Rémy Cointreau’s Growth Was a Warehouse Story.
Now Comes the Real Test
Q1 FY25-26: sell-in sales +5.7% organic. Global value depletions in the same quarter: -2.2%.
Rémy Cointreau’s sales grew 5.7% organically in the first quarter of fiscal 2025-26. Consumer demand for the group’s brands fell 2.2% in the same three months.
Both numbers are real. They describe two different things. Sell-in measures what distributors bought from Rémy Cointreau. Depletions measure what consumers actually bought from distributors. When the first number rises while the second falls, the growth is sitting in a warehouse, not in a shopping basket.
The Rebound Was Real. It Just Wasn’t Demand
Group sales reached €220.8 million in Q1 FY25-26, up 5.7% organically but only 1.8% reported. Currency drag from the US dollar and the Chinese renminbi cost 4.0 points. Volume grew 12.4%. Price and mix fell 6.6%, a combination of mix shifting toward standard formulations and softness in the ultra-prestige tier, Louis XIII most notably. The volume surge was a technical shipment recovery, US distributors rebuilding inventory off a soft prior-year base created by their own earlier destocking. It was not new demand appearing. It was old demand catching up with itself.
CFO and Deputy CEO Luca Marotta said as much on the call: “We should be careful not to overinterpret this performance too positively.” That is an unusually direct thing for a CFO to say about a beat. It is also the correct read of the quarter.
By Q1 FY26-27, the picture had normalised. Group sales reached €223.2 million, up 1.1% reported and 1.3% organic, with FX down to a 0.2% drag. Cognac led the recovery: €141.9 million, up 7.7% organic and 8.1% reported, driven by Asia-Pacific excluding China, plus the United Kingdom and South Africa. Mainland China Cognac sales still declined, though the decline was contained, and the 6.18 e-commerce festival delivered online revenue growth above 12%.
