Which works out to around $29,200,000.00 / DAY in profits, not even total revenue but actual in the pocket profits, for selling sugar water with some flavor additives…
Good.
How many people have diabetes because of their Coca-Cola addiction? How many people are overweight and hate their bodies because of all of the non-nutritious sugars they have drank?
And they have the audacity to not only charge several dollars a pop for their sodas, but to also bottle water in the exact same plant and charge the exact same price for the water they have bottled that they do for their sodas.
Externalities with no direct impact on the company? No way! Milton Friedman assured me that capitalism was perfectly balanced with 0 exploits!
several dollars a pop
Nice.
Don’t blame a soda company of you being fat and chugging 130 calories down 12 ounces at a time. Own up to your own shit. “This item tastes good. I blame it for ne being unhealthy because I won’t stop eating/drinking too much of it”
In isolation that is true, but it’s not a fair game. Own up to your own shit when They lobby against restrictions in schools to target children with their addictive substances. They have marketing budgets in the hundreds of millions to convince us one more won’t hurt. They employ psychologists to come up with the most manipulative strategys.
It’s not a level playing field.
Did you know it doesn’t even have cocaine in it anymore? What a ripoff!
When did they quit putting cocaine it? If I’d known that then I wouldn’t have been buying it anymore!
Coca Cola ensured that international drug laws grant them an exception to use real coca leaves (with the cocaine extracted from them first). Oddly enough, they could still make their cola taste the same without the leaves. The reason they still use them is because they likely wouldn’t be allowed to call it “coca” cola it it had no coca leaves. The name was so recognizable that they asked for an exception to drug laws rather than change the name of their drink.
Sounds like an excuse to extract cocaine to me
Eh, works for me. BRB, making a new product called coca tea, for the… uh… tea.
Branding is one helluva drug
The other reason is they make a good profit selling medical cocaine.
With a wink and a nudge, transactions are often structured to shift profits from high-tax countries to low-tax countries to cut their tax bills. The most popular target for transfer pricing abuse is intangible property, including licenses for manufacturing, distribution, sale, marketing, and promotion of products in overseas markets. Since intangible property doesn’t really have a physical home—unlike, say, real estate—it’s easy to transfer it to countries that offer certain benefits, including more favorable tax treatment. (That’s what’s in dispute in the Coca-Cola case.)
Ugh
The intangible property for coke is a secret recipe that is preserved in some vault in the US. There’s no transfer of IP here and that’s not what’s in dispute.
The facts are centred around the profitability of concentrate producers that earn the super profits. Operating entities and the US makes a slim margin.
You can read a better informed analysis here.
The dispute centres on Coke subsidiaries in Ireland, Brazil, Eswatini and four other countries that manufacture concentrate, the syrup that gets mixed with carbonated water to make drinks such as Coca-Cola, Fanta and Sprite. The subsidiaries sit between the US parent company, which owns the brands, and the bottling companies that make the final product.
The company routinely shifted production of concentrate to countries with favourable tax rates, the US tax court found. The subsidiary in Ireland, which had a tax rate as low as 1.4 per cent, at one point shipped to bottlers in 90 countries.
Unlike independent contract manufacturers, which typically have low margins, an IRS analysis found these Coke subsidiaries were unusually profitable — earning a return on assets two-and-a-half times that of the US parent company that owns the iconic brands. By controlling how much the subsidiaries must pay other parts of the Coke network for use of the brands and marketing, and by setting the prices they can charge bottlers, Coke itself in effect decided their profitability, the court heard.
Those profit levels were “astronomical”, Judge Albert Lauber wrote in an initial ruling in 2020.
The company routinely shifted production of concentrate to countries with favourable tax rates
Manufacturing is different than IP transfers.
the US parent company that owns the iconic brands. By controlling how much the subsidiaries must pay other parts of the Coke network for use of the brands and marketing, and by setting the prices they can charge bottlers, Coke itself in effect decided their profitability, the court heard
IP is owned by the US. What they’re describing is transfer pricing. Subsidiaries are owned by coke hence by definition coke sets the prices under which the US charges for their IP. It’s tax advantageous to charge a low amount to shift profits to low tax jurisdictions.
Numbers look massive but overall not large enough. Coke is gigantic and the dispute spans multiple years. The IRS hasn’t always covered themselves in glory and they may still fumble a technical aspect on the burden of proof.
