Diageo 1H 2025 – Bouncing Along?

Commercial Spirits Intelligence No.81

Photo by Zhivko Minkov on Unsplash

This week saw Diageo’s interim results out and these present a great opportunity to look at the spirits market and global trends.

Because Diageo is such a large player in the market, what they say and do is important to follow. In brown spirits and scotch, they are incredibly important as the category leader through Johnnie Walker. This matters to all producer’s whether they realize it or not.

I also think it’s increasingly important to horizon scan. Especially when you sit in Scotland which is a mature whisky marketplace. The patterns of consumption here are not the same as those in other geographies. It is critical to see the marketplace through the eyes of other consumers who may be at the start of their whisky journey. Things look very different in Brazil or Nigeria! Economic pressure and macro trends are also very different elsewhere and part of the whisky intrigue is the fact that ~ 200 countries consume the stuff so a big market may only represent 3% of total sales.

We have also now done this for the last 36 months, so we are now in a position to assess this information versus the previous years. This in turn allows patterns and trends to be teased out.