Whisky Focus - Decline In Travel Retail Scotch Whisky Sales

The IWSR Magazine has just released its annual Travel Retail Top 100, and while Scotch whisky dominates 27 of the top 100 brands (the most of any single category), half of these brands suffered declines in 2015. The exceptions to this negative trend were largely Scotch malt whiskies, such as Edrington’s The Macallan, Diageo’s The Singleton, Beam Suntory’s Laphroaig and William Grant’s The Balvenie. Here the trend mirrors what is occurring in domestic markets, with malts outperforming blended Scotch varieties as consumer interest in the segment’s high production values soars.

Despite the global 0.5% increase in spirits consumption in domestic markets, the travel retail spirits market contracted by -3.3% in 2015, shedding a total of 750,000 cases over the year. This overall contraction is reflected in the largely negative performance by many of the travel-retail sector’s Top 100 brands last year. In fact, many of the sector’s largest brands were most keenly affected by its downturn, with the share of the Top 100 brands falling from 83% in 2014 to 82.6% in 2015.

Four of the top five leading travel-retail brands experienced volume losses over the year ranging from 7,000 to over 100,000 cases. Most of their volume losses stemmed from the Americas and Asia-Pacific duty-free/travel-retail regions which respectively declined by -6.3% and -1.3% overall between 2014 and 2015.

The travel-retail Cognac market also experienced a mixed performance in 2015, with sales down in Asia-Pacific and Europe, while posting marginal growth across the Americas. Similarly, of the five Cognac brands to appear among the Top 100 travel-retail spirits brands, two (Hennessy and Martell) posted overall growth, while Courvoisier, Rémy Martin and Camus saw their volumes decline.

Gin was one of the few spirits categories to build additional volumes in the travel retail channel in 2015, growing by 5.7% overall. As a reflection of this, all of the five gin brands ranking among the Top 100 improved on their 2014 positioning. Vodka is the second-largest contributor to the Top 100 travel retail spirits rankings after Scotch, but once again there was a mixed performance among the category’s leading brands.

New entrants into the Top 100 list in 2015 included Fireball Cinnamon Whisky, Wild Turkey Bourbon and Bundaberg rum, among others. All of these brands experienced double-digit growth over the year, propelling them into the top 100 rankings, as brands such as Bowmore, Drambuie and Becherovka fell by the wayside.
 

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