Jane Morreau
Analyst · Vivien Azer from Cowen
Yes. So yes, just to step back, as you said, we did have a pretty big drag on our margins this year, and it was driven in large part because of input costs. That was the biggest piece, that was three quarters of it, so think wood and agave and I’ll get to -- as we look forward. So really, mix only had a small impact. It was only a quarter of it so $0.06 [ph] or so. And when you break it out and you pull it apart, yes, a piece of it is because of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey and the fact that the on-premise were shut down and Jack Daniel’s in the U.S. alone is one of the top three on-premise brands. And so, it was impacted significantly and it impacted our margins, of course. So, when we look ahead to F ‘22, as I said in my script and you just referenced, we are expecting some improvement. I will pause for a moment, and the improvements why we’re expecting is because we do expect some of these last couple of years of hurt from agave to begin to reverse and only begin next year, and we can talk more about that later if people want to know what we’re seeing in that. But, we also have had a number of productivity initiatives from our global production organization that will start to begin realized next year, and we’ve got several years before they’re all fully realized because of, again, just a reminder of our aged whiskey products, and how things go on to the balance sheet. And then, mix will benefit some, but it’s not the hugest piece, as I said, this year, I said from this past year and how much it hurt. What I will want to pause and point out for a moment is something that we have included in our forecast, and that’s a pretty significant increase in commodity costs. Inflationary commodity cost is around double digits is what we currently have forecasted in there. Otherwise, we would have expected a better improving margin next year -- or this year, and we’re going to keep an eye on that, by the way, as I know all consumer products companies are. But right now, we feel where we sit, that we can improve margins -- expect margins to begin to improve in F ‘22. And as we look beyond that, we expect improving trends thereafter. As a reminder, tariffs are still in our numbers. They’re still dragging down our numbers and hope -- we’ve got optimistic that that will go away at some point down the road.