Garth Hankinson
Chief Financial Officer at Constellation Brands
Thank you, Bill, and good morning, everyone.
Fiscal '23 was another solid year for our company as we continued to relentlessly deliver on our operating plans and strategic initiatives. Despite the inflationary pressures that both our industry and consumers have been facing, we demonstrated yet again the strength of our adaptable businesses, higher end brands and resilient teams. We expect the same focus and dedication to further support our momentum in fiscal '24.
So, let's review in more detail our full year fiscal '23 performance and fiscal '24 outlook. As always, I will focus on comparable basis financial results. Starting with the fiscal '23 performance of our beer business. Net sales increased $713 million or 11%, exceeding the upper end of our guidance range. This was primarily driven by solid shipment growth of approximately 7% as strong demand continued across our portfolio, supporting a $464 million uplift in net sales from incremental volumes.
Net sales also benefited from favorable pricing in excess of our unusual 1% to 2% average annual pricing algorithm. As we previously noted, the incremental pricing actions taken in fiscal '23 were in response to cost pressures across the value chain due to inflationary headwinds. We introduced larger pricing increases and made pricing adjustments in certain markets ahead of our regular case. Depletion growth for the year was over 7%, which, as Bill noted, was driven by continued strong growth in our largest brands, Modelo Especial, Corona Extra, Pacifico and Modelo Chelada brands. On-premise depletions grew 15% year-over-year, and on-premise volume accounted for approximately 12% of total depletions in fiscal '23, nearing the mid-teen volume share from prior to the start of pandemic. As previously guided, our shipments and depletions were closely aligned on an absolute basis.
Moving on to the bottom line for our beer business. Operating income increased 6%, also exceeding the upper end of our guidance range. This increase was largely driven by a $492 million benefit from net sales growth and yielded an operating margin of 38.3%, which was in line with our implied guidance range. As expected, and noted over fiscal '23, operating margins were negatively affected by inflationary headwinds. For the import portion of our beer business, which represents nearly the entirety of COGS, we faced an increase of approximately 16% in our raw materials and packaging costs, which was largely driven by inflationary pressures that resulted in an 8% increase on a per case basis. This reflected some benefits from the lapping of the seltzer obsolescence charge in fiscal '22 as excluding any obsolescence impact, the increases in our raw materials and packaging costs would have been 20% on an absolute basis and 12% on a per case basis.
Note that these two COGS categories, including the obsolescence impact represented just over 55% of the import portion's COGS in fiscal '23. We also saw a 12% year-over-year increase in freight costs, mainly driven by incremental shipment expenses that were offset by efficiency initiatives. Freight costs were 5% up on a per case basis and account for just under 25% of import. And we faced a 14% rise in labor and overhead costs that was mainly driven by our brewery capacity investments. Labor and overhead were up 7% on a per case basis and accounted for just under 15% of import COGS.
In addition, operating margins for the beer business were also affected by a $41 million or nearly 22% increase in depreciation, almost entirely associated with our brewery capacity investments. A $55 million or nearly 9% increase in marketing spend related to incremental investments in sports sponsorships and a $48 million or nearly 14% increase in our -- in other SG&A, driven by incremental sales support to align with the momentum of our beer brands.
Note, however, that while our marketing investments increased when compared to the prior year, they were still within our 9% to 10% range as a percentage of net sales. All of that said, and it's important to note that we still delivered best-in-class margins for our beer business in fiscal '23.
Now shifting to our Wine and Spirits business. First, please recall that we divested a collection of primarily mainstream wine brands from our wine portfolio in fiscal '23. So during today's remarks, I will also be discussing top line on an organic basis, which excludes the contributions from the divested brands. As Bill noted, despite the strong performance of our higher-end Wine and Spirits brands on an organic basis, net sales decline of 2%, ultimately landing in our guidance range. The decline in net sales, excluding the impact of the divestiture, was primarily driven by our mainstream brands as they faced challenging market conditions and lapping of prior fiscal year inventory build.
