Market Opportunity
The Coca-Cola Company has long been a worldwide business. The first soda fountain sales to Canada and Mexico were recorded in 1897 with the first international bottler established in Panama in 1906. Coca-Cola entered China in 1927 and the 100th country, Sierra Leone, in 1957. Today, the Coca-Cola Company is the largest beverage company with the most extensive distribution system in the world. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the international growth of Coca-Cola had been rather haphazard. It began in 1900, when Charles Howard Candler, eldest son of Asa Candler, took a jug of syrup with him on vacation to England. A modest order for five gallons of syrup was mailed back to Atlanta. The same year, Coca-Cola travelled to Cuba and Puerto Rico, and it wasn't long before the international distribution of syrup began. Through the early 1900s, bottling operations were built in Cuba, Panama, Canada, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam (western Pacific island). In 1920, a bottling company began operating in France as the first bottler of Coca-Cola on the European continent.
In 1926, Robert W.Woodruff, chief executive officer and chairman of the board, committed the company to organized international expansion by establishing the Foreign Department, which in 1930 became a subsidiary known as the Coca-Cola Export Corporation. By that time, the number of countries with bottling operations had almost quadrupled, and the company had initiated a partnership with the Olympic Games that transcended cultural boundaries. Coca-Cola and the Olympic Games began their association in the summer of 1928, when an American freighter arrived in Amsterdam carrying the United States Olympic team and 1,000 cases of Coca-Cola. Forty thousand spectators filled the stadium to witness two firsts: the first lighting of the Olympic flame and the first sale of Coke at an Olympiad. Dressed in caps and coats bearing the Coca-Cola