Premium power and soft drinks drive Carlsberg’s Q3 category growth

Despite a broadly soft consumer environment, the Carlsberg Group’s Q3 2025 trading statement highlights the sustained success of its premiumisation and multi-beverage strategy.

Premium beer volumes (excluding San Miguel) grew by 5% organically, with the soft drinks segment achieving 4% organic growth, demonstrating the robustness of Carlsberg’s key product categories.

This category strength provided a crucial offset as the company reported a modest 1.4% organic decline in revenue and a 3.0% drop in overall organic volumes for the quarter, reflecting challenging market conditions in Central & Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. Nevertheless, price discipline helped stabilise the top line, with revenue per hectolitre growing by 2% across all regions.

The premium portfolio was the key engine of internal volume growth:

• 1664 Blanc volumes grew by 6%, and the Carlsberg brand was up 3% (with premium markets seeing 8% growth).
• Alcohol-free brews showed strong performance, increasing 6% when excluding the adverse market impact of the war in Ukraine.

Geographically, Western Europe proved resilient, delivering a 1.3% organic volume increase (excluding San Miguel), while Asia showed sequential improvement.

The quarter’s major financial uplift came from the full consolidation of the Britvic soft drinks acquisition, which was completed earlier in the year. The deal supercharged reported volumes by 16.2% and led to a 17.8% jump in reported revenue, reaching DKK 24.1 billion.

Crucially, the integration is exceeding initial expectations. Carlsberg announced it has raised its total expected cost synergies from the Britvic acquisition to £110 million, up from the previously communicated target of £100 million.

CEO Jacob Aarup-Andersen commented: “We delivered strong reported growth driven by the Britvic acquisition. We also achieved solid underlying volume and revenue growth in Western Europe and saw sequential improvement in Asia, supported by strong performance of our premium portfolio in most markets.”

Aarup-Andersen noted that the business has taken “decisive actions to adjust our cost base” since early summer to protect continued earnings growth amid the soft market conditions.

The Group maintained its full-year earnings expectations, forecasting organic growth in operating profit before special items of 3-5%.