Word: lasting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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, Coke...
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...
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...
...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's move, which they feel indicates Atlanta's willingness to transfer to them the burden of Goizueta's and Ivester's growth plans...