Hello and welcome to Brown-Forman Corporation Second Quarter and First Half of Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Sue Perram, Vice President, Director Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. I would like to thank each of you for joining us today for Brown-Forman’s second quarter and first half of fiscal year 2024 earnings call. Joining me today are Lawson Whiting, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Leanne Cunningham, 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 except as required by law, 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 and first half of fiscal year 2024, in addition to posting presentation materials that Lawson and Leanne 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 you should consider in conjunction with our forward-looking statements. Other significant risk factors are described in our Form 10-K and Form 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 condition and results of operations, are contained in the press release and investor presentation. With that, I would like to turn the call over to Lawson.

Thank you, Sue, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today as we share our second quarter and first half results for fiscal 2024. As anticipated, the key drivers behind our first quarter results continued into the second quarter. First, consumer demand for our brands continues to reflect a normalization back to our more historical trends. Second, as we’ve shared, we continue to grow on top of a very strong first half than the prior year driven by the rebuilding of distributor inventories in the prior year period. To help put this into better context, I encourage you to reference Schedule D in today’s earnings release. Third, we’re starting to see beneficial contributions from both Diplomático and Gin Mare, while also continuing our portfolio reshaping with the announced sale of Sonoma-Cutrer. Fourth, while higher input costs were persistent in the first half, these costs were more than offset by favorable price and mix and the lapping of the supply chain disruption costs in the year-ago period. And finally, while our operating expense growth rate moderated in the second quarter, the timing and phasing of these expenses had an unfavorable impact on our first half operating income. Now let’s turn our attention to how these drivers influenced our first half fiscal 2024 results. Our reported net sales growth increased 2% in the first half with organic net sales growth increasing 1% after adjusting for the recent acquisitions. Notably, this growth was delivered against an 11% reported and 17% organic net sales increase in the same period last year. If you were to simply add the organic growth rate in the first half of fiscal ‘24 to the organic growth rate in the first half of fiscal ‘23 and divide by 2, the average in the first half over these…

Thank you, Lawson, and good morning, everyone. I will provide additional details on our geographic performance, other financial highlights, as well as our updated fiscal 2024 outlook. From a geographic perspective, our emerging international markets continued to lead the Company’s growth, collectively delivering very strong double-digit organic net sales growth, driven by Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, particularly in Türkiye as momentum in the premium whiskey category continued, the United Arab Emirates due to increased distribution and strong consumer demand, and Poland, which is benefiting from our pricing strategy. New mix, which grew strong double-digits in Mexico, is benefiting from our pricing strategy and gaining share of the RTD category, and Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Apple, led by Brazil as well as Chile where the brand is returning to normal levels of supply. Also during the quarter, we launched our own distribution in Slovakia. Slovakia has a substantial premium whiskey market where American whiskey is the value leader of the category. This makes it an important market as we drive the global growth of the Jack Daniel’s family of brands and bring our broader portfolio to the market, in particular our recently acquired Diplomático Rum. As we have demonstrated with our previous route to consumer investments, we believe owned distribution provides us with increased consumer insights, focus on our broader portfolio, and a greater portion of the value chain. Organic net sales in the travel retail channel were flat in the first half as the channel lapped 67% growth in the year-ago period. Strong double-digit growth of our super premium America whiskeys such as Woodford Reserve, our exclusive global travel retail offering Jack Daniel’s American Single Malt and Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel were offset by declines in Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey and Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Honey. Organic net sales in our developed…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Peter Grom with UBS.

So, obviously, a tougher first half given the inventory dynamic, and I recognize if you back that out, organic would have been relatively solid in the first half. But to kind of hit the low end of the range, it does imply a return to kind of mid-single-digit growth in the back half of the year. So, can you maybe just walk us through the confidence in the outlook at this stage? Should we expect growth to be more at the low end rather than the high end? And just any thoughts on phasing as we look out to the back half of the year? Maybe specifically, obviously, I’m not -- it might be hard to guess, but is there any kind of shipment dynamic if that’s kind of occurring as we kind of work through this EU tariff situation? Thanks.

