Alcohol brand owners in Q3 2024 – The winners and losers, so far

Brown-Forman brought the curtain down on third-quarter results reporting season yesterday, with its figures from the three months to the end of October (the company’s reporting year runs to April). The group’s 3% sales increase represented one of the better performances of the brand owners in Global Drinks Intel‘s coverage, in what has been a mightily sobering round of results.

Indeed, growth of any kind is not to be sniffed at in Q3, with almost half of the 14 brand owners coming in down on the corresponding period in 2023.

Editor’s Note: Two of the publicly-listed alcohol brand owners that feature in Global Drinks Intel’s results coverage – Diageo and Treasury Wine Estates – do not appear in our chart as the pair report their results on a six- rather than a three-month basis. Brown-Forman’s Q3 numbers are from its fiscal Q2 to the end of October, while Constellation Brands’ are from June to August.

As the date inconsistency indicates, the covering of company results is more an art than a science – witness, for example, table topper Viña Concha y Toro; the Chile-headquartered wine group’s figures are presented in reported terms, which include the impact of foreign exchange fluctuations (all of the other figures above are on organic bases). Despite the skewed +9% showing, Concha y Toro’s commentary included reference to a “robust recovery” for the business.

“This quarter’s performance is even more remarkable given that the US experienced a significant slowdown against our first half of the year due to intense competition in the alcohol sector,” CEO Eduardo Guilisasti said last month.

Joining Brown-Forman in the 3% club is second-placed Heineken, which delivered a second consecutive quarter of low single-digit growth in late October. The brewer also set the scene for a healthy finish to 2024, flagging a “material stepping up of marketing investments in the second half”.

Among the rest of the brand owners to post growth – ranging from +3% (Constellation Brands) to +0.6% (The Boston Beer Co) – is Anheuser-Busch InBev (+2.1%); an accelerated growth rate in the US suggests the giant has finally washed through the high-profile havoc that a simple social media post wreaked on Bud Light back in April last year.

Now for the bad news.

Spirits brand owners dominated the negative column, starting with Campari Group at -1.4% from Q3 and including Proximo Spirits (-4.3%), Pernod Ricard (-5.9%) and Moët Hennessy (-7%). Much as this cohort can point to the healthier results they were cycling from the year prior, three of the four – we’ll exclude Proximo due to its reliance on the US and Mexico – have historically laid claim to the geographical hedging that comes automatically from their multinational presence. The reasons given for the red numbers included the “soft category dynamics” for American whiskey in the US (Campari Group), “softer than previously expected” sales in China (Pernod Ricard) and the considerably broader “ongoing normalisation of (wine & spirits) demand that began in 2023” (Moët Hennessy).

Meanwhile, Molson Coors Beverage Co, the only beer-dominant brand owner in this downbeat grouping, leant on “summer industry softness” in the US over the summer as the explanation for its near-8% sales decline.

Propping up our table – once again – is Rémy Cointreau at just over 16% down. The Rémy Martin owner’s upbeat tone back in January has been drowned out as the year has progressed, culminating in October’s warning of “another year (to March 2025) of double-digit decline” as a result of what it called “soft end-consumption and intense promotional activity around the world”.

For some of these brand owners, then – Rémy Cointreau in particular – Christmas can’t come soon enough.