Coca-Cola has returned to Iraq after an absence of nearly four decades, triggering a cola war in a lucrative but potentially hostile market.
Coke ended its 37-year exile last week by setting up a joint-venture bottling company to compete with Pepsi for 26 million consumers.
The upside for Coke include a thirst-inducing climate and burgeoning Islamic conservatism which has banned beer and other alcoholic drinks in much of the country.
The downside, besides Pepsi's head start, are a raging insurgency and banditry, which threaten supply routes, and a perception that Coca-Cola is linked to Israel and "American Zionists."
Boycott
Coke withdrew from Iraq in 1968 when the Arab League declared a boycott because of business ties to Israel, leaving Pepsi to dominate the Middle East market for soft drinks. The boycott ended in 1991, but sanctions and wars kept Coke out of Iraq.
After a trickle of Coca-Cola imports from neighboring countries, the company is attempting a proper comeback by launching a joint venture with a Turkish company, Efes Invest, and its Iraqi partner HMBS, which will reportedly bottle the Coke in Dubai and distribute it across Iraq.
"A local bottling company will employ local people to do this," a Coca-Cola spokesman said on Monday. "This happens in most of the 200 countries in which we operate around the world, despite the perception of us as an American company."
The response in Baghdad on Monday was mixed. One drink wholesaler, Abbas Salih, said the initiative was doomed.
"Coca-Cola does business with those who are shooting our brothers in Palestine," he said. "How can we drink it?"
Abu Ream, a shop owner in Baghdad, repeated a widespread conspiracy theory: "If you hold up a Coke can to the mirror, the writing says `No Allah,'" Ream said. "Or maybe `No Mohammad.' I can't remember which."
But Ream said since supplies became available two years ago he had sold more Coke than Pepsi.
"People like the taste better. And they like the novelty," Ream said.
Coca-Cola denies any political or religious bias.
"The myth is indeed sometimes perpetuated, but has no truth to it," the spokesman said. "We are a local business that employs local people ... Our Palestinian bottler employs 250 Palestinians."
Pepsi rebuilding
After the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, sanctions led the Iraqi license holder, Baghdad Soft Drinks, to replace the authentic Pepsi concentrate it had used with fakes smuggled from eastern Europe.
Matters were not helped when former president Saddam Hussein's son Uday bought 10 percent of the company. But Baghdad Soft Drinks says Pepsi is rebuilding, with bottling operations in the capital and southern Iraq.
In the west, Coke and Pepsi have been targeted as US symbols. Entrepreneurs have produced alternatives such as Mecca-Cola and Muslim Up.
But in Iraq, hostility to the US is expressed more directly in attacks on US troops; Sunni Arab insurgent sympathizers have no problem drinking and serving Pepsi.
Two US House of Representatives committees yesterday condemned China’s attempt to orchestrate a crash involving Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim’s (蕭美琴) car when she visited the Czech Republic last year as vice president-elect. Czech local media in March last year reported that a Chinese diplomat had run a red light while following Hsiao’s car from the airport, and Czech intelligence last week told local media that Chinese diplomats and agents had also planned to stage a demonstrative car collision. Hsiao on Saturday shared a Reuters news report on the incident through her account on social media platform X and wrote: “I
STILL ON THE TABLE: The government is not precluding advanced nuclear power generation if it is proven safer and the nuclear waste issue is solved, the premier said Taiwan is willing to be in step with the world by considering new methods of nuclear energy generation and to discuss alternative approaches to provide more stable power generation and help support industries, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said yesterday. The government would continue to develop diverse and green energy solutions, which include considering advances in nuclear energy generation, he added. Cho’s remarks echoed President William Lai’s (賴清德) comments in an interview last month, saying the government is not precluding “advanced and newer nuclear power generation” if it is proven to be safer and the issue of nuclear waste is resolved. Lai’s comment had
‘BUILDING PARTNERSHIPS’: The US military’s aim is to continue to make any potential Chinese invasion more difficult than it already is, US General Ronald Clark said The likelihood of China invading Taiwan without contest is “very, very small” because the Taiwan Strait is under constant surveillance by multiple countries, a US general has said. General Ronald Clark, commanding officer of US Army Pacific (USARPAC), the US Army’s largest service component command, made the remarks during a dialogue hosted on Friday by Washington-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Asked by the event host what the Chinese military has learned from its US counterpart over the years, Clark said that the first lesson is that the skill and will of US service members are “unmatched.” The second
STANDING TOGETHER: Amid China’s increasingly aggressive activities, nations must join forces in detecting and dealing with incursions, a Taiwanese official said Two senior Philippine officials and one former official yesterday attended the Taiwan International Ocean Forum in Taipei, the first high-level visit since the Philippines in April lifted a ban on such travel to Taiwan. The Ocean Affairs Council hosted the two-day event at the National Taiwan University Hospital International Convention Center. Philippine Navy spokesman Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad, Coast Guard spokesman Grand Commodore Jay Tarriela and former Philippine Presidential Communications Office assistant secretary Michel del Rosario participated in the forum. More than 100 officials, experts and entrepreneurs from 15 nations participated in the forum, which included discussions on countering China’s hybrid warfare