Interesting to see it unfold but coke has a history of environmental, business and humane malpractices. This is just another outcome of such business model.
Thank you friend
But the IRS will come after meeee! /s
Nail them to the wall.
and i bet nobody goes to jail in the end, and ultimately they end up profiting after paying it back
For this to be criminal it’d probably require intent to be proven which is difficult without a “smoking gun” of an email being like “do this to avoid taxes or be fired”- CEO. For it just to be civil fines is a lot simpler to show. Their inevitable appeal and potential reduction in fine is a different issue.
It almost sounds like you’re saying corporations are not people. Don’t let the conservatives hear you say that.
Which is hilarious because ignorance is not a defence for poor people.
the poor are not, according to the american criminal system; ‘people’. mutually exclusive categories.
Of course they have intent. That’s not an issue at all. They’re trying to avoid taxes, which is in itself legal, and they aren’t denying that. Their theory is that the IRS is doing the math wrong.
16 billion dollars of money laundering isn’t an “honest mistake”…. criminal intent abounds
Sure but that’s a lot harder to prove.
This article is basically their public flogging, they’ve paid their dues and can reenter society
You assume they’re paying it back and don’t do some pittance of a public service instead.
i dont even know why soft drinks are so wide spread. theyre unflavorful and not even that cheap anymore
Unflavourful?
There are so many things you can complain about and you pick the one things so false an entirely new genre of soft drinks had to be created to tone shit down. Eg; flavored seltzers
You may actually have a medical issue affecting your taste buds, or you’ve never drank a real soda.
Soda is literally an assault on your taste buds… Your tongue is completely numb 😂
Is this part of the pay off to Biden’s IRS funding increase?
The fact that there are so many legal loopholes to use to save from paying taxes, the fact they go this far to avoid taxes is disgusting.
Fun fact, most laws are written by the corporations to which they apply. There’s no possible way for politicians to actually write all of the laws, so they rely on their corporate
paymasterslobbyists to go ahead and write them, then have their staff skim through it all, and then sign off on it before it goes off to the chamber for a vote.When you’re a billion dollar company, It’s cheaper to bribe politicians than it is to pay taxes.
There’s a supreme Court judge right now who was giving companies favorable laws for like a pack of twizzlers.
How would that help! Coke sells cola, not Twizzlers! /s
it is just an inevitable consequence of money and lobby based politics. Whoever contributed to turn US elections into something like a pro wrestling match event is to blame
I wish they’d pay the taxes in the country the drinks were bought. Even if the US manages to scrape back some, that’s only one country seeing the taxes owed.
Willing to bet the 16 bn is not really a year and a half of profits lol
Fun fact, these back taxes are higher than the share value of the entire company (~$11bn market cap).
But it’s only back taxes on profits we know about
Sure, it might be prudent to always assume any reported white collar crimes are at least one order of magnitude greater than we get to know. That said, I was really impressed with their stock ticker company description blurb where they strive to “honor God” in all their works.
Assuming they’re referring to the Christian God, a selfish, emotionally unstable mega toddler, their behavior would be appropriate.
This sort of stuff is why the corporate veil needs to be abolished. If they’re not criminals, then they can buy insurance.
Good. I hope it hurts.
Do people upvote these comments without checking anything? Does it sound reasonable for one of the largest companies in the world to be worth only $11 billion?
The Coca-Cola Company is worth $296 billion. I don’t think they’ve been worth only $11 billion since the '80s.
I’m going to stop using this site, as it currently states a market cap of “11,091,895,682” dollars. Thanks for the correction.
That’s a US bottling company that buys from the actual Coca-Cola Company.
The company was formerly known as Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated and changed its name to Coca-Cola Consolidated, Inc. in January 2019.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/COKE/profile/
These bottling companies are the ones that beat people up in developing countries, not the actual manufacturer. They can be confusing.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
Well, I at least stand by my earlier point, that white collar crime is usually way worse than is ever reported.
Tweeted from my iPhone because I will shame any company except Apple
that’s mastodon
I think you are lost.
So they jack up thr prices of their products
How much can they jack up their prices? It’s already like $10 USD for a 12pk of soda.
In the machine where i work they are $5 for one 12oz can
Where you work is the problem lol, not coke in this instance. A can is like 50 cents
The middle man is taking you for a ride there. Soda is not that expensive.
Are you, by chance, a Sherpa stationed half way up Mt Everest?
