Coca-Cola Coke and mirrors
Coke has missed profit targets for two years in a row, which you’d know if you’d followed Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffett into the stock, as many have. It’s this new “health” craze, which is proving a little more robust than previous teenage fads like the jitterbug and roller-skates, and well, Coke itself, and has led Big Red down strange paths – for example, hawking tiny cans and bottles of the brown beverage on the understanding that less is more, and investing in super-healthy juice businesses. But it all may prove too little, too late, and word on the street is that Coke might just be up for grabs in the next couple of years, and that the habitually acquisitive Anheuser-Busch InBev might be buying.
Comment: Hell of a world we live in, when the honest purveyor of a brown, fizzy, caffeinated lifestyle accessory can’t even make a buck. Perhaps we are living in the long-rumoured Twilight of the Brands™, after all.