• Thank you very much [for the introduction]. It is great to be with all of you. Embracing the future is what we are talking about.
    •  I’ve rushed over here from a meeting with the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and I must say without exaggeration I have been privileged to have met many world leaders over the years and today I have met one of the most impressive world leaders I have ever met.
    • On a virtual meeting I was on with him last year, when greece was handling the pandemic better than just about any other country in the world, I remember he said “my opponents accuse me of running Greece like a company” and he said “I take that as a compliment” and I reminded him of that today.
    • If you could have heard the reforms that he has made in Greece when it comes to tax reforms, fiscal reforms, to attract investments, to turbocharge the economy, to generate growth,  to generate employment; absolutely extraordinary. And I’m afraid to say, I now speak wearing various hats, that we [the UK] are doing exactly the opposite with one or two exceptions.
    • We [the UK] have the highest tax burden in seventy years, and this is absolutely the wrong time to be doing that. It is never the right time to do it, but this is particularly the worst possible time having gone through a pandemic. We have been through hell for eighteen months. As Winston Churchill said “When you’re going through hell, keep going” and that is what we have had to do.
    • The amazing resilience that has been shown by citizens around the world, by individuals, by companies, by governments, has been extraordinary. My business that I founded, Cobra Beer, which, just over three years ago, supplies seven thousand restaurants; and through the eighteen months of the pandemic they’ve been shut for the majority of the time. It has been tough; we survived, we survived through our sales in the supermarkets and the off-trade, it’s what kept our business going. 
    • The restaurants however remained shut, but despite this they did so much. They produced voluntarily, unprompted, on their own accord hundreds of meals and would deliver them to their local hospitals for the doctors and nurses and the staff. His royal highness the prince of Wales has a charity called the British Asian Trust, which works in South Asia and they approached us and said “can you help us? We would like to do a big curry night-in” in May last year right in the midst of lockdown. I said “no we will not do a big curry night in, we’ll do a big TEN nights in” and we mobilized the restaurants; hundreds of them opened up when they were shut, prepared takeaways. We set up the technology literally within days so that people could find out about this, order their deliveries, and we raised tens of thousands of pounds and awareness for COVID-19 victims in South Asia.
    • That’s the spirit, the compassion, the resilience that has come through that I have seen, and I am privileged to have seen first hand.
    • And the government to be fair has been amazing; £400 billion worth of support has been given to our economy, to our businesses, including the furlough scheme. That has helped save millions of jobs and thousands and thousands of businesses, and we have got to be grateful for that. In per capita terms that £400 billion is one of the most impressive efforts in the world.
    • So that means that we should have an economy that absolutely bounces back! As president of the Confederation of British Industry, I am proud to be president of CBI, I’m just over half way through my term and I could turn round to you and say to you “what a time to be president of CBI”. I’ve missed out on this [the ICCO Global Summit and similar events], for over half my tenure I’ve missed out on this! I’ve missed out on going around the country and meeting my members and my businesses and, I’ve missed out. I’ve missed out on meetings like I’ve just come from with the prime minister of Greece. I could just say “Damn, damn, damn!”. But you know what I say? I say “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I couldn’t have been luckier to have been president of the CBI at this time in history; to enable, to try and do my best to help save our economy,and help save our businesses. 
    • And the CBI people have the impression that it’s this organisation that speaks for the FTSE100 and FTSE 250. Well yes we do! But we also speak for a hundred and ninety thousand businesses throughout the United Kingdom in every sector, and we also have almost two hundred of the leading trade associations as our members from the law society to the national farmers’ union. We get to be the biggest voice of business by far. The most influential voice of business, right through to the sharp end. To the grassroots.
