For dis­trib­u­tors of Hen­nessy Co­gnac in the Caribbean, in­clud­ing T&T, keep­ing up with vol­umes is a bit chal­leng­ing, but the French wine and spir­its con­glom­er­ate LVMH Louis Vuit­ton Moët Hen­nessy is seek­ing to en­sure that shelves are nev­er emp­ty.

The dis­trib­u­tor of the Moët Hen­nessy brands in T&T since 1994 is AS Bry­dens and Sons Ltd, which was ac­quired by Ja­maican man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny Se­prod in 2022.
AS Bry­dens is lo­cat­ed in San Juan.

Speak­ing to the Busi­ness Guardian at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel last week, Alexan­der Helaine, Moët Hen­nessy’s Caribbean mar­ket­ing man­ag­er said the French com­pa­ny was amazed to see how Trinida­di­ans em­braced the Hen­nessey brand.

“We see a big growth of con­sump­tion in the T&T mar­ket with a 10 per cent growth for 2023 for the brand. So we had some is­sues in the past with al­lo­ca­tion be­cause the de­mand was high­er than pro­duc­tion. Now we try to keep on track and go back to a nor­mal sit­u­a­tion where we have enough for the world which is still not the case, but we are go­ing to get bet­ter and bet­ter to be able to pro­vide the needs of each coun­try,” Helaine said.

He is al­so im­pressed that Trinida­di­ans are very well-ed­u­cat­ed in terms of palette and un­der­stand the dif­fer­ence be­tween the ex­pres­sions from Hen­nessy VS, VSOP to Pure White.

On the AS Bry­dens web­site, the most ex­pen­sive co­gnac sold in T&T is the Hen­nessy Richard 700ml for $40,500, pro­duced in ho­n­our of the Mai­son’s founder, Richard Hen­nessy, and in the Unit­ed States Hen­nessy Par­adis Im­pe­r­i­al is priced at US $3,089.

The mar­ket­ing man­ag­er said Ja­maica, the Ba­hamas, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, and Guade­loupe are the oth­er coun­tries that have a high-vol­ume de­mand.

“Guade­loupe, for ex­am­ple, is 400,000 peo­ple, they are drink­ing 8,000 cas­es (8.4 litres). For a small pop­u­la­tion with such a vol­ume de­mand, that’s out­stand­ing. While dif­fer­ent Hen­nessy brands are ex­pen­sive, these Caribbean coun­tries sure have an ap­petite for it,” he re­marked.

As it per­tains to COVID-19, Helaine said it did not spell bad busi­ness for the French con­glom­er­ate. One of the rea­sons for this, he said, is peo­ple re­alised that you on­ly live once, so in­stead of sav­ing mon­ey, peo­ple de­cid­ed to treat them­selves to qual­i­ty brands.

“We had very good sales dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, but we did not have enough prod­ucts to serve var­i­ous coun­tries and be­cause of the ship­ping de­lays, it made the sit­u­a­tion dif­fi­cult, but we were able to man­age it. The con­sump­tion for some coun­tries was at its peak.”

Last month, the Pana­ma Canal Au­thor­i­ty start­ed new cuts in ves­sel traf­fic which will re­sult in over 40 per cent re­duc­tion of ves­sels by Feb­ru­ary next year, due to an on­go­ing drought.

Asked if this af­fect­ed the French com­pa­ny, the Caribbean mar­ket­ing man­ag­er said no as it ships di­rect­ly out of France and to the var­i­ous coun­try’s dis­trib­u­tors. The oth­er al­co­hol brands that LVMH Louis Vuit­ton has un­der its col­lec­tion are Moet cham­pagne, Belvedere vod­ka, Dom Perignon, Krug, and Veuve Clic­quot cham­pagnes.

Helaine in­di­cat­ed that gen­er­al­ly, cham­pagne is not a very big vol­ume sell­er in the Caribbean (French ter­ri­to­ries be­ing the ex­cep­tion) be­cause of the pric­ing, among oth­er rea­sons, but it’s grow­ing and there is big po­ten­tial.

“A lot of peo­ple think it’s ex­pen­sive and may not un­der­stand why a bot­tle that can fin­ish with a few drinks costs so much. But that is a wrong per­cep­tion as cham­pagne is a 100 per cent nat­ur­al and has a min­i­mum process of three years to pro­duce one bot­tle.

“Ad­di­tion­al­ly, it is made from the most ex­pen­sive grapes from the Cham­pagne re­gion.
“Back in the day it was deemed that on­ly kings and queens could drink such prod­ucts,” he ex­plained.

How­ev­er, he did high­light that the tax­es to bring in the var­i­ous brands of al­co­hol in some coun­tries are pro­hib­i­tive.

“Each gov­ern­ment puts the tax­es on al­co­hol the way they want and some­times it’s very high.”

As the Christ­mas sea­son is up­on us, the mar­ket­ing man­ag­er said cus­tomers usu­al­ly buy al­co­hol gift sets for their loved ones, so sales are pret­ty good for the sea­son, es­pe­cial­ly around Car­ni­val time, in the dif­fer­ent ter­ri­to­ries.

Moët Hen­nessy Louis Vuit­ton record­ed rev­enue growth in Trinidad of 14 per cent in the first nine months of 2023 com­pared with the same pe­ri­od in 2022.

All busi­ness groups re­port­ed sus­tained rev­enue growth over the pe­ri­od, ex­cept wines and spir­its, which faced a high ba­sis of com­par­i­son.

On its web­site, the com­pa­ny said af­ter tak­ing in­to ac­count the neg­a­tive 4 per cent ex­change rate im­pact, rev­enue for the group was up 10 per cent in Eu­rope and Japan, and the rest of Asia achieved dou­ble-dig­it or­gan­ic growth. In the third quar­ter, rev­enue grew by 9 per cent. It said the wines and spir­its busi­ness group saw a rev­enue de­cline of sev­en per cent in the first nine months of 2023, faced with a high ba­sis of com­par­i­son with the same pe­ri­od in 2022. This was dri­ven by its val­ue-based strat­e­gy, the cham­pagne busi­ness grew over the pe­ri­od, de­spite more mod­er­ate de­mand in the third quar­ter.

Hen­nessy co­gnac, the com­pa­ny not­ed, was af­fect­ed in the Unit­ed States by the eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment, the post-COVID nor­mal­i­sa­tion of de­mand, and the con­tin­ued high in­ven­to­ry lev­els of its re­tail­ers.

“In an un­cer­tain eco­nom­ic and geopo­lit­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment, the group is con­fi­dent in the con­tin­u­a­tion of its growth and will main­tain a strat­e­gy fo­cused on con­tin­u­ous­ly en­hanc­ing the de­sir­abil­i­ty of its brands, draw­ing on the au­then­tic­i­ty and qual­i­ty of its prod­ucts, ex­cel­lence in dis­tri­b­u­tion and ag­ile or­gan­i­sa­tion,” LVMH said in a state­ment ac­com­pa­ny­ing the re­sults.