certainly other brands that are just below us that continue to grow and grow nicely too. You've probably seen the, I'll call it the American whiskey business in the U.S., is accelerating right now. It sort of dipped a little bit over the last six months. Then it started coming back, and it's over 10% now or in that range. We feel pretty comfortable that the brand is strong enough that it can continue to take some small price increases and continue to defend its turf as really the number one super premium whiskey out there. It's a great success story for us, and one that we're very proud of.
Great. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Steve Powers with Deutsche Bank.
Hey, thanks. Good morning to everybody. I know that directionally some degree of tariff impact was expected in this quarter coming out of last quarter, it just looks to me like the tariff impacts maybe started to flow through a bit more intensely than expected in the second quarter, both in terms of the reversal of the first quarter advance sell-in as well as some of the negative impacts to gross margin hitting in the second quarter versus more of a delayed impact toward the second half. I guess the first question, is that a fair depiction that you're feeling more tariff impact a bit earlier than anticipated? If so, is there an explanation as to why?
Secondly, in that context, realized price mix fell off dramatically in the second quarter from the first quarter, at the total company level, which just seems counterintuitive given the tariff impacts ramping up. Maybe could you bridge the sequential fall off in pricing in the quarter that was just finished, and then perhaps provide some color as to how that price mix line should trend in the back half as you work to offset some of the further tariff impacts. Thanks.
Yeah. Steve, just to talk about the first half, I think you were talking about were the tariff larger bottom line impacts to us than we expected in the second quarter? They were not.
Correct. Okay.
They were not. Answer to your question, that they were not. We said they would start to hit us in the second quarter. In terms of the timing of when they reverse, we really didn't know what the exact timing, this was new territory to us. We expected some to reverse by our fiscal year-end, and they all reversed in the quarter, if you will. The margin impact of this, is really where I was talking about that we weren't expecting. What we expect in the second quarter margin impact was consistent. The timing was not what we expected, but it's behind us now. We just thought it would all be by the end of the year. Does that clarify both those questions?
That does. I still have a question as to the realized price mix. Thanks.
Yeah, the realized price, as I said, and we said this back in August, and Lawson was just referring to it. We delayed, for the most part, in all of our major markets, any price increases, related to tariff. We had took them in a handful of very small countries. You're not seeing the pricing in the quarter. I think that's what you were trying to allude to, connecting tariff with pricing. That's because it didn't happen, because it was very small, anything that we had. Any type of pricing that we would have later, on tariffs, related to tariffs, would be later in the year. We do have a little bit of a improvement on that in the back half.
Okay. I don't mean to dwell on it, in the first quarter, the 9% underlying growth was in part driven by four points of price mix, if my numbers are correct. Whereas this quarter, essentially all of the underlying sales growth was volumetric. I'm just trying to bridge that four changing to zero just quarter-to-quarter. Is there a mix impact? Is it timing? It just feels like a very abrupt fall off, and I don't see anything in the year-over-year compare that would explain it.
Yeah. It's really driven by the give back, the mix of the give back that we had in Europe.
Okay.
Okay?
Yeah. Way to think about it, first quarter would've been inflated by the inventory build giving you more price mix, and then when it reversed in the second quarter, you would again have the effect of the price mix not being there, right?
Okay.
I think that's the gist of your question. I think that explains most of it.
It does. Okay. That helps. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
Your next question comes from the line of Judy Hong with Goldman Sachs.
Thank you. Good morning.
Morning, Judy.
First, I just wanted to follow up on the U.S. trends, I think that there's sort of two separate issues. One is just in terms of the consumer takeaway trends. I know that you talked about the 4%-5% being kind of the underlying trend that you see. I guess the last couple of months, it does seem a little bit soft, at least in some of the scan data. I know, again, there's a lot of short-term fluctuations, just wondering if you can kind of talk about what's causing some of the slowdown more recently. The second issue in the U.S., it seems to be more just the timing of your underlying sales versus what you see in the consumer takeaway data.
When you say in the second half you're expecting an acceleration, is it more that the consumer takeaway trend should now be more representative in your underlying sales, just as some of the comparison issues go away, so we should be looking at somewhere in the mid-single digits? Do you also expect consumer takeaway trends to accelerate in the back half, and that gives you a boost in terms of the back half trend for the U.S.?
Well, I think, Judy, that kind of yes and yes. One, I would just, and you sort of alluded to it, but be careful with the shorter-term syndicated data results, because they've often diverted from what we're seeing as our real takeaway trend. That's happened a number of times in the past. Really, the two issues which you mentioned earlier, but really is just the tough comps. That math is in the slides that you guys have. The other part of it really is the promotional calendar timing, which we did wait till the second half of the year. As I talked about a little bit earlier, is the pricing gaps relative to our real good, our big competitors, got bigger.