Again, this decline was partially offset by strong growth in our higher-end brands, which outperformed in the U.S. in the higher-end category for both Wine and Spirits and total U.S. wine market. Our higher-end brands also had strong growth in our emerging and rapidly expanding direct-to-consumer channels and international markets. Over time, we expect our portfolio to continue to migrate toward the higher end and for these higher-end brands, channels and markets to support our top line growth acceleration. Shipments on an organic basis decreased by under 8% and depletions decreased by 3%. As just noted, this volume decline, which reduced organic net sales by $148 million, was driven primarily by our mainstream brands, as mix and price, largely driven by our higher-end brands provided a $111 million uplift to organic net sales.
Wine and Spirits operating income, excluding the gross profit, less marketing of the brands that are no longer part of the business, following their divestiture in fiscal '23, increased 2%, and operating margin increased 80 basis points to nearly 23%, also reflecting the same exclusion. This margin increase was driven by a $12 million uplift from net sales flow-through as favorable product mix was supported by lower grade costs as well as a strong New Zealand harvest. Benefits from other cost savings actions primarily resulting in lower-grade costs that helped to partially offset higher logistics material costs and more efficient marketing expense from enhanced investment strategies, which increased focus the highest return opportunities which supported a $20 million tailwind to operating income. These benefits were partially offset by $17 million in higher SG&A from increased headcount as we continue to strategically invest in our growing DTC channels.
We remain well positioned to continue to expand margins in our Wine and Spirits business over time with mix improvements and productivity initiatives in the future. Now moving on to the rest of the P&L. In fiscal '23, our corporate expense included approximately $270 million from SG&A and $20 million from unconsolidated investments related to our ventures portfolio, all-in, landing at the low end of our guidance at $290 million.
Within the SG&A portion of corporate expense, the implementation of our DBA program, which stands for digital business acceleration, accounted for $47 million. As a reminder, we introduced our multiyear DBA initiative in fiscal '23 and expect similar investments to carry into fiscal '24. Interest expense for the year increased 12% to approximately $400 million coming in at the upper end of our guidance range. This increase was driven primarily by the financing of the stock reclassification, which took place in Q3 of fiscal '23 as well as the impact of rising interest rates on approximately 15% of our debt with adjustable rates. Our full year comparable basis effective tax rate, excluding Canopy equity earnings, came in at 19.2% versus 17.5% last year as we lapped favorability in fiscal '22, primarily driven by higher stock-based compensation activity.
Free cash flow for fiscal '23, which we define as net cash provided by operating activities, less capex, was above the upper end of our guidance range at $1.7 billion. Capex totaled $1 billion, including over $800 million of investment in our beer business. Capex came in below our guidance, primarily due to timing shifts in the spend for certain materials and equipment of our Mexico brewery investments at our Nava and Obregon facilities.
As of the end of fiscal '23, our Mexico brewery operations had a total nominal capacity of approximately 42 million hectoliters. This includes 32.5 million hectoliters at our Nava facility and 9.5 million hectoliters at our Obregon facility. This represents 1 million hectoliter uplift at our Nava facility relative to the capacity we communicated a few months ago. This uplift is once again the result of our continued productivity initiatives that have unlocked additional production flexibility from the existing footprint of our breweries.
As a reminder, earlier this year, we shared that these initiatives had unlocked additional capacity of 1.5 million hectoliters at Nava and 0.5 million hectoliters at Oregon. In light of the 2.5 million hectoliters of productivity capacity unlocked at Nava in fiscal '23, we have slightly adjusted the ramp-up plans for our new ABA production line at that facility, which I will discuss shortly.
