The Boston Beer Company, Inc. (NYSE:SAM) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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By the way, it’s not — that’s the guidance that Frank mentioned, we’re not expecting Truly to grow share as part of that guidance. So this is, call it, maybe a little bit more aspirational, but we exist to grow share. That’s our intent. That’s our goal. And we think all the things that we put — that we announce say that were put in place in the market to get there.

Sunil Modi: And if I can just quickly follow up at from a market share standpoint, I mean, is this a function of you getting quality from retailers that they’re cutting off the tail, the Hard Seltzer categories. So maybe you’ll benefit somewhat there? Or are you expecting to close a gap of White Cloud? And can you just give any context on where you think those share gains would be sourced from.

David Burwick: Yes. I think the share gains will come — first of all, there’s a long tail for perspective in Truly is the #2 brand, the next 46 brands equal the share that Truly has, including Bobbitt Seltzer. So there’s a lot of brands to steal share from, and a number of them will be going away. And of course, you’re going to want to see — you’re going to steal share from the #1 player as well. So we expect to source from any — from all consumers who are interested in the Seltzer category and are buying any other brand within that space.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Nadine Sarwat with Bernstein.

Nadine Sarwat: Two questions for me. So the first one on your 2023 shipment and depletion guidance of a decline of 2% to 8%. Can you run us through your volume growth assumptions that are baked into that for each of your major brand families? And then my second question, your announcement earlier today demonstrates how you’re leaning into the spirit RTD space. This continues to grow strongly as a segment, although it’s already dominated by a few brands. So what makes you confident that Truly Vodka Seltzer has what it takes to win in that space?

Frank Smalla: Okay. Nadine, this is Frank. Let me take the first 1 on the guidance. And maybe to preface the assumptions, we’ve taken I’d say a somewhat conservative approach because of the uncertainty that we see around the consumer and the entire consumer environment and the Hard Seltzer category in particular. We believe it will stabilize at a point in time, but we have seen significant declines. So we’ve taken that into consideration. And the guidance of $0.02 to $0.08 decline is really on a reported basis. And as we’ve mentioned, we have 1 fewer week in ’23 compared to ’22. So the comparable range is actually minus 7% to minus 1%. At the low end, we have for Truly, we’ve not modeled an improvement in the trends that we have seen in 2022.

So this is just what we believe, okay? If we don’t see anything. This is where it lands. And for Twisted Tea, which had a stellar year in 2022, we moderated last year’s growth rate. Well, we believe we’re going to have strong growth rates in 2023, we think they will moderate probably during the middle of the year when we had really high growth rates last year. So that’s kind of what we have on the low end. On the high end, at the minus 2, we keep Twisted Tea moderated and don’t — didn’t model really significant improvement in there. So growth rates below last year. And for Truly, we still don’t model share gains, but we have modeled that the relaunch that we announced today and that Dave mentioned is successful. And those 2 brands are really the main drivers.

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