Ben Gilbert

The Coca-Cola company itself does $47 billion in revenue.

40% of revenue is in the U.S.

and 60% is international.

Yeah, still very meaningful.

Yep, I bet that's totally right.

Okay, so the interesting thing is if you start to look at employees.

So revenue, $47 billion at Coca-Cola Company out of $175 billion in total revenue by the system.

And this is as reported by Coca-Cola in their proxy statement.

There are 70,000 employees of Coca-Cola.

But again, if you look at the system, there are 700,000 employees.

So let's look at those last two numbers together, because that's a 10x difference in employee count.

A full 47 of the $175 billion in revenue goes to the Coca-Cola company, 27% of the revenue, with just 10% of the total employees.

I mean, the Coca-Cola company gets a tremendous amount of leverage out of the bottling system.

This is just employees.

This doesn't even think about the margin profile.

This doesn't think about return on invested capital, which, again, is all much better if you're the Coca-Cola company versus if you're the bottlers.

The Coca-Cola company just needs to sell syrup and spend marketing dollars to sell the dream.

It's a beautiful position to be in.

Earnings on that $47 billion, they generate $10.6 billion of net income.

The net income margins tend to average around 23%.