Pepsico CEO Roger Enrico is seeing an awful lot of red in his first few months as captain of the blue team. Throughout July the renowned cola warrior got to witness the marketing frenzy associated with the Games in Atlanta, a.k.a. the Coke Olympics. Coke is riding Olympic glory to an 8% increase in sales so far this year, twice as fast as its great rival.
Then came August, when Enrico learned that Pepsi's biggest bottler, Argentina's B.A.E.S.A., was rotten with financial problems--this coming on the heels of accounting shenanigans with Pepsi Bottling of Puerto Rico. And last week Pepsi's sad summer seemed to reach its nadir in Venezuela, the company's showcase South American market: overnight and without notice, Pepsi's independent (to say the least) bottler switched 18 plants and 2,500 trucks to archrival Coca-Cola, a midnight move that will cost Pepsi some $400 million in sales and $10 million in profits according to analysts if the defection cannot be reversed by Venezuela's regulators.
Now comes news from Europe, and it's even worse. Russia's gone red. Again. Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta told TIME that Coke has overtaken Pepsi in Russia, a market of huge size (150 million people) and scope, erasing the 10-year head start Pepsi enjoyed as the Official Party Cola. Coke opens its 12th plant there this week, staffed by locals trained in Coke's bottling university in Moscow. It's all part of Coke's relentless push across the continents. "The conclusion is obvious," says Goizueta with his typical detachment. "Our system has terrific momentum."
And Pepsico's namesake business has suddenly gone flat. A couple of years ago, Pepsi's internationalists trotted out an ambitious plan to close the cola gap. Pepsi was then being outsold outside the U.S. by 3 to 1, and the idea was to blast the Atlantans from the shelves and fountains using a combination of new products such as sugar-free Pepsi Max, new bottling alliances, and new advertising combined with an old arrogance that Pepsi's marketers have always had in two-liter sizes. None more so than Christopher Sinclair, who led Pepsi's international soft-drinks business. He told Fortune in 1994, "If Coke starts growing 8%, we'll do 10% or 12%." He predicted non-U.S. sales of $5 billion by 1995.
Pepsi put some money where Sinclair's mouth was too investing $3 billion in the past three years in international bottlers. In April, Sinclair launched another salvo, a $500 million marketing campaign, called Pepsi Blue, to introduce a new, sky-hued can in 24 countries and to reinforce Pepsi's image as the coolest cola in the cosmos.
The score? Coke has increased its lead and helped itself to shares of some of Pepsi's prime territories. Internationally Coke's market share increased to 49.2% last year while Pepsi's was flat at 15.7%. In South America, Coke was expanding its 55% market share even before the Caracas Caper. In India, a market Pepsi has owned for decades, Coke bought the leading soft-drinks maker in 1994 and is now top dog. Coke sold $12.7 billion worth of products outside the U.S. last year. Pepsi's non-U.S. sales last year totaled $3.2 billion. And Sinclair? He has disappeared from Pepsi.