United Breweries · tone and specificity signals across the available quarters.
Language signals
Premium margins have become accretive for the first time in the past quarter. And we believe this is structural and the premium portfolio will continue their upward trajectory to become a mutable contributor to profitability for UBL in the future.
The Karnataka move is a revolutionary move and we have been seeing that category is now growing higher of 30-35% in Karnataka and in some months in recent months is actually up more than 50%.
The impact on the margins and the cost because of the war impact and the data is absolutely clear that the state where EDPs are very low, we actually don't make money and it's very difficult for us to invest the money in pushing the product.
The category must bounce back from this quarter and that is why I think rate density is there on Carlsberg. If you actually see the BR share is only 0.1 and it has never been a significant share—it was big in couple of states but we don't see much impact because of Carlsberg intensity coming down.
We're very happy with how this is going because it means that structurally we're improving the business. However, this is still very selective, but overall on bottle returns, I think we've done really good work and we continue to see the improvement.
The category has two challenges. Number one challenge continues to be the affordability. I think beer in the key states like in Karnataka the category declined 17%, in Rajasthan declined 5%, in Telangana declined double digit, West Bengal declined.