Read about Cokes strategy in Africa in the article below and
discuss the ethics of selling soft drinks to very poor people. Is
this an issue that a company like Coke should consider?
Africa: Coke's Last Frontier
Sales are flat in developed countries. For Coke to keep
growing, Africa is it
By Duane Stanford
Piles of trash are burning outside the Mamakamau Shop in
Uthiru, a suburb of Nairobi, Kenya. Sewage trickles by in an open
trench. Across the street, a worker at a bar gets ready for the
lunch rush by scraping the hair off a couple of roasted goat heads.
It's about 70 degrees, the sun is beating down, it smells like
decay, and it's time for Coke to move some product. Annual per
capita consumption of Coca-Cola (KO) in Kenya is 39 servings. In
more developed countries like Mexico, which consumes more Coca-Cola
than any other country, it runs 665 servings per year. One does not
need an MBA to see the possibilities.
Two, in fact, have just walked in. The pair wear short sleeves
and jeans. They reach into a refrigerated cooler, grab two Cokes in
glass bottles, and pull up two overturned red crates for chairs.
Mamakamau Kingori, proprietor, 39, bustles up in a patchwork-quilt
apron to take their money. The 500-milliliter sodas cost 30 Kenyan
shillings (37 cents) each. As is often the case in Africa, the
customers enjoy the drink on the premises, the deposit on the
bottles being too dear.
Such a transaction happens about 72 times a day at
Mamakamau's, and that has earned her the status of a "Gold" vendor,
the highest level awarded by the local bottler. Kingori's sundry
store—known locally as a "duka"—also sells plastic buckets and
mattresses, and is no larger than a small bedroom. Her Gold status
brings benefits, like an introduction to Coke's globally
standardized selling techniques. She's urged by Coke to promote
combo meals to boost profits, and so red menu signs supplied by the
beverage company suggest a 300-milliliter Coke and a ndazi, which
is a kind of greasy donut, for 25 Kenyan shillings. Coke also paid
for the red refrigerated drink cooler at the entrance to the shop,
which is protected by a blue cage. She's told to keep it full to
draw attention, and to stock it according to a diagram inside:
Coca-Cola always at the top, Fanta in the middle, large bottles on
the bottom. At stores down Naivasha Road, and throughout the
continent and the rest of the world, Coke fridges are stocked in
similar fashion.
Chasing shillings in Nairobi is the sign of both a healthy
company expanding its borders and an empire so mature that it must,
for its last great push, reach into many of the most war-torn and
impoverished countries on earth. Chief Executive Officer Muhtar
Kent may not be weeping, like Alexander the Great, at the prospect
of having no worlds left to conquer, but with Coke sales stagnant
or plodding in most of its developed markets—North Americans bought
$2.6 billion worth of Coke in 1989 and just $2.9 billion 20 years
later—Coca-Cola will rely on some of the poorest nations to
generate the 7 to 9 percent earnings growth it has promised
investors. That means, from the dukas of Nairobi to the "tuck
shops" of Johannesburg, Africa's mom-and-pop stores are a major
front in Coke's growth plan, not only for the flagship soda but
also for the company's huge stable of waters, juices, and other
soft drinks.
Per-capita consumption of Coke is also low in India and China,
relative to the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, but those two
continents present less of an opportunity for the company than
Africa. China's market, famously difficult for outsiders to
navigate, is already crowded with competitors like Wahaha, whose
founder Zong Qinghou is China's richest man. India drinks Coke, but
loves Pepsi, too. In New Delhi, Pepsi (PEP) is so popular that the
name is Hindi shorthand for soda of all kinds, even Coke. Coke will
continue to compete in those countries, of course, but Africa,
where Coke is the dominant brand, and where the middle class is
just emerging, may offer a potentially greater payoff.
Coke has been in Africa since 1929 and is now in all of its
countries; it is the continent's largest employer, with 65,000
employees and 160 plants. Its market share in Africa and the Middle
East is 29 percent, which adds up to 9.1 billion liters of
beverages a year. Pepsi's share is 15 percent. But now the small
shops in the back alleys have become more important, as Coke wagers
on Africa finally emerging as a viable market in the next 20 years,
riding a hoped-for wave of improving governance and demographics.
Coke is now in a street-by-street campaign to win drinkers, trying
to increase per-capita annual consumption of its beverages in
countries not yet used to guzzling Coke by the gallon. To do so,
Coca-Cola is applying lessons learned in Latin America, where an
aggressive courtship of small stores helped boost per-capita
consumption in Mexico to the highest in the world.
"I'm not interested in owning Coke when it's got no more
continents," says Ned Dewees, a principal at Douglas C. Lane &
Associates in New York, which manages $2 billion and owns Coke and
PepsiCo (PEP) shares now. "But that's 15 to 20 years from now."