    • We also have an international dimension; we have offices not only in London and around the regions of the UK, but also in Brussels, and in Washington D.C., and in Beijing, and in Delhi. So we have fought for business, but worked side-by-side, and the one word that has stood out is why we have been able to achieve what we have been able to achieve in collaboration. If I give you some quick examples. You remember going back to March 23rd; the Lockdown? Ahead of that I was struck down by COVID-19. I remember meeting His Royal Highness Prince Charles at Kellogg College, Oxford where he was admitted as a fellow to the fellowship that I also hold there as well, the Bynum Tudor Fellowship, and I fell ill with COVID-19,  He then fell ill with COVID-19, Boris Johnson soon fell ill with COVID-19. I was in bed, on the phone during a CBI board meeting and they said “Karan, you’ve been through some tough times with Cobra Beer”. I’ve nearly lost my business three times. “What do you think businesses are going to require? What do you think we need to do to help business?” I said “You know what is going to happen? We have a lockdown coming up, businesses are going to be shut. If you’re shut you lose your sales, if you lose your sales you run out of cash, if you run out of cash, you need cash and the first thing you do is you want to get a loan. If you go to the bank, the bank is not going to lend any money to you because it’s too risky, because the environment is to risky – you don’t know how long this pandemic is going to last, you don’t know when things are going to open, you don’t know whether the business is going to survive.” We didn’t know if there was any government help forthcoming at the time. “So they are going to need cash, and they are going to need loans and the banks aren’t going to lend money, so banks need a guarantee from the government for that money.” And I’ve been the recipient of government guarantee loans, building up Cobra in the early years, when the government guaranteed 75-85% of loans and even then it was really difficult to get a bank to lend you the money, because a bank still had to take that 15-25% risk. Which is a big risk for a bank to take. So I said “in this environment, if they guarantee 80% the money will not flow through.” “Karan, they will never guarantee more than 80%.” I said “they’ve got to guarantee 100%”.
    • I persevered with this, the government didn’t listen initially, maintaining their 80% guarantees and the money did not flow. And I persisted, and I persisted, and I saw Germany was doing 100% guarantee, and I saw Switzerland was doing 100% guarantee. I went with evidence to the government, I was on Question Time in April, and I challenged the Prime Minister and said “Come on! Give 100% guarantees, let that money flow through. Businesses are suffering.” The next week the bounceback loans were announced, and over one million of those have been given to businesses.
    • The other day I was in the Tees Valley with the dynamic mayor of the region, Ben Houchen, to hold a meeting with our [CBI] Northeast members in Crathorne Hall. I remember I was on the stage and at the end of it my CBI team said “look, the sound engineers and the event’s team would like to talk to you.” They’d been listening to my speech and I had mentioned what I’ve just said about the bounceback loans and one of them came up to me and he was in tears; he said “you have saved my business. I got one of those bounceback loans and now here I am and I’ve got business roaring ahead, but I wouldn’t be here without that loan, so thank you.” So that is just one example, the bounceback loans.
    • Another example is the job retention schemes. Do you know when the furlough scheme was supposed to finish – great scheme by the way, and we thank the Chancellor – it was meant to finish in May last year, then it was meant to finish in June last year. We said “come on, we can’t have these rolling cliff edges, and what about the fact that it needs to be more flexible?” When did the furlough scheme actually finish? September 2021. The government listened; so it’s government and business working together.
    • I’ll give you another example: two-meter to one-metter social distancing. Do you remember when we opened up last summer? We said “if you keep it at two meters it will be unviable for a pub or restaurant to open up, it needs to be one meter.” And by the way that is not double the amount of people; if you do the maths, one meter is four times the number of people, it just about makes it viable to open up. We got evidence from around the world, the government listened.
    • VATs! From 25% to 5% to help consumers, help businesses, they listened. And the big one was lateral flow testing. Now you all know about lateral flow testing, I mean I’ve had to take one this morning, I took one yesterday; I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of them I’ve taken. I put that idea forward, and being in parliament, I can challenge the government as a crossbench peer as well. And I challenged the government “bring in lateral flow testing.” “No. No. No. No. No!” They just said “no” the whole time. And then I remember the beginning of November last year I asked the question again “Bring in lateral flow testing. Get businesses and people testing themselves regularly, then you don’t have to lock down and you can keep the economy going, you can keep schools going, you can keep universities going. What happened? I asked the question in parliament and the health minister said “look Bilimoria, you have won this argument, and we are inspired by you.” I mean, we were operating virtually at that time and I nearly fell off my chair. And now we have them free and delivered to our doorstep, free of charge and regular lateral flow test. One of our members, Smurfit, who, as it happens, makes packaging for Cobra Beer as well; they were one of the pioneers who started testing regularly and said”Karan, this is brilliant, we’re identifying people who are asymptomatic who can isolate while the rest of us carry on working.” You know we could have avoided lockdowns two and three if we’d had regular mass testing around the country. Mass testing, rather than mass isolation. And schools, in April we had one million children who were, through the bubble system, isolating. 
