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Strategies & Market Trends : WILL COCA-COLA ALWAYS GO UP? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dulane U. Ponder who wrote (817)	12/4/1997 10:51:00 PM
From: jethro	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1462

Dulane, as a long time shareholder and a person from the Indian subcontinent here's my take on the possibility of coke buying a larger stake in the bottlers there. 1) continues coke's global strategy of buying stakes in bottlers or the entire bottler (those which are underachieving company goals in volume growth and infrastructure investment to prepare for more growth) whipping the operation into shape and then selling that stake to an anchor bottler (which coke also has a large stake in) for a large profit while also increasing case and volume growth (more money to headquarters). 2) earlier this decade when coke re-entered the indian market after a 15 year abscence, they did so by buying the largest indian soda company (makers of the drink Thumbs-Up) which had a large number of independant bottlers. since the buyout, these bottlers have been very uncooperative with the folks in atlanta (refusing to invest in infrastructure, marketing etc..), generally they've been a pain in the ass. 3) the company could also decrease overhead by only having to deal with larger bottlers 4) the indian market is VERY important to coke with incredible growth prospects, the population is currently somewhere around the 900- 950 million mark, with a higher birth rate than china (which it will surpass by approx. the year 2020 or so). that is a lot of consumers, the country also has an annual coke drinking rate a fraction of the size of the rate here in the U.S. 5) if i remember correctly, coke is not the market leader in the indian market (pepsi by a small percentage); however, with the right execution coke can easily become the market leader (the question of uncooperative bottlers). 6) coke would like to become the market leader before brand loyalty becomes a problem. jamal yusufji aka jethro