Oct 23, 2020
Coca-Cola has blamed the lockdown and restrictions relates to covid 19 in India to effect its overall Asia Pacific volume sales by 4% in the third quarter ended September 30.According to Coca Cola, the unit case volumes declined 4% primarily due to coronavirus-related restrictions in India and Japan. This also happened for its own bottling investment group (the company’s own bottling entities), where the unit case volume declined 10% in the quarter, driven by India and South African covid 19 situation.
It reported a decline of 4% in global unit case volumes, with businesses at restaurants, malls, cinema theatres and other entertainment venues which contribute about half of its revenues not yet back to normal. The company reported loss of value share in overall beverages, which it attributed to share loss in sparkling soft drinks.
According to the beverage giant, while sales are inching back toward normal, a resurgent virus could continue to muddle near-term results. Though the Indian government began gradually unlocking since June, but restricted state-wise lockdowns did drastically effected to impact business in restaurants, malls and airlines, which resulted in significantly impacting out-of-home consumption.
Coca-Cola is seeing an elevated level of sales in at-home channels being more than offset by ongoing pressure in away-from-home channels, which are affected by the level of lockdown in a particular market.