Ben Gilbert

Growth is only 3% or 4% a year.

If you look since 1998, in the post-Gosweta years, it averages out to about 3% to 4% growth.

So I think fair to say anemic when you're describing their growth in recent years.

Yeah, I think that's why we focused the bulk of the episode on the pre-1998 Coca-Cola, because that's really where they built this unbelievable thing that frankly saturated the world.

And over the last 50 years, soft drinks as a category have just gotten a lot more competitive.

The stat that I saw was back in 1948, Coca-Cola said that they had 60% market share of U.S.

soft drinks.

60% in post-World War II America.

In soft drinks today, they have 21%.

Pepsi has 10%.

And I think there's a lot of things in soft drinks.

If you just look at carbonated, Coca-Cola does have 47% market share and Pepsi has 19%.

But in soft drinks, I mean, that category has just gotten a lot more competitive and Coke has lost share.

All right, should we move into analysis?

All right, so instead of Playbook this time, because I had just something kind of funny written down for Playbook, which is this company really only does two things, manufacture syrup out of some unique intellectual property that they own and spend money on marketing.

Correct.

I think the more interesting Playbook this time is a brief review of why Coca-Cola worked.

Nice market to get to play in.

Yep.

Full stop.