👉 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.

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