“While it is early in the year and there are a number of uncertainties in the global economic outlook, we remain confident that we will achieve another year of super growth.”

In context

“expanded, driven by strong pod growth in Europe as we increase our distribution and commercial activity. Within combustible, overall volume growth, coupled with strong pricing and ongoing cost initiatives, drove a robust performance, despite notably negative geographic mix from increased volumes in lower margin markets. Overall, the very strong and increasingly profitable underlying growth of our smoke-free business was coupled with very solid combustible results and the added benefit of favorable shipment timing. This allowed us to deliver plus 16% organic operating income growth and plus 250 basis points of expansion in adjusted OI margin to reach 40.7% and resulted in strong double-digit adjusted diluted EPS growth in both currency neutral and dollar terms, despite currency headwinds. While it is early in the year and there are a number of uncertainties in the global economic outlook, we remain confident that we will achieve another year of super growth. As such, we now forecast double-digit adjusted diluted EPS growth at prevailing exchange rates. Turning to the headline numbers, we delivered volume growth of plus 3.9%, reflecting the very strong dynamism of our smoke-free business. Combined with strong pricing and despite unfavorable combustible mix, we delivered double-digit organic net revenue growth of plus 10.2%, reaching $9.3 billion in total. There was also a technical impact from the change in commercial model for the Indonesia below tier-one cigarette segment, where we now act as a handling agent. This results in lower net revenue and cost of goods sold that has no meaningful impact on gross profit or operating income. Excluding this effect, which will notably affect the first three quarters of the year, organic net revenues gre”