now for no recar Shares are falling today the French maker of absolute vodka and Jameson Whiskey expect sales in the U. S decline in the first quarter as a boom in demand for premium Spirits loses steam joining us now from the company's headquarters in Paris is Alexander Riccar the CEO of purno Ricard Alexander thank you so much for joining us this morning look Shares are down about 4. 4 percent I'm sure you're going to tell me that that you don't care about one day price moves which is fair enough but but what do you make of of what seems to be a sense of investor disappointment in this set of results listen I I have to say I'm a bit surprised indeed um I I don't look at share price day to day you're right that being said coming out of a very strong uh set of results very strong performance for the year with double-digit growth uh Topline 10 organic growth coming from all regions very drug-based growth coming from basically all our spirit categories with six key Spirit categories driving more than 85 percent of our growth and and very strong as well profit growth with Pro uh profit from recurring operations growing double digit 11 with some margin expansion and a clear protection of our gross margin so very strong set of results maybe markets are currently focused on on very short-term deliverables because we did indicate that we were expecting a soft q1 you mentioned the US the underlying consumption in the US just to be clear is is resilient then there's phasing and technical issues which will lead us to believe we'll have a soft q1 in the U.
S but a positive outlook for the full year in the US of course how would you characterize the American Consumer right now well the American Consumer is resilient uh I mean premiumization is still ongoing although there is a Slowdown in the pace of premiumization given the the global uh environment but at the end of the day we do see a resilience for the American Consumer the American Consumer trading down or simply buying less how are their spending habits changing spending and still growing the U. S market is is a four to five percent value growth mortgage Market on average over time we've just come out of a an amazing period of double that growth rate per annum so the last three years post covid have grown on average for our industry around eight percent so what we're seeing is a normalization based on a high uh basis but the market is still growing we believe it's growing in the low single digit maybe around one and two percent and the real question is the rate of recovery to to that longer term trend of four to five percent so still positive Dynamics with a lot of inventory management happening after after a couple years of uh of supply chain disruption can you continue to pass on some of the increasing input prices that you've seen to consumers or are they kind of hitting a wall here especially in the United States listen to be fair uh inflation has been there we've been hit by inflation in terms of our costs and and therefore we were driven by price increases to cover for uh inflation we do believe when we look uh specifically our at ourselves that inflation is going to ease and has started easing especially regarding transportation and and therefore you should expect a more normal behavior and more normal I would say uh pricing I'm just looking over some analyst notes on on your earnings at the moment one bright spot at least from city they're pretty excited about this buyback that you've announced for 2024 500 million to 800 million euros they said it was unexpectedly large should soften any blow of other concerns talk to me about the upper end of that the 800 million euros how ambitious do you see that as being well over the last two years we've done a sure buyback programs of uh 750 million so we we just came out of a 750 million share buyback program over the the fiscal year 23.
