Coca-Cola Company in China
The Coca-Cola Company is the world’s largest beverage company, refreshing consumers with almost 500 sparkling and still brands. The Company’s brands include Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Fanta, Sprite, Coca-Cola Zero, Vitamin Water, POWERADE, Minute Maid and Georgia Coffee. Globally, Coca-Cola is the giant of the beverage industry worldwide. Through the world’s largest beverage distribution system, consumers in more than 200 countries enjoy the Company’s beverages at a rate of nearly 1.6 billion servings a day.
The Coca-Cola Company has been refreshing China for eight decades. Coca-Cola Company opened the first bottling plants in Tianjin and Shanghai in 1927, and by 1948, Shanghai was the first market outside of the United States to post annual sales of more than one million cases of Coca-Cola. When the Coca-Cola Company re-entered China in 1979, it was the first international consumer company to grasp the opportunities offered by the open-door policy. Since opening in Beijing bottling plant in 1981, the Coca-Cola system has spread across the country by way of 35 bottling plants. Today, the Coca-Cola Company is proud to be China’s leading beverage manufacturer.
China, the world’s second largest beverage market, is the fourth largest beverage market, is the fourth largest market for Coke. In spite of a stringent regulatory framework in China, the company could successfully expand into the Chinese domestic markets. The success can also be attributed to consumer spending in China, which has been growing at an annual rate of over 20% and has contributed to the burgeoning domestic markets as well.
Coke adopted a “think global, act local” strategy, which emphasizes on addressing the needs of consumers in the local markets around the world. In china, it has introduced non-carbonated soft drinks such as Guo Li Chen (Minute Maid Pulpy) and Yuan Ye (Original Leaf Tea) to offer a wide range of beverage choices to the consumers. In the