    • I mean, I want to see a raise of hands; how many of you have heard of the Oxford University lateral flow schools trial that took place between April and June this year? [Very few hands raised] Well look at this, communication! It should have been communicated so much better. That trial was of two hundred schools; two separate cohorts of one hundred schools. And you had one hundred thousand students on one side, one hundred thousand on the other, ten thousand staff, and ten thousand staff. One group used the bubble system: if one pupil or staff member tested positive for COVID-19, the whole class would isolate, the whole bubble would isolate. The other group, the person who got tested positive through a lateral flow test would have it confirmed with a PCR test; that child or that teacher would isolate the rest would carry on going to school because they were testing themselves two or three times a week. At the end of it, less than 2% of both cohorts tested positive for COVID-19 which means that 98% of one cohort were unnecessarily isolating and missing out on school, while the other cohort didn’t miss out on any days school. Just imagine if we could have done it; the cost of it is a fraction of the £400 billion that we’ve had to spend to save the economy.
    • So I could go on about the power of government and business working together and the power of communication. That goes down to confidence as well, we do need to build confidence in the public and today I think we have that confidence going. I think we should have no Plan B required, we should have no more lockdowns because, one, we have a fantastic vaccination system which is working brilliantly. Secondly, we now have these lateral flow tests that we know are very effective. And the third reason we are not going to have, I believe, lockdowns is we’ve started putting in as much effort as we are in the vaccines, into  treatments. Into the treatment taskforce. Existing drugs that can be repurposed to treating COVID-19 and what have we had, just recently? How many of you have heard of the new Pfizer antiviral drug that has just been proven? Can I see a raise of hands? [A relatively substantial amount of hands raised] Fantastic! 89% prevention of hospitalisation and deaths. Once among the two cohorts, among those not taking the drug, a few people have died. In the Pfizer cohort not one person died. 89%! That’s a game-changer! And they have just announced today that they are going to make it generic in countries where they cannot afford it, and affordable for people to have access to it. I know five companies in India who are ready to manufacture the Pfizer drug. Game-changer, to prevent people from dying from COVID-19 and being hospitalized. Game-changer, along with the vaccines as well. So I think we are in a really good position there.
    • Here is the “but”! The “but” is that in May this year I had the privilege of chairing the B7 before the G7 in June. And we had two fantastic speakers. One was Dr Ngozi who is the new director-general of the World trade Organisation (WTO), what an impressive person, she’s worked for World Bank for years, she’s been a cabinet minister in her country for many years, highly respected. And it was said that the WTO is in it’s last chance solution. The world is moving towards protectionism; we are going globalized in one way and protectionism in another. At Harvard business school where I’ve been lucky to study, straight after Brexit and the Trump election, this was January 2017, one of the professors showed us a graph of globalization and started after the battle of Waterloo in 1815 when the world had no globalization because of war. And then we had peace in Europe basically for a century and the “great” empires of the world. During this time the globalization curb grew until the start of the First World War. And if you remember, the build-up to the First World War was like watching a train crash in slow motion – it should never have happened, there was no need for that war, and it happened, and it was devastating. Globalization plummeted. Then you had the Second World War which was caused by the First World War and globalization picked up and then, Second World War, plummeted. And then you look at that graph from 1945 onwards and you see the graph rise and rise and rise until today where it has surpassed the peak of a hundred years ago before the First World War. So if history repeats itself, or if we let it repeat itself it leads to conflict again and the plummet of globalization. And that is what we have to avoid, and is what Dr Ngozi said: “It is absolutely crucial that we have got to get the WTO to work, move away from protectionism to globalization. She also said by the way Dr Ngozi, “the inequalities in the world – here’s an example of inequality: Africa has the population of India, around 17% of the population, but 0.15% of the world’s vaccine manufacturing capability.” So huge inequality, us [the UK] £400 billion, other countries have not been able to support their companies or businesses at all so I do believe that we need to keep in mind inequalities that have existed for years and address them.
    • And finally, COP26, that was an amazing experience. During the time of crisis is when you can actually look forward and make changes that are transformational. The best example of that is in the Second World War, 1942 the Beveridge Report was commissioned. Can you imagine? Just try and imagine, the world has been at war for three years and you say “come up with a plan for the future”. Well hang on, when’s this war going to end for a start? They didn’t know at the time, it lasted another three years, but they still came up with the Beveridge Report and after the war that report was implemented and what we have is our welfare state and the National Health Service. 
    • So that came out of a time of crisis, so we at the CBI said why don’t we look at the UK in this time of crisis and we launched our vision for the UK in the next decade which we’ve called “Seize the Moment”, we’ve identified £700 billion pounds of opportunity in our economy if we do certain things. So we think that there are several pillars: decarbonized economy, an innovation economy (we underinvest in innovation by the way), globalized economy, regionally thriving economy, inclusive economy, and a healthier nation.

