 Just to start with, I remember my days, you know, growing up. So, you know, there were brands like Kalyani Black Level, Hayward 5000, Thunderbolt, Godfather, you know, these are equivalent of hard liquor that were there in the market. And this is pre when King Fisher was there. Right. And then King Fisher came. And then it became the all, you know, the name that people would go to for beer in the Indian market. You know, even the international brands tried, you know, Fosters came in, Heineken came in for that matter, but kind of King Fisher remained where it was almost maybe the market share went a little here and there. So, can you tell us what has been that one little secret that has kept the brand going over the years? Or is it just that, you know, the distribution network was focused on very initially and that has paid off till date? Yeah. So, let me first, you know, start off by saying that a lot of good work has happened in the past, you know, on King Fisher. And a lot of that credit goes to my predecessors. But I think, you know, no brand can survive purely on the context of supply side excellence, right. So the network of breweries is certainly a competitive factor. It is certainly an advantage that we have given our long sort of history in the country. But having said that there have been others who have, you know, not built it on their own, but got access to that network by virtue of acquisitions, but have not been able to weave the same sort of magic, right. So that itself is indicator of there being, you know, a serious demand side work that has happened by King Fisher and United Breweries in order to retain the trust of its consumers, right. So I think we've always anchored the brand in a deep consumer connect, looked at what the Indian consumer finds aspirational, what parts of those we can leverage for a very social beverage like, you know, sort of beer and tried to marry those things together, right. And we've sort of been for various years now, pioneers and the kind of stuff we do, right. So if you look at in the early days, the jingle that we formulated that even serves us well till today, you look at some of the associations we had, you know, the West Indies cricket team, Formula One, you know, the King Fisher calendar, all of these where ideas that drove aspiration and consumer connect ahead of their times. And that combination with, you know, sort of some flawless execution, the network you spoke about, et cetera, I think that has kept the brand going even in the face of some serious competition, right. And, you know, you raise another very important point you opened by saying, you know, there are a number of brands and some of them are the strong brands, strong beer brands and King Fisher strong was not the first in the country. As a great example of how you don't need to always be first, but once you recognize a trend, once you sort of leverage that trend, then you go for broke behind it and you can catch up surpass and prosper for a long period of time, even if you're not the first, right. So I think this combination is really what's worked for us as a business. Okay, all right. So, you know, you spoke about you don't need to be first, I'll come to that later. But before that, you know, you've come in and as you said that a lot has been done by your predecessors. So now from here on, you know, what put those some of the good things that you're going to definitely continue and some new things that you believe are required to adapt to the new evolving world or new evolving tastes that you know, people are now used to. So I would say the following, right, sort of first of all, you will start with where the market is and where the country is, right. So I always say that India continues to be an under penetrated market for beer. We can compare the per capita consumption, not just among the whole population, but even among the consuming class, which is the more relevant sort of comparison, but it's a hot country, rising prosperity, rising urbanization, people want to go out socialize. So beer in this kind of an environment should logically be on the cusp of a large penetration game, right. So market penetration is really the first strategic priority for us as a business. It has been for some time, and it will continue to be going forward. The second piece is in terms of premiumization of the market, right. There are, as people get more exposed to global lifestyles as their own incomes sort of, you know, sort of go up. There's a whole degree of desire to consume, you know, sort of lifestyle brands, brands that are more in consonance with what is globally available, people start traveling and so on and so forth, right. So the entire premiumization of the portfolio is really the second sort of big ticket item that we would say would be a strategic priority. Now, based on these two pillars of penetration and premiumization, we have a number of initiatives which are already happening and more of which will come now to give you an example on the penetration piece, right. And they say necessity is the mother of invention in the last couple of years, especially in the early part of the pandemic when we saw that, you know, lots of bars and restaurants were shut. There was an imperative to drive, you know, consumption of beer at home. And that's something that we started 18 months ago. We started first through communicating the beer at home campaign. We then started broad phase two of that, you know, in December last year. And it's a multi-year journey, but we have started that whole thing about taking beer to what are in Indian context, non-traditional consuming moments. Similarly, if you see a lot of our advertising, a lot of the marketing that is happening now is all about trying to be, you know, gender agnostic, right. So to try and give 50% of the consumers in the country an opportunity to engage with beer to drive that consumption over a period of time. So penetration has its own sort of, I would say, drivers. At the same time, there is the premiumization story. So if you really look at it, you