Thanks, Peter. I’ll start with that. Our guidance does imply that we’re going to have sequential improvement in the second half. And as we shared in our Q1 call, we continue to remain cautious with changes in trends such as the impact of inflation on consumer spending and the current macroeconomic volatility. And then, you heard in our prepared remarks, we do expect kind of all of our markets and channels to continue to grow, but it’s about the tempering of our expectations. And when we were -- specific to the United States when we were on our call in our first quarter, we were looking at U.S. three-month value growth trends for TDS with acceleration and trends kind of in that mid single digits and the environment that we’re in today has -- we’ve had a change or shift in trends where we’re looking at TDS decelerating in low single digits. So, that’s been included as we look out, but the drivers that we see for our acceleration is that you can see on slide 5. We’ve now lapped and are growing on top of just a really exceptionally high first half of last year, which was a plus 17, so like we said in our prepared remarks, the average is 8. And one thing we’ve also talked about is we did launch Jack Daniel’s and Coca-Cola in the second half of last year and we will have to comp that as we go through the fourth quarter of this year. But again, generally speaking, the back half of the year, we have significantly easier comps in the back half, and we continue to believe that we’re going to be able to benefit from our long-term pricing strategy. We’re really leaning on our revenue growth management strategies. We’ll talk about that probably in a bit. What else is going to drive our acceleration is that Gin Mare and Diplomático, our recent super- and ultra-premium acquisitions are going to come into our organic results in the back half of the year, which will help us. And we continue to see that our cost trends are heading in the right direction and we’re on a path to gross margin recovery, which is going to continue to help deliver some of that acceleration in the second half as well as you heard us say in the first quarter call as well as this quarter, in the support of the launch of Jack Daniel’s and Coca-Cola in the U.S, we just had a lot of operating expenses loaded into the first quarter of this year, we saw moderation in the second quarter and we’re going to continue to see that moderation as we go through the rest of this year. So, those are kind of the components that are built into our outlook.

And you talked about tariffs, real quick at the end of that, just a brief thing on that. First, and I assume what you meant was have we been shipping incremental cases into Europe ahead of the potential for these tariffs, and we have not. We have not largely, because we don’t believe that they are going to come through in the real near future. For those that are not as close to this whole situation, we continue to work with both sides of the Atlantic. We said that on the prepared remarks a little bit. There have been some rumblings lately that these tariffs could come back around. Look, we’re smarter about this than we were 4 or 5 years ago when it first came out. We’ve got a lot of mitigation scenarios that we know what to do. But at this point, as long as both sides are at the table, which they are right now, we do not expect this to come around, and I think our pretty strong belief is that this will be kicked down, we’ll kick the can down the road for at least a couple of years until some of these tariff conversations can get resolved.

Got it. So basically, even if we get to this deadline, you’re kind of more of the view that this could still be kicked down the road, negotiations could continue. So, it’s not like a month from now, this automatically goes back in, it’s kind of your view?

Correct. Correct.

Our next question comes from the line of Vivien Azer with TD Cowen.

I was hoping to follow up on your commentary around more cautious outlook on the U.S. Lawson, maybe you can just unpack it a little bit. Are we more concerned around price elasticities? Is this more tempered outlook a function of more down-trading than you were anticipating, or is there something kind of more structural in terms of per capita consumption within spirit? Thank you.

Oh no, it’s definitely not the last. Look, I think it is simply -- the consumer has weakened a bit over the last 3, 4, 5 months. That’s kind of what’s changed since where we would have been last quarter. As Leanne went through it, I mean, if you just look at TDS, which as you know, has been running at 4% to 5% for 20 years or something like that. Certainly stepped up over the COVID, which I know some of you called it a super cycle, went up quite a bit over those years, and it’s come back down. And I would have said most of 2023, calendar 2023, we were in that mid-single-digit range, and then it really fell off, over the last, as I say, 3 or 4 months. And so I think there’s just been a bit of weakness in consumer confidence that has hit the entire market and brought the number down a little bit, but it’s still growing, I should say, too. It’s still at a sort of plus 2 range. And so it just made us get a little bit more cautious on the outlook for the U.S.

And just as a quick follow-up, you guys noted the inclusion of Gin Mare and Diplomático. Those are quite high end offerings. So, how are you kind of thinking about the contribution to organic growth from those two brands? Is your outlook a little bit more restrained on that too, given concerns around the consumer? Thanks.

Well, where we see kind of really strong growth for Gin Mare and Diplomático, globally, yes, but these brands are really large in our European markets where we align well with investments we made in our route to consumer. So, we believe with those brands in our hands in those markets and the performance that we’re seeing in those markets, we do see consumers in Europe. I mean, they’re optimizing their spend but they’re still looking for experiences in everyday affordable luxuries. And so, we see a path to growth for those brands. And again in our reported results, they’ve contributed 2 points of growth for year-to-date and we expect that momentum to continue as we go into the back half of this year.