 

 

  • Q&A: What according to you is the way businesses can create a roadmap for creating a more sustainable future for themselves in the UK?
    • If you look at the way the world has evolved, when I started in business three decades ago, you have the vision of this businessperson, and you can conjure up individuals who are super successful business people who make lots of money; they worship their customers, bully their suppliers, bully their employees, bully their advisors. “I’m the client, I’m the boss.” We all know those sorts of people. Well those days are gone. When I built Cobra Beer from scratch and, by the way, in India they don’t have the term SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises); they use the term “MSME”, Micro, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. In the beginning there were just two of us, my business partner and I, and then we became S, and then M, and now I’ve got a joint-venture for the last twelve years with Molson Coors, one of the largest brewers in the world. So I’ve been through every stage of building a company. And what we embraced from the very beginning was what I term as the partnership approach so we treat our customers, our suppliers, our employees, our advisors, our accountants, our lawyers, our PR agencies – they’re all our partners. Shareholders are partners, and then it’s such a better way of operating; you get so much more from everyone who feels part of this partnership family. Another word for it is stakeholder capitalism if you want to use that. Then what’s happened is then you say it’s business with a purpose. 
    • So business with a purpose, what does that mean? It is not just what you do, but how you do it. It’s not just being the best in the world, it’s being the best for the world. Now Cobra Beer has 128 gold medals. We are one of the best beers in the world, and I’m proud of that. But it is not just good enough doing that, what can we do? And if I were right back in the beginning I’d put it back into the community, with no one asking us to do it. I’ve given away millions of pounds worth of beer over the years to charitable causes, to fundraising events. One of our best prizes is free Cobra beer for a year as an auction prize. A case of beer a month delivered to your doorstep. We support charities by giving big events such as the Lord Mayor’s big curry lunch that donates all the money it makes for the Services Charity including the Army Benevolent Fund. It has raised over two million pounds since it was founded, and we’ve given thousands of pounds of beer every year to help raise that money for our brave service people.
    • So the House of Lords, House of Commons; we have a tug of war every day on legislation, but we also have a real tug of war that is attended by hundreds of people to raise money for Macmillan’s Cancer Support every year. Even in recessionary times we raised between a hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand pounds net from that one event. Hundreds of people attended, Cobra beer gives that beer free for that every time.
    • So we’ve got our own foundation at Cobra Beer, the Cobra Foundation; very few companies in this country have their own foundation and we’ve got water. Who’s heard of the brand of water Belu. I see a few hands come up. I noticed Belu and asked why this new water was replacing Hildon Water, the big water brand, and I asked why was this Belu water replacing Hildon. And I shared the platform with the CEO a few year ago and I discovered why. Belu sells its premium mineral water, as good quality as you can get anywhere in the world to the wholesalers at the normal price; the wholesalers makes their profit and sells it to the restaurant at the normal price; the restaurant makes a profit and sells it on to the consumer who pays a normal price. Here’s the catch: 100% of Belu’s profits are donated to water aid, saving lives through sanitation and clean water. And I said “how many indian restaurants do you supply?” They said none. I said “well we supply thousands, let’s form a partnership.” So we now have the Cobra Foundation – Belu Water and we have raised hundreds of thousands of pounds, my only stipulation is that it should be for water-aid projects in South Asia as that is where the majority of our restaurateurs come from. And nobody tells you to do this! If every business operates on business purpose then you have the PPP (profit, people, and planet) , the triple bottom line, then CSR, and now we’ve gone onto ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance).
    •  The big difference in this COP and the COP, for example in Paris six years ago. In Paris commitments started to be made, and again the UK, this little country, we took the lead, we legislated for net zero in 2050, first in the world to do that. That’s one thing; a country making a commitment, but what about companies? And what has happened since then, in these six years, is that people were skeptical then (“Oh is climate change real?”;”Who is causing it?”;“Should it be taken seriously?”;”Should we be committing to it?”). So that skepticism has gone, we’ve now got belief. People genuinely believe in it, and the proof of that by the way is business. This time at COP26 it wasn’t just the government, the NGOs; business was there in a big way, en force. And business now genuinely believes in it. 79% of businesses believe climate is a mega-trend, now is that belief or not? 89% of businesses have at least one climate-related target. So without anyone forcing it, we are doing it anyway, so that has been the big change.
