OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Tuesday 12.30pm.
SOFT drink giant Coca-Cola is to invest $200-million in South Africa.
Chairman Douglas Daft announced in Pretoria on Tuesday that this will form part of a billion dollars the company is investing in Africa as a whole over the next three years.
“We are very optimistic about this company’s future and the economic development of African nations,” Daft told reporters after briefing President Thabo Mbeki on Coca-Cola’s plans.
Coca-Cola International Vice President Donald Short, who made the billion-dollar announcement at a conference of the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa in Cairo at the end of February, told Egypt’s Al-Alam Al-Yom financial daily it will be spent on bottling plants, personnel training and refrigerating equipment.
He said the company’s development policy in Africa had recently seen sales rise 30% on the continent, where the jobs of 700000 people rely directly or indirectly on the distribution of Coca-Cola products.
Coca-Cola suffered a disastrous year in 1999 with sales stagnating, share prices dropping and products being ordered off the shelves in four European countries after Belgian children fell ill drinking Coke, while US black employees began a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination.
The company also recently announced 6000 jobs are being axed worldwide, 2500 of them at Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. — AFP