According to the State Broadcastin Channel’s evening news, the Nordic management of Coca Cola Company has threatened Kaupthing with the revoking of the production licence if current owner Thorsteinn M. Jonsson does not keep the company.
Thorsteinn who has been a close business partner of Jon Asgeir Johannesson has sat on the boards of several companies linked with the Icelandic fairy-tale economy of recent years, including FL Group and Glitnir Bank. He has highly leveraged the soft drink company Vifilfell, which holds the licence from the Coca Cola Company, and under normal circumstances he should be losing the business.
Why on earth Coca Cola is protecting one of Iceland’s largest business failures is beyond reason? But similar stories are told of Toyota protecting Magnus Kristinsson, the highly leveraged owner of the Toyota licence in Iceland.
Pepsi anyone?
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2 years ago
What does that really mean?
Will they not license it to anyone else in Iceland for X years as a token of F U, or will they just cancel it temporarily to decrease the value of Vifilfell’s assets once Þorsteinn has lost it?
If it’s the former: let’s boycott Coke. Not having Coke around makes that easy.
If it’s the latter: Who cares? The company still has, among other things, a huge part of the beer market so it’s surely worth aomething to the banks. Icelanders drink a lot of Coke (as much as 0.5-1M Danes/Swedes?) so they stand to lose a lot of licensing revenue (straight to their rival Pepsi), so it could be a bluff. Call it.