Word: coke
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...Ivester appears to have done what no mere soft-drink rival could have hoped to accomplish--dimmed the luster of one of the world's brightest brands. It wasn't just Coca-Cola's seven-quarter-long profit slide. When dozens of Belgian schoolchildren fell sick after drinking Coke products last June, Ivester maintained what looked like an arrogant silence for more than a week before traveling to Belgium to apologize. (The incident resulted in a 65 million-can recall.) Nor did he burnish his company's image by failing to promote Carl Ware, senior vice president for African operations...
Wall Street investors are fretting over the future of the global colossus, while business strategists ponder what went wrong. Last week Coke named Australian-born Douglas Daft, 56, who runs the company's Asia and Middle East operations, as president and heir- apparent. But that didn't do anything for Coke's stock price, which fell $4.125 a share last Monday on the news of Ivester's retirement--a 6% drop that knocked $9.9 billion off the company's market value--and dropped 75[cents] more by Friday's close...
...question gnawing at everyone is whether a company that already controls 51% of the world's soft-drink market can sustain Ivester's relentless strategy of pumping up sales 7% to 8% a year. "Coke has been this perpetual growth machine," says Ari Ginsberg, a management professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, "and now all this has happened...
...fairness, Ivester inherited Goizueta's strategy. And he took office just as Coke's foreign markets, which account for nearly 75% of its profits, were sinking from Moscow to Manila beneath a worldwide wave of currency devaluations. That tanked sales and turned many of the lavish investments that Coke had been making in overseas ventures into instant losers...
That should have set off warning bells in Atlanta. But Ivester, known for his bulldog tenacity, pushed ahead with expansion plans. Coke had built its omnipresence in the 1980s by welding together a motley collection of soft-drink bottlers into the most powerful distribution channel on earth. Ivester felt compelled to fill that global network despite the spreading financial contagion. Instead of paring growth targets, he embarked on a flurry of acquisitions to put more products into the pipeline...