Back
~
2
min read
· Posted on
February 21, 2024

Coke kept around $100 million in coal royalties bottled up but now its new owners want to flog 'em off

Coca-Cola Amatil had 'secretly' kept millions of dollars in coal royalties, and now its new owners wanna sell them off.

What's the key learning?

  • Coca-Cola Amatil secretly collected $80 million in coal royalties between 2014 and August 2020 - but no one really knew about them, despite being a public company
  • Coke's new European owners wanna sell the royalties which are worth around $100 million
  • Publicly listed companies release financial statements, which are meant to show the public a complete picture of what's going on, but that isn't always teh case.

👉 Background: Coca-Cola was previously bottled in Australia by a company called Coca-Cola Amatil. Last year, another bottler called Coca-Cola Europacific Partners acquired the Australian bottling biz for just under $10 billion.

👉  What happened: Back in 2020 it came out that Coca-Cola Amatil had collected $80 million in coal royalties between 2014 and August 2020 alone. The problem is, no one had a clue about them!

👉 What else: Now it looks like Coke's new owners wanna sell the royalties - which are worth an estimated $100 mil. It just goes to show that even giant public companies can play hide and seek when it comes to their financial statements.

What's the key learning?

💡Publicly listed companies release financial statements that share their business activities, their revenue and generally their overall performance. These financial statements are meant to show analysts, potential investors and auditors a complete picture of what’s going on.

💡But that's not always the case, like with Coca-Cola. Ya see, Coke didn’t want to disclose that it was earning tens of millions in revenue from mining royalties.. So they placed it in a mysterious ‘other revenue’ line.

💡While it’s generally not illegal to do this, it ain't a good look once it's found out. So we can see why Coca-Cola Europacific Partners would want to get rid of these royalties and put the whole chapter to bed.

Ready to win at money?

Sign up for Flux and join 100,000 members of the Flux family

A button to App StoreGoogle Play store button
Excellent  4.9 out of 5
Star rating
No items found.