Our next question comes from the line of Filippo Falorni with Citi.

I had a question on the -- your comment on distributor inventories. I know you cycled the rebuild in the first half. And you also mentioned that they’re now at a normal level. Given the weakness that we’re seeing at the consumption level, which you alluded to, is there a risk that you’re going to see more of a normalization further below this current level? Many of your spirit peers have talked about more of a normalization of distributor inventory? So, I’ll be curious on your perspective there?

Okay, great. Yes, we believe that -- and kind of like we stated in our prepared remarks in general that distributor and retailer inventories have normalized. The impact of that estimated net change in distributor inventories for us is largely related to that year-over-year comparison. And if you take a look at Schedule D, which -- B, I’m sorry, which is in our earnings release and you kind of look at the shipments and depletions for our full strength portfolio, you’ll see that they are -- the shipments and depletions are largely aligned. And we’ve talked about we’ve lapped supply chain challenges, our inventories returning to normal. So really what we see going forward is going to be related to consumer demand. One small note is that our recent acquisitions of Gin Mare and Diplomático aren’t yet reflected in the schedule and we’ll be adding those in the next quarter. And maybe just to kind of dig in a little bit deeper, the U.S., we believe they’re back to normal. This time last year in Europe, we were -- and really in October was the big month where we were air freighting cases into Europe. So, we had product available. So, we were still rebuilding inventory. Again, in Q2 of this year, we have really the largest impact of the absence of those supply chain disruption costs, but we believe they’re back to normal as well. And then, in our largest markets in Latin America, Brazil, our business is strong and our inventories are at normal levels and Mexico as well -- for both Brazil and Mexico, we own our route to consumer. So, we have visibility through there. And then we purchase retail inventory data that continues to let us see further through the chain. So Brazil, we feel like our levels are normal. And Mexico, yes, with the really recent change in trend, we’re adjusting accordingly and all that’s built into our guidance.

And then a quick follow-up on your tequila business, obviously, we’re coming off a cycle of very high inflation in agave costs, which is now turning the other way. How do you assess the potential risk of more price competition in the category, particularly given we’re seeing also a slowdown in consumption levels? Thank you.

So look, tequila has been on a pretty unbelievable run actually over the last few years as particularly, I’ll say that 22, 24-year olds up into their 30s really have adopted tequila as sort of their drink of choice and it’s done really, really well, particularly at that super-premium, ultra-premium price point, which is where Herradura plays, el Jimador is going to be a little bit less than that, but still a solid well-positioned brand across both Mexico, the U.S., and in el Jimador’s case increasingly in some other markets around the world. So now to your question about what’s going to happen with pricing in the category. Look, I think and hope that the people that are playing in that ultra-premium price point for tequila are the big players, who all have suffered through a period of time when the agave costs were so high and hurt everyone’s margins that would have been playing in that that it’s time now to reap some of those benefits of the better margins. So, I don’t expect that we’re going to see significant changes in promotional pricing, and I haven’t seen it yet in any kind of material way, but we’ll have to see what happens over the next 6 to 12 months. But I know at least from Brown-Forman’s perspective, we are not planning to get more aggressive in that category. We want to be able to stay as an ultra-premium brand.

Our next question comes from the line of Nadine Sarwat with Bernstein.

Earlier you called out seeing low-single-digit net sales growth for the U.S. spirits market overall. Are you anticipating getting back to that long-term mid-single-digit growth rate that we saw in the U.S.? And if so, over what time horizon? Are your expectations sort of that coming back in the next few quarters, or is this well over a year into the future? And then, just a slightly shorter term question. Any color that you could add on what you’re seeing in the last month in U.S. spirits and global spirits since the end of the quarter? Any changes to the trends that you’ve reported today, or is it largely in line? Thank you.

