Coca-Cola share price slides as profits miss expectations
Coca-Cola saw its shares slide as much as 4.2 per cent in early trading this afternoon after its second quarter results showed profits were down on last year.
Profits fell to 58 cents a share from 59 cents a year earlier, a drop from $2.67bn to $2.59bn. Revenue was also down, falling one per cent to $12.57bn.
Analysts had been predicting a price per share of around 63 cents and revenue of $12.83bn, despite a cooling of the sugary drinks market and the cost of Coca – Cola's restructuring of its Russian juice operations and last year's separation of the Brazilian bottling operations.
Developing markets are considered to be falling out of love with fizzy drinks, but the world's largest soft-drink maker has seen itself perform worse on the New York Stock Exchange than its main rival, Pepsi.
Brand Coca-Cola volumes in the US were up one per cent and two per cent globally for the three months to June while the worldwide volume growth was 3 per cent during the same period.
Shares in Coca-Cola have not had the best of years, having increased by 3.81 per cent over the year at the end of trade last night. That figure was noticeably lower than the S&P 500's 16.4 per cent and Pepsi's 4.05 per cent. At pixel time Coca-Cola's share price had decreased 2.9 per cent.
Indexing the shares to 23 July 2013 shows the weakness of the two competitors compared to the market.
The company doesn't expect an improvement in the second half of 2014 and says new legislation in Venezuela is likely to affect net revenues.