Pheonix Research - Editorial Index
Editorial analysis anchored to industries, segments, and the market intelligence behind them.
A 5 per cent ready-to-drink serve pays GBP 1.33 of duty per litre against GBP 11.48 for a 37.5 per cent gin — 8.63 times less, and 13.1 per cent less per unit of alcohol. In 2025 the RTD was the only major beverage alcohol category to grow. That is not a taste shift. It is a tax schedule.
Gilbey's added 40 per cent with no still of its own. Diageo owns three of the world's eight biggest gin brands and treats the category as 4 per cent of net sales. In a market where duty is two-thirds of a value bottle, the liquid is a toll service and the name is the only asset left to arbitrage.
Gin is the cheapest liquid in premium spirits at USD 14.27 a litre, and almost every number in its cost stack is fixed by law or by plant. The exception is juniper — the one input with no futures market, no substitute and no disclosure, and the one input the product standard lets a producer skip entirely.
A 34 per cent jump in Colombia's 2025 soybean grain imports looks like restocking. The price says otherwise: realisation rose 6.6 per cent while the tonnage nearly doubled. What actually changed is the form of the purchase — meal to whole beans — and the oil-to-meal ratio that pays for it is set outside Colombia. The forecast's real fault line is crush capacity arriving in 660,000-tonne lumps, not demand.
Skyr and high-protein strained yogurt reached USD 13.6 billion in 2025 and compound at 11.6% to USD 32.7 billion by 2033 — 2.4 times the growth rate of the total yogurt category. The reason is not Icelandic provenance. It is that straining is the cheapest known way to concentrate protein into a format people already eat at breakfast, and the value and volume paths are starting to separate.
Tequila produced a record 583.5 million litres, up 17.7 per cent, while US supplier revenue fell 4.1 per cent and blue agave collapsed 66 per cent to MXN 7.62 a kilo. Three series, three directions — and the record is a supply event, not a demand one.
100 per cent agave is now 71 per cent of tequila production — 415.4 million litres against 168.1 million of mixto. But US supplier revenue fell 4.1 per cent in the same year, because the plant that carries the claim got cheap, not because the consumer paid for it.
Rosé is 8.5 per cent of world wine volume and 8.9 per cent of its value — and it now sells at a 1.05 price ratio to the wine average. Volume grows 0.20 per cent to 2033 while value compounds at 4.80: the whole forecast is price and mix inside a shrinking category.
The top ten countries make almost 90 per cent of the world's rosé and three of them make two thirds — while a third of demand sits in France and the growth comes from the UK, Germany and the US, which produce almost none of it.
Champagne volume fell 1.95 per cent in 2025. Revenue fell 12.31 per cent. Revenue per bottle went from EUR 23.95 to EUR 21.42 — the most protected wine appellation in the world taking a double-digit price cut in a single year.
Japan pays EUR 32.03 a bottle, the United States EUR 26.00, the UK EUR 21.50 and France EUR 17.98 — for wine from a single appellation made to a single set of rules. The home market is the discount market, and that inverts the category's whole value logic.
The Philippines is the largest volume block in world gin — 51 million cases across one portfolio that doesn't even separate gin — while the UK sits 40 per cent below its peak. The volume centre and the value centre of the category are in different countries, which makes a global average price a poor instrument.
Gin grew 1 per cent in volume, 2 per cent in value and 3 per cent in price — three rates that don't reconcile, and the gap is the story. At USD 14.27 a litre it is the cheapest liquid in premium-plus spirits, and the low price is the growth engine rather than the symptom.
Twin-screw extrusion is a USD 3.0 billion market sold as complete lines, and one plant may buy two or three in a year. That makes a single quarter of shipment data a measure of when a handful of projects closed — not of demand. What to read instead, and why 7.2% growth is happening inside a machinery market that shrank 2.3%.
CADE cleared BRF into Marfrig on 5 September 2025 because horizontal overlaps were below 20% and every vertical-stage share below 30%. Those thresholds measure the fragmentation of milling, not the meat industry — which is why MBRF is better understood as a consolidated feed order book than as a consolidated feed producer. Bunge–Viterra closed five weeks earlier, and the merchant mill now sits between a more concentrated supplier and a more concentrated customer.
Feed is 62.51% of a Paraná broiler producer's cost and 72.52% of a Santa Catarina pig producer's, per Embrapa CIAS. A mill can pass that cost through. It cannot pass a margin through it — and that single asymmetry explains why the industry's profit moved into additives, why capital is being spent from both ends at once, and why cheap grain is a demand subsidy with an expiry date.
Latin America made 204.4 million tonnes of compound feed in 2025. Brazil is 89.9 million tonnes of that and Mexico is 41.9 — but one buys corn from a record harvest in its own currency and the other imports 26.8 million tonnes of it in dollars. Four countries, four different cost structures, and no such thing as a regional average.
US winery direct-to-consumer shipping moved 0.28 per cent of the world's wine volume and 0.73 per cent of its value in 2025 — at USD 49.55 a bottle against a world average of USD 19.06 — and it shrank 15 per cent in volume while price per bottle rose 11. Direct is a price channel, not a distribution solution.
Maharashtra sold 12.1 million litres of grape wine in 2024-25, up 14.2 per cent and doubled in a decade — and it is 0.058 per cent of world volume. India's beer market is sized at USD 6.85 billion; its wine market has no number, and the reasons are tax and distribution rather than demand.
Treasury Wine Estates earned A$138.1 a case at the gate on 2.7 per cent less volume: revenue per case rose 10.2 per cent while cost per case rose 2.5, turning A$53.60 of gross profit into A$64.70. But organic revenue fell 1.1 per cent, and eighteen points of cash conversion are sitting in inventory.
