India continues to be a market with long-term potential: Coca-Cola COO

Coca-Cola COO Henrique Braun said India remains a long-term growth market with expanding consumer base, rising drink frequency and steady capacity investments

India continues to be a market with long-term potential, Henrique Gnani Braun, chief operating officer (COO) & executive vice president, The Coca-Cola Co, said at the Barclays Global Consumer Staples Conference. 

 

“When you look at it (India) from a year-on-year basis, it continues to grow for us, the industry and other industries. But it’s a market, if you look at that with the angle of segmentation across the countries that I was talking about, it’s still very small in terms of the industry size and consumption, one of the lowest actually,” Braun said. 

 

He added that the consumer base in India is over 1.4 billion and the base will continue to expand and the frequency of drinks over time will be there, he said, and added that India is a long-term game.

 

“What we are seeing as well is very inherent of every market that’s growing or a category that starts to grow. A lot of new entrants want to play, and that’s a good thing to grow the industry. It’s not a good thing if you digress from a strategy and pivot on tactical moves because of a player that maybe is not playing a game to be here for the long, long-term,” he said. 

 

He added that the company knows how to react to short-term attacks by different competitors without taking away the eye from the ball in the future. 

 

“Our game in there (India), it’s (a) competition, it’s welcome to grow the industry. We will not step out of our strategy to build the right foundations with the flywheel that I talked about, invest capacity ahead of the curve because that’s what we have done in other markets, and it has been paying off here for years,” Braun said. 

 

While addressing its recent stake sale in Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages to Jubilant Bhartia Group, he said, “In every single bottler that we have, there is an element of multi-generational belief in the business and that’s the best place to put your resources and to actually pass it on to the next generation, whether they’re going to be sitting on the boards or they’re going to be on the sidelines, just steering, but making sure that the business continues to thrive.”