Well, look, those are pretty short timeframes there. I mean, I think forecasting where the U.S. market is going to go, as I said, it’s in that sort of low single digit range right now. I just talked a minute ago about it being in the 4% to 5% for years and years and years with the exception of the COVID boom. But I don’t know how to predict when it’s going to come back. Certainly, if we looked at past cycles, the only time that TDS has really materially weakened in the last 20 years was after the financial crisis, so sort of 2009 timeframe. And it snapped back really fast. I think all of us -- well, those that have been in this business that long, remember that, because it surprised everyone and came back. And I think it’s a category -- this is an amazingly resilient category in the United States spirits and I do not believe it’s lost that factor. So, I do think it’s just sort of a weakening right now, and then we’re just going to have to see where consumer spending goes over the next six months, but hoping and believing we’ll be back in that sort of mid single digit range. And I’m guessing here, but we’re talking 6 to 12 months. What was the second half of the question? Oh, to be honest with you, I haven’t really -- I haven’t seen -- I’m looking at same data you are in terms of Nielsen and NABCA. I haven’t seen anything real recent that was any different. The step-down was more in the August, September range, not even sure the numbers have updated to October yet, so.

Our next question comes from the line of Bryan Spillane with Bank of America.

First question, just Leanne, I might have missed this, but Finlandia, is the divestiture now included in the guidance? I think I kind of missed that towards the end of your prepared remarks. Just trying to understand how Finlandia impacts the guidance now versus the previous guide?

Right. Well, we guide on an organic basis, which would exclude that benefit. But that’s why we also thought it was important to give to you all today, quantify that impact because it does kind of fall outside of our organic outlook. So, we wanted to make sure that you had that piece.

Okay. And that’s true for EBIT as well as revenue, right?

Yes.

Okay. And then second is just, Lawson, as you talked about the U.S. a bit, just -- travel retail in Mexico, I guess those are two other areas where we have fielded some questions, just about potential slowing. So, is there anything there we should have noted? I guess, in terms of how the, you kind of moderated the full year outlook aside from the U.S. Those two or any other geographies, I guess, that might have factored into the more moderate growth expectations?

Yes. Let me hit global travel retail first. That one really is a factor of comps. If you can remember, this time last year, we were refilling that channel in a big, big way. And I do expect that -- I mean, just look, anyone who’s been traveling anytime recently, the planes are absolutely jammed. And so, I feel pretty good that that business will return to sort of its historical rate very, very quickly. It’s just got to get through this comping thing. Mexico is a little bit different and a little -- it’s not confusing necessarily. I mean if you look at our schedule and I think the year-to-date sales is plus 9%, something like that. So Mexico is the second largest market in the world for Brown-Forman. And so it is an important market and has been growing pretty dynamically for us for a period of years. Now that’s been led right now by New Mix, which is a great brand. It is absolutely enormous down in that country and I think everyone knows that at this time. But the rest of the business, which had been doing okay throughout this year, I think we’re getting a little more cautious that the Mexican consumer is showing some weakness, too. And so, we are expecting a little bit of a slowdown in the second half of the year in that market, but not falling off a cliff or anything like that either. It’s just both tequila and whiskey have slowed down a little bit, and so we’re expecting that to continue through the rest of the fiscal year.

I’m sorry. I was just -- the only thing I was going to add on to that is we said on our prepared remarks, GTR is comping at plus 67%. When you look at the two first halves, the average of that we’re at 29%. And then one of the things that we would also add on Mexico is that while we’re seeing kind of weakness in the whiskey and tequila categories, we’re gaining share across that in our takeaway data. So -- but again, what it’s talking about for our outlook, kind of a revision in our expectation, and that’s just kind of for that deceleration in the back half of the year.

No, that makes sense. And Lawson, maybe if I could just sneak one last one, just the Sonoma-Cutrer deal was creative actually, a pretty good creative solution I thought in terms of finding a good home for it and making it a transaction that is kind of attractive to both sides. So, I’ll give you -- it was actually a really good, I thought, creative solution. Just thinking about portfolio more going forward, is there -- just how should we be thinking about acquisition divestiture, is this just a continuing on kind of the reshaping you’ve done, or is there a chance we see it sort of move in either direction more meaningfully?

Sure. So, I mean look, as we would have said literally 10 years ago, that we were going to reshape our portfolio to focus on spirits, in particular on super- and ultra-premium spirits, and that is largely finished. You know all the different brands that we’ve sold over the last, 5, 6, 7 years, and we’ve brought a lot of new things in. And so, we have definitely premiumized the portfolio to a pretty big extent. The Sonoma-Cutrer one was Slightly different because that within the world of wine, that is certainly a super premium brand, but we were not -- it was the only wine brand that we owned fully on. I mean, Korbel is still here, but the brand was sort of sitting by itself, which is not the most efficient way to operate it. And the Duckhorn Group are, one, they’re fully focused on super-ultra-premium wines. They’re one of the sort of premier wine companies in America. And it’s one of those where we believe the value creation opportunity is better under their hands than ours. I hate to say that in some ways, but wine is really -- it’s their focus. It’s what they do. It is the accounts that they call on are all very similar and Sonoma-Cutrer is a huge benefit to them, too, because it is so big, particularly in the United States. And so, we just thought it made more sense that way. And then as you say, we own a piece of that company now and we’ll share in the upside that hopefully comes in the relative near future.

