Scotch Whisky Struggles in Travel Retail Top 100

Malt whisky & gin show grows despite market contraction.

 

The travel retail market went into negative growth last year, according to latest studies. While Scotch whisky struggled to hold on to positions in the travel retails Top 100, malt Scotch whiskies like The Macallan, The Singleton, Laphroaig and The Balvenie performed well. The gin category also saw robust growth.

The IWSR Magazine has just released its annual Travel Retail Top 100, and while Scotch whisky dominates 27 of the top 100 brands (the most of any single category), half of these brands suffered declines in 2015.

The exceptions to this negative trend were largely malt Scotch whiskies, such as Edrington’s The Macallan, Diageo’s The Singleton, Beam Suntory’s Laphroaig and William Grant’s The Balvenie.

Here the trend mirrors what is occurring in domestic markets, with malts outperforming blended Scotch varieties as consumer interest in the segment’s high production values soars. Despite the global 0.5% increase in spirits consumption in domestic markets, the travel retail spirits market contracted by -3.3% in 2015, shedding a total of 750,000 cases over the year.

This overall contraction is reflected in the largely negative performance by many of the travel-retail sector’s Top 100 brands last year. In fact, many of the sector’s largest brands were most keenly affected by its downturn, with the share of the Top 100 brands falling from 83% in 2014 to 82.6% in 2015. Four of the top five leading travel-retail brands experienced volume losses over the year ranging from 7,000 to over 100,000 cases. Most of their volume losses stemmed from the Americas and Asia-Pacific duty-free/travel-retail regions which respectively declined by -6.3% and -1.3% overall between 2014 and 2015.