Africa offers "enormous opportunity" for Coke, agrees Philip
Gorham, a senior equity analyst for Morningstar (MORN) in
Chicago.
Looking to capitalize on its position in Africa, Coca-Cola is
adding beverage plants and developing packages and products to
serve a growing population with rising incomes—and anticipating
that stable governments will allow the Coke sales machine to work
at speed. In 2000 about 59 million African households earned at
least $5,000, which is the point when families begin to spend half
their income on nonfood items, according to a recent McKinsey
report. The study suggests that number could reach 106 million
households by 2014. Coke plans to spend $12 billion in the
continent during the next 10 years, more than twice as much as in
the previous decade. The expansion will include new juice plants to
capture a growing middle-class demand for orange, mango, and other
tropical fruit beverages, as well as to allow wider distribution of
plastic bottles as more consumers can afford to sip on the go or
buy the two-liter family sizes that Americans take for
granted.
As Kent hunts for consumers, he is shadowed by a number Coke
may never see again—$87.94. That was the company's stock price on
July 14, 1998, when its shares reached an all-time high following
the 16-year term of former CEO Roberto Goizueta. By 2003, the stock
was less than half that as everything from a contamination scare in
Belgium to a race-related class action in the U.S. flattened the
company. The turmoil was coupled with high turnover at Coke
headquarters in Atlanta. Goizueta died of cancer in October 1997,
and Coke has had four CEOs since.
Muhtar Kent started in 2008. Now, as he travels the globe in
search of growth, he keeps a green spreadsheet in his briefcase
from the industry newsletter Beverage Digest. It lists the soft
drink market shares for Coca-Cola and PepsiCo in 95 countries last
year. Kent has highlighted in yellow the nine countries on the list
where PepsiCo leads. None is in Africa.
"Africa is the untold story, and could be the big story, of
the next decade, like India and China were this past decade," Kent
says. "The presence and the significance of our business in Africa
is far greater than India and China even today. The relevance is
much bigger."
The 25th-floor executive suite at Coca-Cola headquarters in
Atlanta, from which Kent, 57, runs the company, resembles the
oversized living room of a new-South mansion. Draped in rich cream
fabrics and varnished wood accents, the floor is connected to the
executive offices below by a spiral staircase. Portraits of company
leaders such as Robert W. Woodruff, who ran Coke from 1923 to 1954,
and oil paintings used for old ads hang in wooden frames.
Kent briskly enters a small dining room connected to his
office. He is famous at Coke for his energy, known to contact
subordinates at all hours from far-flung time zones.
Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with thinning hair, he is
dressed as usual in a shirt and tie. He wears a tie-bar Coke gave
him in the 1990s for 15 years of service, with one small ruby for
each five years worked.
"You've got an incredibly young population, a dynamic
population. Huge disposable incomes. I mean, $1.6 trillion of GDP,
which is bigger than Russia, bigger than India," he says, leaning
into the table. "It's a big economy, and so rich underground. And
whether the next decade becomes the decade of Africa or not, in my
opinion, will depend upon one single thing—and everything is right
there to have it happen—and that is better governance. And it is
improving, there's no question."
Kent's understanding of the importance of government may be as
much inherited as learned. His father, the late Necdet Kent, was a
Turkish diplomat. While stationed in France during World War II,
the older Kent, who was Muslim, issued citizenship papers to Jewish
refugees facing deportation by the Nazis. By December 1952, when
Muhtar was born, Necdet Kent was serving as the Turkish Consular
General in New York.
Whenever possible, Kent arranges meetings with political
leaders during his travels, whether he needs something from them or
not. Such relationships come in handy when, for example, he needs
permission to build a new bottling plant. In July, Kent hosted
Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, at a Special Olympics
soccer match during the recent World Cup, which was heavily
sponsored by Coca-Cola. "I invited him to come and join when we
were together in Davos, and he kindly accepted," says Kent. "When
everyone was pulling him in one direction because it was right in
the middle of the World Cup, he came and spent the whole afternoon
with us."
Though Kent grew up in Turkey, he studied economics at the
University of Hull in the U.K., and earned a master's in
administrative sciences from London City University. He started at
Coca-Cola in 1978, answering a want ad. He was soon based in Italy,
where he managed advertising and sports marketing for several
regions including North Africa. His first assignments required
regular trips to Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. He's been working
in and with Africa ever since, and gets excited as he rattles off
the countries he's visited on the continent.
"There's nowhere in Africa that we don't go," he says. "Being
in a country is very easy, you can go and set up a depot in every
capital city. That's not what we're about. We go to every town,
every village, every community, every township."
Population growth in Africa has long been a source of concern,
as food and fresh water supplies are strained, but Kent argues that
Africa's plentiful young may actually be viewed as its strength.
