The Real Thing

These are the Coca-Cola marketing slogans I recall from my childhood:

# 1963 - Things go better with Coke.
# 1966 - Coke ... after Coke ... after Coke.
# 1969 - It's the real thing.
# 1971 - I'd like to buy the world a Coke.

Fareed Zakaria explains that the company's early global impulses have now flowered. The world has returned the favor and now buys a lot of Coke:

The companies on the S&P 500 generate 46% of their profits outside the U.S., and for many of the biggest American names, the proportion is much higher. You might think of Coca-Cola as the quintessentially American company. In fact it is a vast global enterprise, operating in 206 countries. "We have a factory in Ramallah that employs 2,000 people. We have a factory in Afghanistan. We have factories everywhere," explains Muhtar Kent, the CEO of Coke. Nearly 80% of Coca-Cola's revenue comes from outside the U.S., and an even greater percentage of its employees are in foreign countries. "We are a global company that happens to be headquartered in Atlanta," says Kent.

Lots of "American" companies are creating far more jobs abroad than domestically in the current recovery.

I'm not sure what this says about sales of Mecca Cola.


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