Spirits company Diageo is selling 19 lower-end brands including Seagram’s VO Canadian whiskey and Goldschlager cinnamon schnapps to US-based Sazerac for $550 million, as it focuses on its premium labels such as Johnnie Walker in the US.

The divestiture is the latest move from the world’s largest liquor company to trim its portfolio and concentrate more closely on its core business. In recent years, it has sold interests in wine, Red Stripe beer and the Gleneagles hotel and golf resort.

Diageo, also known for Smirnoff vodka and Guinness stout, said on Monday it would return the net proceeds of about 340 million pounds ($438 million) to shareholders through a share repurchase.

The sale, which also includes whiskey brands such as Seagram’s 83, Seagram’s Five Star and Jamaican rum Myers’s, will reduce Diageo’s pre-exceptional earnings per share by 1.9 pence per share in the first full financial year after closing.

Yet it will improve growth in Diageo’s US spirits business by 40 to 50 basis points, its chief financial officer told Reuters, by shifting the business away from the low end of the market, where sales are falling as more drinkers choose premium labels.

“The value space has been in secular decline for a number of years, so we see the bigger growth opportunity and focus for our business in premium and above,” CFO Kathryn Mikells said.

Berenberg analyst Javier Gonzalez Lastra said the brands Diageo is selling were seeing sales decline by as much as 10 percent a year.