With that, let's move now to our outlook for fiscal '24. We expect a comparable basis diluted EPS to be in the range of $11.70 to $12, excluding Canopy equity earnings. For fiscal '24, our beer business is targeting net sales growth of 7% to 9%. As Bill discussed earlier, we expect continued strong volume growth momentum to be largely driven by our icon brands, Modelo Especial and Corona Extra and next wave brands, Pacifico and the Modelo Chelada brands. We anticipate our full year fiscal '24 shipments and depletions to track each other closely, both on an absolute basis and in terms of the year-over-year comparison.
As a reminder, despite some fluctuations in the last few years in our quarterly shipment cases and year-over-year growth rates due to severe weather and pandemic-related impacts, we expect the cadence of our shipments in fiscal '24 to follow a more traditional seasonal pattern. We anticipate approximately 55% of our fiscal '24 wines to ship in the first half as we meet peak summer demand for our products.
In addition, from a quarterly perspective, particularly when looking at year-over-year growth rates, we also expect shipment and depletion comparisons to still show some variability as they always have, as we manage inventory levels around seasonality throughout the year and our regular brewery maintenance activities in Q3. All of that said, we do not expect to have any incremental lapping variability in our shipment growth rate for Q4 as we did in fiscal '23.
From a pricing perspective, at this stage, we are planning for average annual pricing within our 1% to 2% algorithm. We are mindful that consumers will likely continue to face challenging macroeconomic conditions for the foreseeable future and that our pricing increases in the last two fiscal years were above this algorithm. As we advance throughout the year, we will continue to monitor inflationary dynamics and potential recessionary risks to ensure our pricing is appropriately balanced to support the momentum of our brands. We will provide any further update in that regard as part of our future quarterly calls.
In terms of operating income growth. Our beer business is targeting 5% to 7%, which implies a fiscal '24 operating margin of approximately 38%. As we have discussed, we continue to expect our beer operating margin to be negatively impacted by inflationary COGS headwinds. The majority of these relate to the year-over-year adjustments in our packaging and raw material costs, which, on average, represent a high-single-digit increase in absolute terms for these inputs in the import portion of our beer business. While prices for some of these inputs are off their peaks, most are subject to contractual terms that reflect annual adjustments based on trailing pricing data and some still remain significantly elevated relative to pre-pandemic prices.
In fiscal '24, we expect packaging and raw material for our imports to account for approximately 55% to 60% of our costs. In addition, we expect freight to be approximately 20% to 25% of costs and reflect a high single-digit year-over-year absolute increase as we continue to face annual volume and contractual increases. And labor and overhead to be approximately 15% of costs and reflect a high-teens increase in absolute terms, largely driven by increased headcount and training tied to our brewery capacity investments. For our beer business, we expect incremental depreciation of approximately $35 million to $40 million as we continue to bring into production incremental growing capacity from our investments, particularly at Obregon, in fiscal '24.
As noted earlier, the incremental capacity unlocked from our existing Nava facility footprint from productivity initiatives has given us additional flexibility on the ramp-up of our new ABA line. We now intend to spend a bit more time optimizing that new additional ABA production to better support the strong growth of our Modelo Chelada brands. Accordingly, we anticipate the ABA line will be ramping up in Q4 of FY24.
Conversely, we have been able to accelerate the ramp-up of our next 5 million hectoliter investment at Obregon to Q1 of fiscal '24. This is being enabled by the move of brewery and package equipment that we had previously intended for use in Mexicali. Now, going back to operating margins. We plan to execute a number of productivity initiatives to help offset inflationary pressures. The expectations shared for our beer business COGS in fiscal '24 have operational efficiencies and cost-saving actions embedded into them.
These initiatives include benefits from our ongoing hedging program and contractual negotiation efforts as well as from our fiscal '23 DBA program. To that end, it is relevant to note that only around 25% of our beer business COGS are subject to contractual pricing adjustments within fiscal '24, and then we expect our hedging program to reduce our exposure to those adjustments for about 10% to 15% of COGS.
