Word: coked
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That led to clashes with overseas regulators, who have long suspected the company of attempting to Coca-Colonize the planet. In one confrontation last spring, the European Community forced Coke to scale back its $1.85 billion purchase of the foreign rights to Cadbury Schweppes beverage brands, which prevented the company from marketing Crush, Dr Pepper and Canada Dry in Europe. That took the fizz out of one-quarter of the company's global sales...
Then, in July, European authorities conducted a series of dawn raids on Coke facilities from the Continent to Britain in search of evidence that the company was offering retailers illegal kickbacks for favored shelf space. That investigation is ongoing. And last month French authorities rejected Ivester's $840 million bid for the Orangina soft-drink business. Observes John Quelch, dean of the London Business School: "The power of global brands may be strong, but they are not strong enough to preclude the need to cultivate [government] relationships at the national level...
Fortunately for Coke's board of directors, diplomacy is just one of Douglas Daft's strengths. The 30-year company veteran has spent most of his career overseas, building successful businesses in the uncertain, even untrammeled markets of the Middle East and Asia. If Ivester seems almost uncomfortable outside the world of the beverage business or his native Georgia, Daft is a jovial former math teacher with a wry sense of humor, a diverse range of interests and a creative streak. He pushed to develop Coke's biggest seller in Japan, for instance, and likes to joke that...
Syrup may prove to be one of Daft's biggest challenges, assuming that he takes office as CEO next April. In what seems to many analysts to be an ever desperate bid to increase revenues, one of Ivester's most recent moves was to hike the price of Coke's concentrate by a steep 7.7%. In effect, that represents a penalty for the company's cost-conscious bottling affiliates. In the past, Coke has offset such cost increases by funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in financial assistance to its key bottlers. But bottlers expressed outrage at last month...
...letter to Coke's 30,000 employees last week, Ivester pointed to the "soul-searching" that preceded what was clearly a painful decision to abdicate the company throne. In an uncharacteristically melancholy tone, he exhorted the troops to look not toward the travails of the past but the "opportunities" of the future...