The Coca-Cola Company

The Coca-Cola Company is an American non-alcoholic beverage company that licenses its trademarks to a worldwide network of independent bottlers and sells them concentrate, syrup and, in some markets, finished drinks. It generated $47.9 billion of net operating revenues in fiscal 2025, and its brands account for an estimated 2.2 billion of the roughly 65 billion servings of beverages consumed worldwide every day. Four geographic segments own the brands and the concentrate recipe; a fifth, Bottling Investments, holds the company-owned bottling operations that management is steadily selling off.

This is not a growth story in the ordinary sense, and treating it as one is the fastest way to misread the file. Worldwide unit case volume was flat in 2025 and had been flat or barely positive the year before; every point of reported revenue growth now comes from price and mix. Meanwhile the company is deliberately shrinking its lowest-margin business — refranchising bottling territories in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines, selling the Nigeria finished-product operations in October 2025 — which lifts margins while subtracting revenue. What is left is an unusually high-margin brand-licensing franchise compounding earnings on a flat physical base, funded by a dividend that has now risen for 64 consecutive years.

So the question this file turns on is narrow. Can a business with flat volumes and a contingent tax exposure worth more than a fifth of its market capitalisation keep compounding per-share earnings fast enough to carry a mid-twenties multiple — and does the market appreciate how much of the reported cash flow is obscured by two one-off payments?