  • Q&A: How can companies that seek to hire talent do so better and how can they get people back into work mode?
    • At the time of the B7 in may we had Dr Gita Gopinath the chief economist of the IMF, and she said “your country is an example of a country that will bounce back from the pandemic very rapidly because of two reasons; the £400 billion pounds you’ve spent to save your economy and secondly you vaccination program is world-leading and outstanding so you will bounce back very quickly.” Well we’ve got a recovery, but it is a very fragile recovery; what’s happened since May is the energy crisis, the fuel crisis, the labour shortages, inflation, the pingdemic which was highly avoidable so it’s one thing after another. 
    • All businesses, I mean I’ve suffered, I was out of draft beer, one of our biggest products, for one whole week in October. Those are sales that you never get back, so we’re all suffering from it and inflation is a real worry. I asked Rishi Sunak in February at a CBI meeting about inflation, I said “are you worried about inflation? I’m worried about inflation.” and inflation today, the results came out this morning: 4.2% inflation, and the prediction was that it would go up to 4.5% by next year and would come back down by next summer. 
    • So if you have very low interest rates, 0.1%, the lowest since the bank of England was founded in 1692 and your putting up interest rates, a quarter of our public debt, which is at 100% of GDP, a quarter of our debt is linked to interest rates, that in turn puts up government expenditure, mortgages, businesses. So how much can you keep putting up interest rates? So this inflation interest rate is a worry looking ahead, and then we need to generate growth. Now how are we going to generate growth? To generate growth, I believe, we should be following what the Greek prime minister just said this morning; set up competitive tax rates that are really good to incentivise investment domestically, and inward investment. You incentivise investment, and then that creates growth, that growth creates jobs, those jobs represent over 50% of our tax take is paid for by jobs, which create the taxes that will pay down the debt. But it all hinges on growth, and our challenge now is dealing with issues like labour shortages, so it’s all linked to making us more attractive as an economy; having a competitive tax system to attract inward investment and also employment. 
    • And also, our visa rules by the way; we need to have an immigration system which is flexible; so we no longer have freedom of movement in the EU, that still represents a declining 50% of British trade, so we don’t have that free mobility anymore. We’ve got a points-based system. My deal with the government: you want a points-based system? If any sector of the economy cannot get the people that it requires we need to implement the shortage occupation list to allow us to bring in these people. And do it independently. In the way that the monetary policy committee sats interest rates independent of government every month, proactively, reactively – why don’t you have the migration advisory committee, with some business presence on it, not just academics, that meets on a regular basis, where there is one supporter that analyses the whole economy and the sector and says “right, you now need ten thousand butchers, or you need ten thousand welders, or you need a hundred thousand lorry drivers, and give them temporary visas of at least one year and open that up. That’s what we need.
  • Q&A: I’m just curious based on what you just said, how do you think hybrid working fits into that? Whether you need visas, or can you have talent work from around the EU or anywhere in the UK?
    • Yeah, so this new world that has emerged from the pandemic; I remember in May last year, two months into it, Satya Nadella, the head of Microsoft, said “In two months the world has adapted to and adapted technology that would normally take two years.” So the zoom world, this technology has been around for a long time, we just weren’t using it. I mean if I give you an analogy  very quickly, I did a very big transaction with my business twelve years ago and all that transaction, the lawyers, the accountants, the different counter-parties involved, very complex, we ended up having thirty nine agreements at the end of it all took place in one of the lawyer’s offices. So we’d all meet at the lawyer’s offices in big conference rooms, and small conference rooms, and break-outs, and meeting together late into the night; all physical meetings. I did a similar deal two years ago, just as complex, not one physical meeting, it was all done through conference calls. Now if we were to do the same deal, it would all be done on zoom calls. And the network effects have take place, once everyone starts using it, EVERYONE starts using it, and then there is a point of non return, so we’ve now got the facility to do it – here we are with a hybrid conference – but what I’ve noticed, whether it’s attending the party conferences in my role as president of CBI, i went to the Labour party conference, I went to the Conservative party conference, I was at COP26 for one-and-a-half weeks; you can’t have those events virtually, the power of those events is actually being there, meeting people, bumping into people, exchanging things. The power of innovation and creativity? There is nothing to beat being in a room together. 