know, Ultra is one very successful premium product that we have from our portfolio. We've now sort of launched in the last couple of years with beer and that wherever it's launched is getting a good response relative to the size of the opportunity. We've looked at Heineken. Heineken has come in, it's established a toe hold in the market. I'd be the first to admit it's still not, you know, doing all that we wanted to do, but driving that. So I think there's enough action in the market between these two pillars for us to strategically drive it. And now with the Heineken sort of stake increase in our company, I think we get even more access to, you know, compelling brands and propositions that that company has been able to exploit globally and will bring some of those to bear in India. So the agenda seems quite full, right, between these two things in the next few years. Okay. So Rishi, is this premiumization and bringing more brands from the portfolio of Heineken connected? So are you talking about premiumization through bringing these brands or something from UBL that we're going to see? Well, as I said, you know, Ultra is the most successful example of a premium brand which is from the United Breweries portfolio, right? And that has already, you know, sort of established a presence and that will only grow. As part of the Ultra franchise, we also have the Whitbeer which has come in. Again, that is pure play from the traditional United Breweries sort of portfolio, right? And that will be complimented wherever necessary with propositions we have from the Heineken portfolio, right? So I think it's not about this or that now. It's all about, you know, finding out and establishing what's the most compelling proposition and driving it on that basis. Okay. So which brand are we expecting the earliest and when then India from Heineken, if you can tell me. Well, you know, so to me, I think the first starting point is to do more with what we already have, right? So we've got Ultra, we've got Whitbeer, we've got Heineken itself, right? And then we are in the process right now of seeing which other portfolio brands will have relevance to Indian consumers. Now the good news is that Heineken as a company has a vast number of local propositions and a good track record of getting those propositions to travel across countries, right? And I think that is really what the exercise is on now. So we are not committed right now to which of those will find resonance. I think it'll take some time for us to sort of establish that. But in the meanwhile, we already have, you know, three or four that are already in the market and those are the ones that we would first want to take to the logical conclusion, right? All right. So, you know, you said that we talked about that you need not be the first, you know, to succeed, there could be, you can come late and then win. So now let's talk about this new age, you know, crafters who are coming in the market with their brands, we know, and they are kind of getting sold off the shelves, we have, we witness that. So, how are you looking at that? Is that a competition or how are you like, will you tackle it later on when they become really big or you have already started strategizing about it? Yeah. So first of all, I think we are consumer focused but competition aware, I keep saying that to everybody who will listen, right? I think the important thing here is we've been doing a lot of thinking and talking to consumers and trying to find out what is the craft beer phenomenon, the way the Indian consumer defines it, right? Now, if you look at it, there's one fundamental difference between the way the Indian consumers define craft and the way it is understood in, let's say, the West where the phenomenon stuck in, right? And big difference is that in India, it is a means of you know, enjoying a different taste profile, a different flavor profile, a different grain and so on and so forth. In the West, in addition to all of this, there's a fundamental difference that it is an anti-large brewer, you know, sort of a need as well. Now, fortunately for us, that is not being spoken about by Indian consumers. So if I take our large network breweries of breweries that is present all India that can deliver a fresh product, if we can then combine that with our brewing expertise, our knowledge of ingredients and craft exciting products, we have a way as a large scale brewery in every state of taking on, you know, this compelling consumer proposition and bringing it into our fold. And that is something that we are focused on. So the bit beer example that we really crafted in the last couple of years and brought to market is a manifestation of this thinking, right? And the kind of traction that we have seen with bit beer in the last few, I would say quarters is testimony to the fact that, you know, it is starting to prove the concept. Now, like this, we'll have to see whether there are any other flavor profiles, any other grain profiles, any other sort of, you know, exciting propositions that would excite sort of consumers and we'll bring that to bear as well. I mean, it is quite, I would say necessary and I've always believed this, that when you are a player of some scale, your innovations have got to play to your strength. Otherwise, you can diffuse everything all over the place. And, you know, you can do stuff that will look nice on headlines, but doesn't really make material difference for companies progress, right? So rather do things that, you know, deliver scale, play to our strengths, then, you know, try to just do stuff that is cute. Okay, so will it always remain or it could be inorganic, I mean, would you try to like, you know, think of taking on board any of these new new age brands? I mean, again, you know, my belief and my sort of, you know, our philosophy on acquisitions is we must know what we are buying. Are we buying scale? Are we buying access? Are we buying a recipe? Are we buying a brand? So, you know, given the portfolio that we have right now, I'm not sure we need another brand in the