Our next question comes from the line of Lauren Lieberman with Barclays.

I was curious if you could talk a little bit about Latin America, about Brazil in particular. You already touched on Mexico, but in Brazil, which I know is a smaller market for you, definitely heard some of your peers out there talking about a more challenged environment. So, wondering if you could talk a bit about that and then probably much more importantly the UK. The UK, just backing into it looks like it was down pretty this quarter. And I know there’s the Jack and Cola dynamics in there, but just any help and perspective on UK, I guess, I should throw in Germany too, but Western European -- sorry, I meant France. Sorry, those are the two that for me were -- a little weird. But just perspective on the consumer environment there or how much of this is more about Jack and Cola transition that’s impacting the numbers right now? Thanks.

Okay, great. Thanks, Lauren. For Brazil specifically, again, you can see in our year-to-date results, we’ve got high-single-digit, organic net sales growth. A lot of that is being driven by -- and again, when you think about how we prioritize brands and geographies in supplying our products at -- post supply chain constraints. Jack Daniel’s flavor portfolio has a much improved supply or really a back to normal supply. And we are able to support the consumers’ taste profile for our products of honey and apple and really the launch of Jack Daniel’s Apple along with our geographic expansion strategy that we’ve had in that market for a while is continuing to gain market share. So the consumer takeaway is slowing a bit and we do see the competitive environment intensifying, but we continue to believe we’re going to do strong business in Brazil. So, I’ll move to UK and I think you’ve already that our business is strong there. What we’re seeing is this is really about the transition of our Jack and Cola business out of our results because this will be a market where, that is led by Coca-Cola with the Jack Daniel’s and Coke. And then specifically to France, that continues to remain a challenging environment, with declining consumer sentiment. And inflation has been high. It is starting to impact the consumers there and their discretionary income spend. We are seeing a little bit of down trading in that market and maybe a little bit, even a switch to beer, in that market while the consumer is going through this period of high inflation. But again, as we look over the longer term and how we are thinking about how Diplomático rum will have a strong impact to that market over a period of time, we believe that -- and as we continue to revise strategies there, we continue to believe France is going to be a contributor to growth over the mid to longer term.

A follow-up on the Tennessee Apple question or comment, you saw that how it is doing a brilliant job in Brazil, actually doing a really good job in Korea, some sort of unusual market that we would be talking about. But Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Apple was launched in the middle of COVID and was -- as really all new products during COVID was a really tough time to launch things and it didn’t meet anywhere near our expectations. But now that we’re through a lot of that, the expectations on Apple are going up a lot, and I think it’s a great product. I mean it’s just -- the taste alone is excellent, and appeals to a very wide palate I think on a global basis. And so, you’ll hear more from us on Apple over the next quarters or years, as we think that really has potential to be a really nice big addition to the Jack Daniel’s family.

Okay. And sorry, just one more follow-up on the Jack and Cola piece on the UK. Should we assume that there’s a significant drag for the next like another three quarters, so that’s fully out of the base, as we model that…?

Yes. As we’re transitioning because that Jack and Cola business will be coming out of our results, so that we would need a full 12 months before we lap that.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Steve Powers with Deutsche Bank.

Just one final question on the U.S, if I could. In terms of the lowered growth expectations, are you able to talk a little bit about whether that’s whiskey, that’s tequila or other in your mind or any color by kind of price tier product? Just trying to get a little color as to where you see, within the portfolio, the most -- the biggest step-down relative to your prior views or if it’s more widespread?

I think it’s just about lapping and growing on top of that really high impact of rebuilding the inventories in the year-ago period and then, as we look at where we are year-to-date and understanding what acceleration can be and what it could potentially look like between here and the year to go period. So I think we would just say that. And then Gin Mare and Diplomático would be a smaller positive impact for the U.S., but again we do think it will be a positive impact for the U.S. I mean, I think that’s -- it’s just kind of generally where we are in a year to go period with what we’ve seen the current trends of TDS. And one of the things we’ve talked about is on this kind of path back to normalization and currently being kind of below that mid-single-digit, we believe there’s not going to be a linear path back to normalization or probably be a little bit up and down over a period of time, but we’ve factored in a little bit of that as well.