In addition, we expect to deliver marketing and other SG&A efficiencies, including an even greater focus on optimizing these types of investments toward our Icon and Next Wave brands. So, despite remaining slightly below our medium-term operating margin target we expect our fiscal '24 efforts to still yield best-in-class results for our beer business, and we expect all quarters within fiscal '24 to deliver operating margins above this latest quarter's result.
Moving to the outlook for our Wine and Spirits business. Our fiscal -- for fiscal '24, we are targeting organic net sales to be relatively flat within 0.5 percentage point from fiscal '23 net sales, excluding $38.5 million of net sales from the brands divested in fiscal '23. We expect to continue the strong growth of our Premium Wine, Fine Wine and Craft Spirits brands and in our DTC channels and international markets. These segments of our business will help to offset the headwinds we expect to face with our mainstream U.S. wholesale brands, which are facing challenging market conditions due to ongoing consumer-led premiumization. Conversely to our beer business, we expect our Wine and Spirits business to ship approximately 55% of our fiscal '24 volumes in the second half, again, in line with seasonal demand for our Wine and Spirits products. More notably, despite continued inflationary pressures, we are targeting operating income growth between 2% to 4%, exclusive of $19.5 million of gross profit, less marketing, related to brands divested in fiscal '23. This implies an operating margin improvement of at least 40 basis points.
The primary margin improvement drivers for fiscal '24 include additional mix improvement, particularly with our further optimized portfolio, driven by ongoing growth in our higher-end brands from continued consumer-led premiumization trends, enduring growth momentum in our higher-margin direct-to-consumer channels and targeted international metro areas, primarily through our Aspira portfolio brands, additional innovation with new consumer-led products that help extend our higher-end offerings and stabilize our mainstream brands, reduced marketing spend relative to net sales with optimized investments increasingly focused on high-growth, high-return areas, and additional SG&A reductions in cost management initiatives. Similar to our beer business, we expect approximately 25% of our Wine and Spirits business COGS to be subject to adjustments within fiscal '24.
Now moving to expectations for the rest of the P&L in fiscal '24. Corporate expense, including just the SG&A portion, is expected to be approximately $270 million. We expect to see favorability from the termination of certain compensation and benefits that will not be payable in fiscal '24 following the retirement of Rob and Richard Sands from their executive roles for the reclassification agreement, approved by shareholders in fiscal '23, offset by the impact of inflationary pressures and merit-driven salary increases. Interest expense is expected to be approximately $500 million for the year. This is a 25% increase from fiscal '23 and is primarily due to the incremental interest expense associated with the financing of the reclassification. The comparable tax rate, excluding Canopy equity and earnings is expected to be around 19%.
Rounding up the P&L, we anticipate approximately $40 million in non-controlling interest benefits and weighted average diluted shares outstanding are targeted at approximately $184 million.
Turning to cash flow. We expect fiscal '24 free cash flow to be in the range of $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion, which reflects operating cash flow in the range of $2.4 billion to $2.6 billion, and capex of $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion. Capex includes approximately $1 billion to support our Mexico brewery investment and most of the remainder will support our Wine and Spirits hospitality updates.
To wrap up, I would like to reiterate that our refreshed capital allocation priorities that we have introduced and discussed throughout fiscal '23 and earlier by Bill remain unchanged. We remain committed to a disciplined financial foundation by maintaining an investment-grade rating as we move towards our net leverage ratio target, delivering returns to shareholders via both dividends in line with our payout ratio goal and through incremental share repurchases to at least cover dilution while remaining opportunistic for any additional repurchases, continuing to support the growth of our businesses through deployed capital in our beer brewing additions and in our Wine and Spirits hospitality investments.
And lastly, through smaller acquisitions that will fill gaps or enhance our existing portfolio. We believe that this strong disciplined capital allocation strategy, combined with exceptional execution, will empower us to be a premier shareholder return generator for the foreseeable future.
With that, Bill and I are happy to take your questions.