portfolio, right? But if there's something that comes along that is either market access or it is somebody's scale or something so unique that we cannot emulate, nothing's off the table. But, you know, to do an acquisition for the sake of, you know, short-term signaling to the market that we are interested in a space may not be the route that we would go. Okay, okay. Alright, so someone has to really do something magical for UBL to get interested in acquiring. But having said that, I mean, being focused on consumers, whatever the consumers are telling us, we keep examining whether we can deliver those needs, right? So we want to continue to remain relevant we're also acutely aware of the fact that it doesn't take long, especially in the modern world for consumers to sort of, you know, start finding your brand to be not relevant, right? So we are acutely aware of that and want to stay here at UBL. So, not for the record, just for understanding, have you tried these new variants that have come in the market just to have a, you know, understanding that, okay, what is this offering? Why are people buying it? Or why should anyone be interested in that? We have a robust sort of a program where we, you know, sort of taste our products, comparative products, new innovations in the market to keep ourselves abreast of, you know, what is going on. That's actually a regular feature in the company. So it's both happening at the blind level, at a paired level so that, you know, we get a sense of where exactly the market is sort of going, right? And no one has raised an alambient premium, right? Well, there are lots of exciting and interesting things over there. The question that I keep asking myself is can we do those on our own or what's the compelling proposition and can that be scaled up and can we use that in a way in which it plays to our strengths, right? In the end, when you're driving penetration, you're driving premiumization, you have to be aware of all the different things that are happening in the market. So, you know, so the current year, I mean, we are coming off like probably and hopefully that it's the end of this, you know, unbelievable thing that we have all gone through in the past two years. So do you think the bear market will look any different or what do you expect overall from the from the from the market, especially given there have been change in rules and different states and taxes and everything, what would be the ultimate, where do you see it? See, I think when we came off the last two years, I think my biggest hope and desire for this year is that we have a normal summer, you know, and I think that is the single most important thing in the short to medium term that we would like to see that the summer of 2022 is a normal summer, which gives us a chance to do stuff that we have sort of, you know, only been planning to do in the last couple of years, right, and achieve the scale that we need to achieve because ours is a quite a summer dependent category like many other cold products, right. So normalcy is the first thing. Very fortunately for us, the initial the very initial dramatic increases in taxation that we saw at the start of the pandemic in 2020, state governments realized that these were counterproductive, right, they shrunk consumption to such an extent that, you know, it was not it was a sort of not worth it, right, and we have seen barring one or two states and one significant state, most of those sort of COVID related, whether you call them taxation says whatever you want to call them, those have been rolled back. So that's kind of behind us, right. So I think if we get a normal summer, and people remain where they are in terms of normative level of taxation and access, I think that would be the first big thing. Strategically, what I've said is true, which is, you know, we continue to drive therefore, premiumization and continue to drive penetration. So between normalization, premiumization, and, you know, penetration 2022 is pretty much sort of so now, right. And then those two will continue for the foreseeable future. How does beer consumption change? Of course, something that has lasted as long as the pandemic will have certain impact. Again, very fortunately for us in the early part of the pandemic, and I remember I just joined the company then, a number of analysts, media folks would just ask me that, hey, have people shifted to hard liquor because it's easier to buy store and so on and so forth. And, you know, over time, we've seen that beer consumption in markets that have opened up has returned to not, right. So that gives us the confidence that this category plays a role in consumers life, and it's logical for it to, you know, sort of a hot country like India, and also, you know, consumer need that is, you know, lower alcohol than spirits, you know, for that to sort of, you know, play out logically, right. So we've not seen any losses on a share of throne basis, right. And so I think there are some good, I would say, negatives that have not materialized for us. We have the opportunity of a low per capita income and that's really what we will see. Now, what do we see from a consumer standpoint at the upper end, we spoke about it, you know, people are willing to experiment much more and we have to do more of a job to sort of, you know, allow consumers to, to sort of, you know, satisfy that need and remain in our portfolio, right. That's one part of it. We've also seen that consumers are more experimentative in the occasions that they want to sort of, you know, look at. And hopefully, there's also a lot of pent up demand because there have been so many days of closure of bars, of pubs, of going out opportunities, socialization opportunities. So in some ways, there should be some hopefully revenge beer consumption as well, right. I don't know if it'll happen, but you know, there's always a hope. Yeah. So the flip side is that people start realizing that they're okay drinking at home and not going to a bar and spend, you know, that extra amount to buy that beer. That don't you