I do think American whiskey and tequila are still the two strongest categories in the U.S. spirits business, which is where the vast majority of our portfolio is. Now, delta from where we were, I mean, I think we spread it out a little bit. I think both are -- tequila is coming down off of sky high numbers, where American whiskey was steady high, but not as high as tequila. And so I guess, the delta would be more on the tequila side of things. I do want to point out too. I just want to reiterate one more time. Now, for Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, so core Black Label. Now, this is not a U.S. statement, this is global, but the brand was up last year first half plus 18. For a brand the size of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee to be a plus 18 is an enormous amount of volume movement. Now to be down 2 over the first half of this year, while we don’t love that the two-year average is still 8. And so, I want to make sure people don’t take away from this that the brand is somehow not healthy or anything down that path. The brand has had a -- not only the last two halves, but even over the last five years, Tennessee Whiskey has continued to be a really strong supporter and continues to be the single biggest source of growth for Brown-Forman and will be for the foreseeable future.

And then one last thing I’ll add on specifically about the U.S. As we talk about understanding what our opportunity -- our long-term opportunity is with Jack Daniel’s and Coca-Cola, we know it’s now a top ten spirit based ready to drink brand. It’s the number one whiskey based RTD in Nielsen. It’s got over 2% of the category share. And it’s really getting great accolades like we talked about in our prepared remarks as named one of Jack Daniel’s and Coca-Cola as the best new product in 2023 from the spirits business. So again, we think this product is still fairly new in the market, but the accolades are supporting what we believe will be that future growth.

So just playing it back, it sounds like the revised expectations are fairly broad based, but just given the large numbers that were embedded in tequila growth, to begin with, more of the step-down is showing up in that category. Is that fair?

Correct, yes.

Our next question comes from the line of Robert Ottenstein with Evercore.

Two questions. First, I think in prior calls, you had talked about going to kind of a 2% to 3% or 3% price increase in the U.S. and trying to do that on a steady basis. Is that under review or at risk now, given the weakness in the market? So that would be the first question. And then the second question is more on your distributors and route to market in the U.S. and whether you’re getting the kind of execution that you expect, doing a lot of channel checks, talking to a lot of people. A lot of the wine and spirits distributors have gotten very big. Some of them are taking on beer, doing other things. And I am hearing more complaints about the execution in the U.S. market and people trying to figure out what they’re going to do and deal with that. So, I was just wondering if that’s an issue that you’re looking at. Thank you.

I’m laughing people complaining about U.S. distributors. Look, the pricing question first. Look, we still believe and see solid consumer demand. And so, we are not planning on really changing that pricing strategy. We’ve been doing it now for 2, 2.5 years where we like -- in the U.S. it’s been that 2 to 3 range. It’s actually been higher in other parts of the world and it has a lot to do with why our gross margin has expanded so much over the last say six months. And so, we’re -- we love that and still see a lot of really good pricing opportunities. So it’s that low -- very casual, low and slow, where we believe in that over the long-term is the way to go. We did not do like some of our competitors, took huge increases back when supply chains were very constrained and all that and go to double digits. And that is a risky strategy I think in our industry and not one that we’re going to pursue, but we are going to continue with the sort of low-single-digit range and I see that continuing for the foreseeable future. Now back to the U.S. distributors, I mean we are -- certainly there’s been a lot of consolidation in that space over the last decade or really two decades. We’re very comfortable where we are. They’re doing a good job for us. We’re in many cases the largest supplier in many -- particularly in the RNDC market. And so, we get our fair share of attention and feel good about that. And these are great partners that we have and we need and have good relationships with. So, I don’t really see any significant changes happening there in the near future.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, due to the interest of time I would now like to turn the call back over to Sue for closing remarks.

Thank you. And thank you, Lawson and Leanne. And thank you to everyone for joining us today for Brown-Forman’s second quarter and first half of fiscal year 2024 earnings call. If you have any additional questions, please contact us. We’d like to note that yesterday December 5th was the 90th anniversary of Repeal Day, which is the end of Prohibition in the United States. And if that isn’t enough reason to cheer, 90 years ago today, Brown-Forman became a publicly traded company. So, I hope you will join us in celebrating responsibly, of course, these two milestones as well as the holiday season ahead of us. Cheers to everyone, and happy holidays.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.