The Coca-Cola Company (KO)
Q4 2008 Earnings Call Transcript
February 12, 2009 9:30 a.m. ET

Executives

Jackson Kelly - Vice President and Director of Investor Relations
Muhtar Kent – Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Gary P. Fayard – Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Analysts

Judy Hong - Goldman Sachs & Company, Inc.
Marc Greenberg - Deutsche Bank Securities
John Faucher - JPMorgan
Kaumil Gajrawala - UBS
Christine Farkas – Banc of America/Merrill Lynch
Lauren Torres - HSBC
Mark Swartzberg - Stifel Nicolaus & Co., Inc.
Carlos Laboy - Credit Suisse
Celso Sanchez – Citigroup

Presentation

Operator

At this time I would like to welcome everyone to The Coca-Cola Company’s fourth quarter 2008 earnings results conference call. Today''s call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. All participants will be in a listen-only mode until the formal question-and-answer portion of the call. If you would like to ask a question, please press “*1” on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question press “*2”. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset before asking your question. Participants will be announced by their name and company. Due to the interest in this call, we request a limit of one question per person. I''d like to remind everyone that the purpose of this conference is to talk with investors and therefore questions from the media will not be addressed. Media participants should contact Coca-Cola''s Media Relations Department if they have questions.

And now I''d like to introduce Mr. Jackson Kelly, Vice President and Director of Investor Relations. Mr. Kelly, you may begin.

Jackson Kelly

Good morning and thank you for being with us today. I''m joined by Muhtar Kent, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Gary Fayard, our Chief Financial Officer. Following prepared remarks this morning by Muhtar and Gary we will turn the call over for your questions.

Before we get started, I''d like to remind you that this conference call may contain forward-looking statements, including statements concerning long-term earnings objectives, and should be considered in conjunction with cautionary statements contained in our earnings release and in the company''s most recent periodic SEC report.

In addition, I would also like to note that we have posted schedules on our company’s website at www.thecoca-colacompany.com under the Financial Information tab in the Investors section which reconciles certain non-GAAP financial measures that may be referred to by our senior executives in our discussion this morning and from time to time in discussing our financial performance to our results as reported under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Please look on our website for this information.

Now let me turn the call over to Muhtar.

Muhtar Kent

Thank you Jackson and good morning everyone. I am pleased to report that we have delivered another quarter and year of strong financial performance. This marks our ninth consecutive quarter of double-digit comparable EPS growth and the third straight year of meeting or exceeding our long-term growth targets.

Our results reflect the hard work and dedication of our global system through this incredibly challenging economic environment. Together with our bottling partners we are assertive and flexible in terms of managing our business, focusing strategies, accelerating actions, redirecting investments, and being prudent with our capital and other expenditures, while maintaining a disciplined long-term approach to our operations.

Our performance for the quarter and full year underscore our firm belief that there is no better business to be in than non-alcoholic commercial beverages. In a challenging environment we added another billion incremental unit cases in volume, essentially another Japan, our fifth largest volume market. We firmly believe our industry will continue to experience growth across all categories and geographies as macro population and person expenditure trends still highly favor the simple moments of pleasure we bring to our consumers over 1.5 billion times a day, a cent at a time.

Strong, decisive execution based on focused strategies enabled us to deliver continued global volume and value share gains across key geographies as well as categories. As we all manage through these globally challenging times, volume and value share gains will continue to be critical benchmarks for our performance progress.

We remain on track to deliver $0.5 billion in annualized savings from productivity initiatives by 2011. The continued acceleration of these efforts are going to enable our cash to be re-deployed to drive investments for sustainable growth. And there is no question that this year will pose unique macroeconomic challenges for all businesses.