"In the old days when I used to study economics at university in
England, everybody who taught macroeconomics used to say how bad
population growth was, that it would condemn a country to poverty,"
he says. "The world has actually changed. You need a young
population for a country to survive."
Maturing economies are of particular concern to Kent. Since
taking over as chief executive, Kent has struggled to find growth
in countries such as the U.S. and Europe, two of Coke's largest and
most profitable markets. The U.S. soda market has declined for five
consecutive years, prompting both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo to buy back
bottlers to retain more of a shrinking profit pie. In this, they
are reversing a decision made years ago when the lower-margin
business of manufacturing and distribution was shed from the
higher-margin business of licensing, keeping returns on capital
high. The benefit no longer outweighs the loss of control in
markets where profit growth comes not from new demand but through
measures such as shaving millimeters off plastic caps, as both Coke
and Pepsi have done.
So Kent looks overseas, increasing investments in developing
countries as part of a plan to double, by 2020, the $100 billion in
global system revenue last year. Kent is fond of pointing out that
1 billion consumers will come into the middle class during the
coming decade, mostly in Africa, China, and India.
Ahmet Bozer, president of Coca-Cola's Eurasia & Africa
Group, notes Africa's minuscule debt and positive trade balance.
Governments like Zambia are collaborating more with institutions
such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Regional trade agreements are being signed. "There are lights
coming on in the continent," says Bozer, minutes after stepping out
of an August meeting with Coke's Zambian bottler and local company
executives in Lusaka. A day earlier, Bozer had visited a bottler in
the Democratic Republic of Congo who was elated over a new
200-kilometer road built near the country's troubled northern
region. The access helped the bottler triple his business in the
area.
Africa, of course, is not Atlanta, and Coke is, in a sense,
sticking its hand into a bees' nest to get some honey. Poverty,
war, and shortages of fresh water plague the region and make
commerce extremely difficult, especially for a company whose chief
product is discretionary and offers no nutritional value aside from
calories. Political instability complicates the building and
supplying of factories, and transportation is notoriously
unreliable. In the Sudan, Coke supplies syrup to an independent
distributor but is barred by the U.S. government from providing any
marketing or sales support. Somalia is in the midst of a
decades-long civil war, and though soda gets in via boat, the
bottling plant is closed. In Zimbabwe, Coke supplies "dried up" for
the first time in 40 years in 2006, during the economic crisis
there under Robert Mugabe.
"It's a hugely undeveloped continent, but in order to become
the next China it will have to have some growth driver," says
analyst Gorham. "In China's case that was exports. In Africa it
will have to be exports as well."
In the U.S., health advocates who say Coca-Cola contributes to
an epidemic of obesity have put the company on the defensive. Last
year, Kent attacked a congressional proposal to tax soft drinks to
pay for health care, calling it "outrageous" and comparing it to
actions the Soviet Union might have taken. Still, Coca-Cola and
PepsiCo have relented on calls for clearer calorie information on
packages and a ban on soft drink sales in schools. In Africa,
though, arguments over empty calories are mostly drowned out by
concerns of too few available calories of any kind. That is not to
say that Africa offers some kind of health-concern-free marketing
Shangri-la. The World Health Organization has called a rise in
overweight children in countries including Nigeria "disturbing" and
warned of the same for adults in Northern Africa. The U.S.-based
Center for Science in the Public Interest—famous for its 1998
anti-soft drink report, "Liquid Candy"—has turned its attention to
obesity in countries like South Africa, already joining with
international activists for a Global Dump Soft Drinks
Campaign.
Coca-Cola, however, remains undaunted, at least in the person
of Nathan Kalumbu, president of the company's East & Central
Africa Business Unit. Kalumbu keeps a photo of a pride of lions
above his desk in Nairobi. When it comes to selling, Kalumbu says
the animals remind him to "go kill something," whether it be a
corner store or an entire continent. "You gotta get hungry," he
says.
In Africa, most soft drinks are sold in returnable glass
bottles. In Coke's plants they are refilled as many as 70 times
each before they're recycled, depending how far the bottler chooses
to stretch the glass. Returnable bottles help keep prices down so
the company can reach more of what it calls "economically diverse"
customers. Consumers, in effect, pay only for the liquid in the
bottle.
As any good Coke man will tell you, the first rule is to get
the product "cold and close." In Alexandra, a dense township of
500,000 in Johannesburg, South Africa, with 65 percent
unemployment, Coca-Cola is sidling right up. Last year the local
bottler blanketed streets with drink coolers and Coke signage. To
keep the coolers full, the bottler extended credit to merchants who
didn't have the capital to take on inventory, giving them seven
days to pay. "That's one of the challenges in this market," says
Billy Tom, a district manager for bottler South African Breweries.
"You want the pipeline to be full all the time." Sales on one test
street rose from 5,000 to 14,000 cases in the first six months of
the year.