think that that gets affected? Obviously, this is not a, it's not an empirical, you know, study that I'm quoting you, but I'm just telling you that, you know, once you get a taste of anything new, you might as well stick to it. Well, you know, theoretically, you're right. And that would be a challenge because it'll take us time for us to sort of, you know, build that beer moment at home, which we've already started doing. But then whatever we are seeing in other categories, including ours as markets have opened up and consumers have had the opportunity to go out, people have gone out, right? Because it's an opportunity to be with your friend. It's not just the cost of the beer, it's the whole experience of, you know, sitting at, you know, let's say, an early evening day part, spending time with your friends, cracking jokes, meeting together. These are not substitutable by, you know, sort of just drinking beer in your corner at home, right? So I think, you know, humans are to that extent social. We've seen this pent up demand come to light, whether it's tourism, whether it's, you know, movie going, wherever markets, not just in India, across the world where people have got a chance to go back to normal, people have done so, right? So I think that I don't see any reason why that won't happen. So, so, and do you think, you know, you are a beer market leader, and we talked about this new age brands coming in. So, but overall, because we have a huge focus on startups, I would want to ask you, so we do get people who are starting out in this, you know, in this journey of Vancouver. So if you have to give three advice or three tips that, okay, boss, you're starting out, watch out for three, whatever, I mean, these three will tell you whether you're succeeding or these three will tell you that you're not, you know, these are red flags. So what would that be? I mean, I think in general, you have to have a very compelling proposition and remain true to that, right? I mean, that is very, very important. Sometimes we forget the reason why we start, right? So I think that is very, very important. The second thing, which I always tell not just startups, but my own company, focus on your cash, because, you know, right from the early days, one has been taught that, you know, you can do a lot of, you know, sort of buying or volumes, you can also, you know, get some degree of profitability, but in the end, the cash that you generate in the business is very, very important, right? So I think focusing on that cash. And the third thing I would say is, which I again tell a lot of people is that the difference between strategy and reality is execution. So focus on the execution, right? There are a number of companies across the world that have very similar strategies, but they're all different places, as far as their financial performance is concerned, their valuations are concerned, the success they have in terms of market share or engagement with consumers, and that difference is all sitting in execution. And, you know, we've always seen this, you know, UBL's brands, Licking Fisher, and all to be the cool ones in the market, but there are newer ones which are coming and trying to become more cooler. So I know that you don't want to compete in the sense of offering what they're offering, but in terms of image, in terms of, you know, how you portray yourself, especially to the younger generation, you know, which is maybe the youngest of the lot to drink beer, will you have a different strategy or image position for the brand? Yeah, I think, and that's a very important question, I think to remain relevant across generations is one of the most key challenges that brands with long histories have to go through, right? There are brands, and I won't take their names, but there are brands that have failed to pass that test, and over time, they have fallen by the wayside. There are very few that have actually transcended that, right, that have remained true to their proposition, understood that what worked in the past and what constituted to use your word cool in the past may not be the same as what constitutes cool today. So if you have the honesty and humility to understand that, and then, you know, continuously reinvent yourselves to remain relevant to consumers, whatever your proposition is, in some brands it's cool, in some brands it's innovative, in some brands it's technologically the most advanced, in some brands it's the most, you know, optimum in terms of cost, and therefore price, whatever that proposition is, right, transcending that across generations is a tough act, and that's something I'm acutely, and we as a company are acutely, you know, sort of acquainted with, focused on, and we would like to continuously reinvent ourselves to be one of those few brands that would make that difference, right, and that leap, that is, I think, one of the biggest challenges for any brand that has got a history and a legacy, especially in the modern world, right. Yeah, yeah, and you know, I especially given that I look at a lot of brands across sectors, so we've seen that, you know, even for that matter, Tata's of this world, and I'm taking names, Tata's of this world, and you know, Reliance's of this world, they actually acquired some of the new age startups to get to the space where they weren't able to get themselves. So do you think this is also, but forget about the name, but do you think this is also a kind of strategy that one can have, you know, in, in case it cannot transcend those boundaries? It's a possibility, right. It's definitely a possibility, right, and, and you know, having said that, I think, look at the kind of franchise that a brand like Infisher has in this country, right. I mean, our first attempt will always be to transcend that franchise and take that across generations, right, but should we find that we need some accelerators, some brands that, you know, you know, truly can add that to us. And that could be a reason why you would actually go out and acquire a brand. Yeah, why not? It's not off the table, right.