By Arun Kumar
IANS
Atlanta : Things seem to be going better for Coca-Cola in India with the world's largest beverage maker hoping to turn the country into its third largest market in the none too distant future.
From Rs.30 billion, or less than three percent of $24 billion (Rs.1,000 billion) of the company's worldwide sales, to a place at the top may appear to be a tall order but Coca-Cola's president Muhtar Kent is pretty upbeat about India.
"India is hugely important for us," he told a group of reporters from 24 countries attending grand opening events in Atlanta for the new "World of Coca-Cola" attraction, which tells the 121-year-old company's success story through a thousand rare artefacts.
Kent admitted that the company that sells 400 brands of beverages, teas, coffees and juices to 1.4 billion consumers worldwide had not done too well in India, where it had invested over $1 billion, till recently. But now it's out of the woods and doing much better than expected.
"Quite frankly, there was a time when the company lost it way a little. We forgot what it meant to win and grow and believe," he said.
Now people at the company have started to believe in winning again. And "ten straight quarters of positive financial growth has helped reinforce that belief," added Kent, a Turkish native named president and chief operating officer of the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola in December.
While boosting growth in existing businesses was the company's main priority, "we actually are very active in bringing in new portfolios to enhance, to supplement, to complement" its product offering.
"In the future you will see more examples of that as we go around the world," he said.
One example came just a day later when Coca-Cola announced it was buying vitamin water maker Glaceau for $4.1 billion. The deal would in turn bring about $1.2 billion to India's Tata Tea Ltd, which last year bought a 30 percent stake in Glaceau for $677 million.
Kent said Coca-Cola was, as expected, doing well in fast growing markets like Russia, India, China, Brazil, South Africa and emerging economies where only 30 percent of consumption is ready to drink and there is a lot of room to expand.
At the same time, the company is also growing in its established markets like Europe and Japan.
With the total non-alcoholic ready-to-drink beverage market expected to grow to almost $650 billion globally, Kent sees a "40 billion unit case opportunity out there internationally alone -almost twice the size of our existing business".