Rob Sands
Analyst · RBC Capital Markets
Thanks, Patty and good morning everyone. Before I begin the review of our accomplishments for the year and our plans for fiscal 2016, I would like to focus your attention on the press release issued earlier today reporting that our board of directors has approved the initiation of a quarterly common stock cash dividend for the first time in the history of our company. This milestone is of particular significance because it reflects the confidence that we and our board of directors have in our ability to execute against growth opportunities, invest in our businesses and generate free cash flow that could be returned to you, our shareholders. It is the collective strength of our businesses that has abled this action and demonstrated by the impressive results achieved by the company in fiscal 2015. Since the acquisition of our beer business almost two years ago, we have had no shortage of milestones. We emerged as the number one multi-category player in alcoholic beverages and we are committing significant investment to our world class brewery in Mexico and our key [ph] beer brands continue to achieve outstanding growth and garner accolades for their quality. For example, six of our wine and spirits brands and three of our beer brands won Impact's Hot Brands award for 2014 as announced in early March. Collectively, these accomplishments have driven the appreciation of our stock which remains one of the best performing stocks in the S&P 500 Consumer Staples Index. So now let's talk about some of our key achievements for fiscal 2015 and the great initiatives we have underway as we charge ahead to an exciting fiscal 2016. This past summer, we purchased Casa Noble Tequila, an award winning handcrafted super-premium tequila, which has been a great addition to our portfolio. This fast growing tequila brand naturally complements our Mexican beer brands and fits well into our existing wine and spirits distribution infrastructure. More recently, we hired our new Chief Growth Officer, Bill Newlands, who is responsible for providing greater focus and coordination on the long-term growth opportunities across our beer and wine and spirits businesses. In addition, Bill is accountable for accelerating innovation and new product development initiatives and leveraging strategic insights and customer analytics while identifying synergies across total beverage alcohol within our national accounts organizations. Bill reports directly to me and I am happy that he has joined our executive management team. One of our major accomplishments for the year was the implementation of a multifaceted long-term, glass strategy for our beer business under favorable terms with key industry players, which included the formation of a 50:50 joint venture with Owens-Illinois, the world's leading glass container producer to own, operate, and expand the Nava glass plant. The acquisition by the joint venture of ABI's state-of-the-art glass plant located adjacent to our brewery in Mexico and the execution of a glass supply agreement with Mexican glass manufacturer, Vitro, the benefits of which we will begin to fully realize once their Monterrey glass plant has been completed. We believe this comprehensive sourcing strategy provides an optimal solution for this essential component of our beer production process, while securing future supply of materials and approved margins on finished products. Now the commercial side of our business continued to achieve stellar growth in fiscal 2015, outperforming the U.S. beer industry key competitors and all other imports for the fifth consecutive year with growth achieved by every brand in our Mexican beer portfolio. As a result, Constellation Brands’ beer business was the number one contributor to growth in the U.S. beer category in fiscal 2015, while delivering market share growth across all channels in 48 out of 50 states. More importantly, our beer business growth has accelerated every year since 2010 and depletion trends accelerating to greater than 8% in fiscal 2015. I would like to take a minute to share some of this past year's amazing accomplishments for our iconic beer brands and highlight the key initiatives we plan to execute during fiscal 2016 in order to maintain this excellent momentum for the business. Let's begin with the clear heavyweights in our portfolio, Corona Extra and Modelo Especial. These brands are not only the biggest but have contributed the greatest incremental volume growth. Our flagship Corona Extra brand is the best selling imported beer in the United States. This brand sold more than 105 million cases in fiscal 2015 and posted depletion growth of more than 3% for the year. Corona Extra was the only top five beer brands in the U.S. to achieve growth last year with volume trends for this brand continuing to maintain their solid momentum. In fiscal 2016, we expect to capitalize on the growth of Corona Extra through increased national TV advertising, sports media, boxing sponsorships, and by leveraging our acquisition of Casa Noble. According to GuestMetrics, during calendar 2014, Corona Extra continues to be the number one selling imported beer in the off-premise channel. To further support Corona Extra, we plan to increase our investment to expand activations in on premise accounts throughout the year. Most importantly, fiscal 2016 will represent the year of the can for Corona Extra. We see great opportunity for growth with cans, as this format currently represents less than 3% of total sales for Corona Extra. Last year, we represented another record setting year for Modelo Especial with depletion growth of more than 16%. The Modelo Especial brand family contributed more dollar growth to the total beverage alcohol category than any other brand family in beer, wine, or spirits in fiscal 2015. Modelo Especial has become the number two