    • In times of crisis, when India in April and May, when the Indian COVID-19 cases rocketed and we had those sad, sad, sad situations. Hundreds of thousands of cases a day, absolutely tragic. I mobilized the team at CBI, my chief of staff who is over there [points at them] and another of my team, the four of us, formed a war cabinet. We worked with the Indian high commission and her team here in London and there were various people in various zoom calls, and after about a week I phoned her and I said “Gaitri [Issar Kumar], look we need to meet.” She said “come round, I’ll set up a war room” and we literally met in the Indian high commission around the table and in those two hours we achieved far more than we could have ever achieved virtually. 
    • So I think there is a time for physical and there is a time for virtual, a time for home working and a time for being back at the office. And particularly for young people who missed out on so much, when you start a job there is nothing like being in that office and learning from people, the mentoring you get face-to-face in the physical world. I do believe that we will go back more to the physical world, but we will use the zoom world far more, that will reduce traveling, enable people to have flexibility. In the House of Lords we were virtual, virtual, virtual, and now we’ve gone back to physical but there are people who because of illnesses, long-term illnesses, or for whatever reason who find it difficult to come into parliament and used to come in with great effort, they’re allowed to participate virtually. So you see, that would never have happened before. I think it is wonderful, we are now going to have the best of both worlds going forth. But for our city-centers as well, it’s important that people come back to work, and I think work is good for people in terms of not just the money you earn, but the whole environment when you are working , the social environment, the learning, the camaraderie,and the power of creativity. In our world of PR and communications, marketing, advertising; nothing beats face-to-face to be creative.
  • Q&A: As the founder of an iconic beer brand, what would be your view on the importance of brands building in CSR or ESG as part of their brand rather than just having it as a tickbox?
  • I think that the whole term greenwashing, forget it! Don’t even try it, people will see through it like take! You’ve got to live it, you’ve got to actually believe it and live it, and I think that one of the biggest problems for climate change; biodiversity. If you haven’t read it, look at Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta’s report “The Economics of Biodiversity” that was published this year in Cambridge University. Outstanding! I mean David Attenborough said “this is the moral compass we need”. In it he [Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta]  said “nature is our most precious  asset.” So biodiversity we don’t talk about, we also don’t talk about water; water is going to be huge, wars are going to be fought over water if we run out of water. I was talking to a senior business leader who was at the Greek prime minister’s meeting. I won’t name them, but they are in an area of the UK, East Anglia, that doesn’t have as much water as the rest of the country. And if you want to set up, for example, to produce green hydrogen you need lots of water.
  • So in brewing [referring to Cobra Beer] we are very fortunate because we literally live this term in the circular economy. That’s another thing we don’t talk about enough, we talk about climate change, let’s talk about the circular economy. I’ll give you a quick example; when we make beer we use lots of water. Our challenge is to use as little water as we can to produce the beer and our challenge is whatever waste-water we have we need to treat, so it’s not polluting and we treat our waste-water to an extent that it is so pure that in one of our breweries in India  we have a pond outside one of with fish swimming and flourishing in it, living very healthily to prove how pure that water is. Surplus water we give to the farmers in the fields next door. The carbon dioxide that we produce we can recapture and reuse. The bottles that we use are crushed and put back into making bottles. Then I can go even further, when you produce beer you use malt, the waste malt is taken away as cattle feed. We use yeast to make beer, the waste yeast goes to making marmite. I could go on, there is so much of the circular economy that we in brewing operate ourselves. Another example in India, we would see the farmers after the harvest would burn the rice husks. Literally just pile it up and burn it as waste; we said “we’ll buy the rice husks from you”, and we use the burning husks as energy to fuel our breweries so we don’t have to use oil or diesel. So there are many ways in which that circular economy operates.
  • And finally the brand! I think brand is so important whether you are in B2B or B2C, brand is crucial. As a country, the UK brand is a big brand, we’re not a superpower, we’re a global power. We have six criteria that we classify an extraordinary brand. One is based on an undeniable brand truth. You can apply this to any business. Secondly, an extraordinary brand never compromises on its principles, no shortcuts always doing the right thing, always operating with integrity. Third thing is that an extraordinary brand has an iconic look. Fourth, an extraordinary brand delivers a relevant and consistent experience, that’s a challenge for any business, otherwise you’re a one-day-wonder. Can you do it day after day, year after year, consistently? Fifth an extraordinary brand produces loyal brand champions, that’s the best one when people look out for your brand. When they walk into a restaurant and their favorite brand of beer isn’t there they walk out! They’re disappointed. And finally an extraordinary brand delivers extraordinary profits; you’ve got to deliver the results as well.