Not everyone on the local level appreciates Coca-Cola's
aggressive tactics. Patricia Ndlovu, 45, saw her business dip after
the Coke bottler decked out her general store-like tuck shop and
tavern in red tablecloths and Coke signs. The bottler even
installed a remote opener on the door of Ndlovu's drink cooler so
the attendant, behind a small window, could open it when a customer
rang a small chime. Some of the locals became jealous and stayed
away, thinking she was being paid for tarting up the neighborhood.
Things got worse when the Coke bottler painted a nearby wall red
and the owner demanded payment from Coke. Coke repainted the wall
white.
Mostly, though, Coke's plans work. In Kabira, a Nairobi slum
the size of New York's Central Park, shop after shop along the
densely populated main roads are Coke-red, like colored links in a
chain. The local bottler hires an artist to paint the makeshift
stores with logos and enticements like "Burudika na Coke Baridi,"
Swahili for "enjoy Coke cold."
Outside one of those shops, Ann Kimeu, 34, sips Sprite through
a straw from a green glass bottle. A few blocks away, residents of
the slum, which has no public water or sewer system, pay 3
shillings to fill used 20-liter cooking oil jugs with fresh water
from a Coke-sponsored well. At a new bathroom Coke is helping to
build in the poorest section of the slum, it will cost 2 shillings
to use the toilet or the shower. Kimeu buys soft drinks as many as
four times a week. It's not a treat. She's mostly just thirsty. A
seamstress, Kimeu earns about 1,000 Kenya shillings ($12) a week
when business is good. At 35 shillings a bottle, the soft drinks
consume 14 percent or more of her income.
Morning breaks in Nairobi's Central Business District, and men
in red Coca-Cola lab coats arrive at Rosinje Distributors as red
trucks pull up from a local bottling plant. Rosinje is one of 3,000
Manual Distribution Centers that are the backbone of Coca-Cola's
delivery system in places such as Kenya and a big part of the plan
to get Coke into every alley. Ayub Onyango, 28, helps unload red
plastic crates of soft drinks into three shipping containers, which
serve as a warehouse. Slender, with a runner's physique, Onyango
will stack up to 22 crates, about 40 pounds each when full, onto a
two-wheeled trolley. He and 10 others then fan out on the broken
and congested streets of Nairobi to deliver Coke, Fanta, and Stoney
Ginger Beer to about 345 small shops and beverage kiosks. With no
room for inventory, many shopkeepers order as little as a case a
day, and, with the crowds and the poor roads, it's easier to
deliver by hand.
Onyango's boss, Rosemary Njeri, herself peddled clanking
crates of soda shop-to-shop as a stockist 12 years ago. The mother
of three worked her way up to eventually own one of Nairobi
Bottlers' largest Manual Distribution Centers, moving 20,000 to
25,000 cases a month.
The program helps the company beat Pepsi to remote customers
as they develop the taste and the income for soda. Coke is also
establishing Manual Distribution Centers like these in countries
such as Vietnam and Thailand, where poor roads are also a
challenge. In 2010, Kent is adding more than 1,200 such
distribution centers in Africa. They currently employ more than
12,000 Africans and generate $500 million in annual revenue.
Coca-Cola teaches these mini-distributors everything about how
to run a business—from things as simple as waiting until the midday
rush before icing down the Cokes to save resources to how to buy a
house with their newfound wealth.
Coke is working to bring Njeri's business into the 21st
century. In August a small team from Nairobi Bottlers studied maps
of Njeri's territory and evaluated hand-tabulated data to help
construct new delivery routes. Up until now, Onyango and his fellow
salesmen visited a handful of accounts in the morning before going
back to the distribution center to load up and deliver. They
repeated this several times a day until their route was done.
Now a specialized sales team has been walking accounts,
sending orders in the afternoon by cell phone to laptop computers.
That lets Onyango and his colleagues concentrate on deliveries,
while the sales crew helps shop owners with marketing and inventory
management. Njeri and the bottler also get more precise sales data,
which are easier to mine for trends and places to cut costs. "My
business is all about volume," says Njeri. "When I do volume, I get
money in my pocket."
Back in Atlanta, not far from where Coke's phenomenal run
began, it's lunchtime at Lenox Square, a shopping mall a short
drive from Coca-Cola headquarters. Shoppers park their BMWs below
glass office towers and a rooftop hotel pool. They buy perfume,
silk ties, and Apple laptops. In the food court, they eat pita
wraps and Japanese noodles. Here, the Coke system operates with
peak efficiency. When customers ask for a soft drink with their
combo meal, chosen from a red menu board, the clerk reaches into a
red cooler and hands them a Coke. But the new money in Coke's
pocket will be earned by Njeri.
Stanford is a reporter for Bloomberg News.