imported beer in the U.S. with more than 15% share of the imported beer category, which has nearly doubled the share for this brand just five years ago. Our strategic initiatives in fiscal 2016 for Modelo Especial include increased media and general market advertising, continued execution with Modelo Especial Chelada, on-premise activation, retail sponsorships and promotion, and Hispanic marketing and advertising and media investments. As you are aware, the bench strength of our beer portfolio goes deeper than our two biggest brands. Part of what makes our collection of brands so powerful is the long-term potential of our smaller brands. So let me provide some examples. Corona Light. Corona Light posted record sales in fiscal 2015 hitting the 14.5 million case mark and growing depletions almost 4% versus the prior year. We have had good success expanding the distribution of Corona Light Draft and we plan to continue building on this success in fiscal 2016 by expanding our national Draft footprint with recent launches in eight additional markets. We are also re-launching Corona Light cans supported with redesigned secondary packaging which will be featured in our new advertising campaign highlighting Corona Light as the light Cerveza. Finally, we plan on continuing our partnership with Kenny Chesney which has been a great asset for this brand. Victoria has become third best selling beer in Mexico with a 15% market share of that market. In fiscal 2015, U.S. depletions for Victoria increased 60% driven primarily by the Mexican Hispanic consumer and expanded distribution for this brand into 19 new states. In fiscal 2016, we are excited to introduce Victoria cans into the U.S. market for the first time. Our support strategy for Victoria will focus on continuing to drive distribution and generate awareness for the new can format during key promotional periods. Overall, I am excited about the organic growth prospects for our beer business in fiscal 2016. As you can see we have tremendous opportunity to growth the business organically through enhanced distribution and execution opportunities across the portfolio. As a result for our beer business in fiscal 2016 we are targeting high single digit sales growth which exceeds U.S. beer industry and import trend estimates and is expected to drive operating income growth in the 10% to 12% range. From a brewery and operational perspective in fiscal 2015, we achieved our key brewery performance goals relating to utilization, quality and cost. All areas of the brewery expansion are well underway with the project expansion on schedule from both a budget and timing of completion perspective. The packaging area and high density warehouses are progressing on schedule as well as utilities and waste water projects. Fabrication of beer tanks has been completed and we recently added capacity to our can line in order to reduce our dependence on ABI for cans. The new joint venture management team has been established at the glass plant and has begun work on the next glass furnace to be built on site at this newly acquired facility. The team has done an amazing job during brewery construction to minimize the impact on commercial business execution in the marketplace. As we begin fiscal 2016, we will be intensely focused on the continued expansion of the brewery with the first incremental 10 million hectoliters of capacity expected to become fully operational just more than a year from now in the summer of calendar 2016. Overall, I am extremely pleased with the outstanding commercial and operational performance of the beer business. This has been driven by a combination of robust consumer demand, strong sales execution, excellence support from our wholesalers, creative new marketing and advertising programs, as well as the outstanding efforts of our commercial team and our brewery team in Mexico. And now I would like to focus on the operational results for our wine and spirits business. During fiscal 2015 we achieved EBIT growth of 6% for our wine and spirits business and increase operating profit margin by 130 basis points. Our spirits portfolio achieved better than expected results as well as our Canadian business which exceeded its financial goals for the year while growing share across all strategic product categories. Sales growth in the U.S. benefited from positive mixed trend and some favorable pricing as we executed price increases in fiscal 2015 for select wine products in the value and luxury segments of the U.S. market while also growing distribution at key U.S. retailers. Wine and spirits EBIT growth was primarily driven by positive mix and COGS benefits including reduced grape costs as well as positive impacts from ongoing blend optimization initiatives and productivity improvements. In addition, EBIT benefited from distributor performance payments as our exclusive distributor contracts included in the selling structure that is just based on achievement of specific executional performance metrics for the year. In terms of our overall U.S. depletion performance for fiscal 2015, our distributor sales to retail for Constellation's total U.S. wine and spirits business across all channels remained relatively flat. Now this compares to U.S. wines and spirits industry depletion growth of approximately 1% across all channels as reported by the Beverage Information Group for calendar 2014. As expected, our overall U.S. wine dollar market share eroded slightly in fiscal 2015 driven by the super premium priced segment which remains highly competitive and currently generates a good deal of the U.S. wine category growth. However, we have gained share in the important premium and ultra-premium price segments of the market and are working diligently to ensure our portfolio remains relevant and at the top of mind for our consumers in all key price segments. And we continue to