Coca Cola Bottlers Insulated, Adobe AI Disappointment, Gold breaks out
Coca Cola’s Secret Recipe
Coca Cola has never patented the recipe for its namesake drink. That would both make it public and would encourage copycats.
Instead they keep it under lock and key and create a sense of mystery about what makes it such a popular beverage.
The company decided long ago that the value of the product line was in the intellectual property.
They spun off the bottling companies globally since they are more capital intense and require local labour in a host of countries around the world.
The decision to split up the company into the brand and large number of bottlers made sense. It did not hold back Coca Cola from delivering impressive returns for shareholders and it created successful businesses all over the world.
Today, most of the largest bottling companies are publicly traded and several are still privately held. If the publicly traded companies were combined, they would have a currency-adjusted market cap that is almost half that of Coca Cola.
The performance of these stocks has also been positive. They have steady demand from the fruits of Coca Cola’s marketing efforts but also have the freedom to find additional business.
Coca Cola is a dividend aristocrat and has a decades long record of annual dividend increases. The price performance has been quite choppy over the last several months and is currently in the process of posting a downside weekly key reversal.
As a major international company and emblem of the USA’s global reach, there is a clear prospect Coca Cola will become subject to reciprocal tariffs if the Trump administration goes after European alcohol exports.