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 As it is everywhere, our focus in North America and Japan is to grow our business by creating value for consumers through brand, price, package and channel strategies. If you
think about it that way, there’s enormous potential in both regions. In North America, 77 percent of our bottler-delivered carbonated soft-drink volume is in cans and 2-liter bottles. Some of our strategies are actually less developed
in the United States and Canada than they are in France, Greece, and Mexico. So in North America, we’re
going to do what we’re already doing in lots of other countries around the world. We’re going to focus again on the needs of individual consumers—what they’re drinking, when, where, how often and so forth. To that end, we’ve already started testing a number of new
packages targeted at different channels, and the initial feedback has been very positive. |
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Considering the wide variety of brands, flavors and packages we offer in Japan, our strategies have been well-developed for quite some time. And as consumer habits and preferences continue to evolve, the opportunity to grow
volume through value creation is tremendous. So we plan to continue to innovate in the vending channel as new technologies allow us to offer interactive and other services. The Coca-Cola system has a great opportunity in supermarkets, too, and in 2003 we began
to provide new packages and better merchandising to our customers to increase trial and purchasing frequency. Early results have been encouraging. In the fourth quarter, our unit case volume in the supermarket channel increased
5 percent compared with the year-ago period.
In both North America and Japan, a critical initiative has been working with our bottling system to address the challenges in both regions. Over the past year, our system has established supply chain management companies to help increase procurement
efficiencies and coordinate production and logistics operations. Lowering supply chain costs is just one way we’re improving system economics and freeing up capital to invest in our brands and advance our strategy.
I want to emphasize, though, that not every country requires multiple packages for every brand. In China and India, for example, value has much more to do with affordability, so we offer mostly low-cost, returnable packages. Our glass affordability
strategy in both of these countries has helped us expand our consumer base by 90 million. But fundamentally, the approach is the same in China and India as it is in Japan: growing volume by creating value. And again, you create value by focusing on the needs of individual consumers. |
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