experience solid depletion growth for a number of our fast growing wine brands including, Kim Crawford, Mark West, Ruffino, SIMI, Black Box, Nobilo and The Dreaming Tree. The strength of our portfolio begins with quality products and I am very proud to say that we received over 300 wine competition medals last year and 52 of our wines received 90 plus point ratings. This includes a 93 point score for Robert Mondavi Winery 2011 To-Kalon Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve in the Wine Enthusiast and a 90 plus rating for our Ruffino Riserva Ducale Oro. And our list of achievements continues. Five of our brands made IRI's top 21 brands in 2014 including Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi. 15 of our brands were winners of the Beverage Information Group 2015 Growth Brand Award including two spirits and 13 wine brands. And many of our other wine brands continue to generate great media attention from a variety of news and lifestyle publications including The Wall Street Journal, Food and Wine Magazine and Forbes.com, to name a few. Earlier I mentioned that six of our wine and spirits brands made to Impact Hot Brands list. It's important to note that this list includes well established brands such as Kim Crawford which has won eight years in a row and Black Box, which is celebrating its tenth consecutive win. It also includes The Dreaming Tree for the second year in a row which is a testament to the level of success of our innovative efforts -- that our innovative efforts can achieve. We experienced excellent sales growth of 8% for our spirits portfolio in fiscal 2015 driven by Paul Masson Brandy and SVEDKA Vodka. The recent data received from the Beverage Information Group for calendar 2014, SVEDKA is the only vodka amongst the top five largest volume vodka brands that achieved growth for the year. In a category that is evolving as consumer preferences change, SVEDKA continues to win in the marketplace. SVEDKA's innovative flavors like strawberry lemonade and mango pineapple are driving current success and we look forward in seeing the results from our recent launch of our grapefruit jalapeño flavor. In addition, the success of Paul Masson peach brandy has exceeded our own expectations and we are currently expanding the product into additional formats and developing other new and exciting flavors for our brandy as we have done with our vodka and our whiskey brands. Overall, we gained IRI dollars share in imported vodka and Canadian whiskey categories for fiscal 2015. Our Casa Noble Tequila brand has been fully integrated into our portfolio and we see significant opportunities to increase awareness and trial of this brand in the coming months. As we approach the Cinco de Mayo holiday, you will begin to see cross-promotional activities between Casa Noble and Corona Extra which will help capture more merchandizing and floor space at retail and in the on-premise channels. From a strategic perspective, in 2016 our goal is to grow profit for the wine and spirits business while also growing revenue which is reflected in our fiscal 2016 wine and spirits guidance to achieve low to mid single digit sales growth and EBIT growth for the year. We also expect to maintain the margin improvement we achieved in 2015. And we are committed to executing the following strategies in an effort to make this goal a reality. We will continue to focus our marketing efforts on a subset of focus brands in order to drive key brands that have scale, higher margin and the greatest potential. These brands include, Woodbridge, Kim Crawford and Black Box, just to name a few. We remain committed to margin accretive innovation and new product development and have launched an enterprise-wide product development process review to improve our results in this area and increase the success rate of our new product pipeline. We have a team dedicated to this process to make sure our innovation is thoughtful and measured and positions us to ultimately win in this area. We believe we have a winner with our new Tom Gore wine brand in the coming year. We plan to improve sales execution and increase points of distribution by delivering more effective feature and display activity at retail with added accountability and visibility for both Constellation and our distributors. Speaking of our distributors, our renegotiated and exclusive U.S. distributor arrangements are in place and will provide increased resources and improved performance metrics while enhancing wholesaler and retailer execution. For the second consecutive year, we plan to execute price increases for selected products in the value and luxury segments of the U.S. wine market. And finally, we plan to optimize our COGS through continued global bland management initiative, productivity improvements and lower grape cost. Overall, we are committing people, technology and resources to our work with our wholesalers and retailers to execute growth for our wine and spirits business. In closing, in fiscal 2015 we delivered industry leading market results for our beer business while exceeding our goals across the board for volumes, depletions, sales and net income. Our wine and spirits business delivered improved margins and earnings growth with the Canadian business and our spirits portfolio achieving better than expected results. Overall, we remain committed to challenging ourselves in fiscal 2016 in order to optimize the business opportunities that lie ahead. Calendar 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of our business which has become Constellation Brands. We are excited to build on the success achieved in fiscal 2015 as we head into the New Year with high expectations to create the next wave of growth for our company. With that I would now like to turn the call over to Bob for a financial discussion of our fourth quarter and year-end results.