‘Today, there are more voices that are speaking against free trade’ – Philippe Schaus, president of World Spirits Alliance & CEO of Moët Hennessy, speaks to Global Drinks Intel (Excerpt)

[Erik Owens]

Source: Global Drinks Intel

July 12, 2024

Earlier this week, trade association the World Spirits Alliance published a report looking at the spirits industry’s place in the global economy. Global Drinks Intel editor Olly Wehring spoke to the organisation’s president – and CEO of Moët Hennessy – Philippe Schaus, to hear more about the report’s findings.

 

Global Drinks Intel: Why has the World Spirits Alliance produced this report?

 

Philippe Schaus, World Spirits Alliance president: This is a new beginning for the World Spirits Alliance. It’s great that we have this study to highlight to outside players how important the spirits industry is. If we can grow the alliance and make it stronger by having more people join us, whether it’s individual companies or national associations, we can better defend our industry while also creating more synergies.

We believe that spirits companies need to be more vocal in a world in which we are facing challenges, such as in trading and with regulations. As a kick-off of this new approach to being more visible and more proactive, we felt it was important to start with answering a question that we’ve all received quite often and not always had a good answer to: What is the importance of the spirits industry to the world economy?

In order to have objective answers, we had this study done by Oxford Economics and IWSR Drinks Market Analysis. The results actually surpassed what we were expecting in terms of the importance of the industry to the world.

 

GDI: Who do you feel is challenging the spirits industry that needs this kind of information?

 

PS: We are moving out of a world in which the universal paradigm for economic development has been free trade. Today, there are more voices that are speaking against free trade; people who think that by reducing free trade, they are going to generate wealth for their national population. But, free trade is what helps countries move out of poverty, it’s created millions of jobs throughout the world, and it’s made the spirits industry particularly successful.

 

We as an industry thrive on free trade and we’ve created an enormous amount of jobs. There are 36m jobs throughout the world that are directly or indirectly linked to our industry – that’s one in every 84 people working in the world, or the working population of the UK, more or less.

Every year, we produce US$730bn of GDP, which is $1 in every $140. We’re also one of the biggest clients for the agricultural industry – Think about agave for tequila, corn for bourbon, barley for Scotch, or grapes for cognac. We’re often a driving force towards elevating the sustainability of agricultural practices, because we’re very visible to consumers and authorities. We want to be best-in-class in what we do, so we drive a lot of initiatives.

All these things are linked to the fact that generally speaking, we are living in a free trade environment. We hope we can make sure it stays like that.

 

To read the full interview, click here.  https://drinks-intel.com/cross-category/today-there-are-more-voices-that-are-speaking-against-free-trade-philippe-schaus-president-of-world-spirits-alliance-amp-ceo-of-moet-hennessy-speaks-to-global-drinks-intel/