USA – American multinational beverage industry Coca-Cola has launched the “Create Real Magic” platform, which allowed consumers to become digital marketeers by leveraging AI to generate original artwork with iconic creative assets from the Coca-Cola archives.
The launch comes just a month after collaborating with OpenAI and Bain & Company to harness the power of ChatGPT and DALL-E to enhance marketing capabilities and business operations and to build capabilities through cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI).
The company also plans to leverage AI to improve customer service and ordering, as well as point-of-sale material creation in collaboration with its bottling partners.
The launch was simultaneous with the announcing of a 5% net revenue increase to US$11.0 billion following a 3%-unit case volume growth. The growth in unit case volume shows a rise in demand for Coke’s products even as the company has been hiking prices to mitigate the impact of inflation.
As much as consolidated results had a unit case volume rise, unit case volume declined by 3% in Europe, the Middle East, & Africa.
There was strong growth in Western Europe, Pakistan, and South Africa was more than offset by the suspension of business in Russia and the impact of the earthquake in Türkiye in February.
Demand was strong in Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region, where Coca-Cola had a 5%- and 10%-unit case volume growth, respectively.
Categorically, sparkling soft drinks climbed 3%, led by Asia-Pacific by strong performance in Asia Pacific and Latin America, partially offset by the suspension of business in Russia.
Trademark Coca-Cola’s sales surged 3%, driven by growth across all geographic operating segments while Coca-Cola Zero Sugar grew 8%.
Coke’s water, sports, coffee, and tea division saw volume growth of 4%, fueled by strong demand for its coffee, which had a jump of 9%, and bottled water, soaring 5%. The earthquake in Turkey hurt the demand for its tea, which saw the volume shrink by 3% in the quarter.
In Full Year 2023, the company expects commodity price inflation to be a mid-single-digit percentage headwind on the comparable cost of goods sold (non-GAAP) based on the current rates and including the impact of hedged positions.
CFO John Murphy told analysts on the company’s conference call that the company is maintaining its financial flexibility amid its long-running tax battle with the IRS. In November 2020, the U.S. Tax Court ruled that the company owed $3.4 billion in taxes.
That figure has since been slashed to $1.6 billion. Murphy said Coke is waiting for the tax court to give its final opinion on the case, so the company can move forward in the appeals process.
“Overall, we don’t expect the tax dispute to have a bearing on our ability to deliver on our capital allocation agenda and drive long-term business growth,” he said.
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