That was a nick on our volumes, and we've done some things to get that back in place again, and we feel pretty confident that you'll see a second half acceleration. That acceleration should show up not only in our company sales numbers, but also in the syndicated data.
Judy Hong, I thought I might just add on one point to help on the first part of your question, just to put it into some type of perspective. I saw this statistic yesterday. I was looking at something, and it talked about our activity, our overall promotional activity, our spend, I guess, if you will, being down double digits for the last 3 months versus a year ago. You can see it's fairly significant. It would have a fairly significant impact, and Lawson Whiting mentioned this earlier, because other competitors were continuing to do this type of activity during this last 3-month period. We did not. We zigged, they zigged, whatever you want to say, went the opposite direction. That big change is probably what you're seeing in the 3-month syndicated data.
We already had planned to move things and did move things, that's what our plan was for the year. We expect to see an acceleration as we go through the balance of the year, and you'll see depletions and our takeaway trends converge back to the more 4% to 5% range.
Got it. Okay. Just following up on the tariff impact question. If I look at the slide where you talked about the gross margin impact from tariff, the 0.3%, that's about $3 million, roughly, in terms of the second quarter. It sounds like the $35 million-$40 million impact that you called out last quarter is still intact. I guess the $30 million-plus kind of a number, it's your expectation that that actually does flow in the back half of the year. The gross margin guidance of down 200 basis points, that seems more second half weighted still. Is that the way that we should think about the tariff impact?
You got it. You're absolutely correct.
Okay. A little bit of a longer-term question on your mix of your emerging markets. I think you even called out today that some of your growth that you've seen in markets like Poland and other markets, it's a little bit different than some of the other competitors that have obviously focused on markets like China and others. How do you sort of envision the mix of your emerging market opportunity kind of changing over time? Is it more just you still see a lot of opportunity in markets like Poland and others, that that's really where you're going to continue to focus on? Or would you think about diversifying that mix going forward, and how do we think about then the investment level in some of those markets?
Okay. I think that's a good question. That is something we're doing a lot of studying on right now as to where we see the best opportunities. It's not that we don't feel good about Poland and Eastern Europe and some of those markets going forward. They're still, particularly as their consumers shift, a lot of times it's shifting out of vodka into whiskey, and that is a sort of an underlying trend that has boosted those markets for a number of years, and we're continuing to ride that wave. You asked about where some of the markets where we're underdeveloped and we see some better performance going forward. I would cite South America in aggregate as one. Africa in general, we are very small. India and China both are growing markets for us. They're just not really all that big.
Expectations are going up on both of those markets. It's true we will have to reallocate some resources to build awareness and to establish those markets and get them moving faster. We have every plans to go ahead and do that. We're not going to go, what I call, silver bullet down on one market and say that's going to be the growth driver of our future. It's going to be a spread-the-bet thing as we continue to look. Really, the geographic diversification, those markets are really going to stay focused on the Jack Daniel's family, and continue to push forward. They're all well-seeded. It's just a matter now of extrapolating it into bigger growth.
Judy, one other thing to keep in mind related to, I know you know this, when you look at the relative position or performance of the companies in the industry and the emerging markets, sometimes it swings by the degree to which you're in cognac, is one aspect of it, particularly when you talk about China. The other one is the degree to which your company has invested heavily in the local businesses. The story of Brown-Forman that's so interesting is that ours, for the most part, is a very Jack Daniel's and hopefully ultimately an American whiskey-led premium price point strategy at this stage for the emerging markets. Some of the biggest differences you'll observe in our performance or penetration or position within these emerging markets versus our competition really goes back to what portfolio you're taking into them and at what price points you play.
Of course, that moves around with the passage of time. Cognac's in fashion for a while, it drops in a country or the emerging market. Local businesses can be strong or weak. So I just always like to remind people that the various companies do have different strategies and portfolio approaches to these emerging markets.
Got it. That makes sense. Okay. Thank you. See you next week.
Yeah. See you.
Thank you. We've reached the allotted time for questions. I will turn the call back over to Mr. Koval for closing remarks.
Thank you, Dorothy, and thanks to all of you for joining us today for our first half earnings call. Just a quick reminder to those who haven't yet RSVP'd to next week's Investor Day at the stock exchange, please let us know by this Friday so you can avoid any issues with security at the exchange. We look forward to seeing you then. In the meantime, feel free to reach out if you have any additional questions. Take care.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. That does conclude today's conference call. You may now disconnect.