CEO James Quincey eyes business beyond Coke as growth beckons

James Quincey,The 52-year-old newly appointed president and chief executive officer (CEO) of The Coca-Cola Company, has a packed schedule on Thursday and Friday on his maiden trip to India. In Mumbai on the first leg of his tour, Quincey’s itinerary includes meeting representatives of the Maharashtra government, following the announcement of a nearly Rs 11,000-crore investment along with partners in June, launching an orange flavour in the company’s Minute Maid portfolio, and visiting the Gurgaon office of Coca-Cola India to address employees there, and review operations with the senior management on Friday.

British-born Quincey, who succeeded Muhtar Kent as CEO in May, is keen to take Coca-Cola India into the parent company’s top 3 club. “That is my vision,” he said, during his media address in Mumbai on Thursday. “But in the foreseeable future, K K’s (T Krishnakumar, president, India and Southwest Asia, Coca-Cola) mandate would be to take the company from being the sixth-largest to being the fifth-largest.”

Quincey, a Coca-Cola veteran, said the world’s largest beverage company would push its way up in India by participating in more categories beyond carbonated drinks, looking to being both global and local in nature and working on a “fruit-circular economy” that endeavoured to cover activities from the farm to the bottle.“It is a great strength that the name of the company is the name of the brand, but it has also somehow limited us. While brand Coca-Cola will always be the heart and soul of the company, the company needs to be much bigger than it,” he said, sitting in the Taj Mahal Hotel, the foundation of which was laid in Mumbai in 1898, six years after The Coca-ColaCompany was formed in Georgia in the United States.

Quincey, who joined Coca-Cola in 1996, said the company had been shifting focus away from sparkling, or carbonated, drinks over the last 10 years. “Earlier, we were 90 per cent sparkling. Now under 70 per cent of the business is sparkling,” he said. “A 50:50 split of sparkling and non-sparkling could come by 2025 or 2030,” he said, adding it was a milestone his company was working towards.