Alfonso Líbano Daurella
Chairman of the Board
Alfonso Bosch
Chief Executive Officer
The most notable of these developments is the relocation of the group's Head Office to Casablanca, Morocco. This move marks a major milestone in Equatorial Coca-Cola's journey, growing from a small team of six in a Barcelona-based office to a key bottling partner of The Coca-Cola Company in North and West Africa. This strategic move underlines our optimism about Africa's future, our commitment to playing a part in its social and economic development and our desire to be ever closer to our customers, consumers and stakeholders.
Our overall performance in 2020 was outstanding, and we closed the year significantly above our best-case scenario for COVID-19. These results are something that everyone at Equatorial Coca-Cola should be proud of, and they demonstrate that we have the team and the capabilities to overcome the deepest of crises and emerge stronger.
Despite the continued challenge of operating in the midst of a global pandemic, we managed to make progress on our path toward becoming a more responsible business. The pandemic posed major challenges to the projects we had planned for the year, but our teams found new ways to deliver value for our communities at this critical time.
We are proud of the work that we have done to secure the health and safety of our teams. It is because of this work, and our people's persistent observation of COVID-19 safety measures & protocols, that we have been able to continue operating and serving our customers non-stop throughout the pandemic.
We are also excited by the growing conversation in our business. Through surveys, OpenLine meetings and internal campaigns we are hearing from and communicating to our people more than ever. We hope to use this conversation to make Equatorial Coca-Cola Bottling Company an even better place to work going forwards.
This will help us to be more resilient and agile as we adapt to the new realities of our markets. Our customers and consumers are facing a great deal of change and we will need to work together to become more and more effective at meeting their evolving needs.
We want to thank the whole Equatorial Coca-Cola Community for their efforts over the last year. Our results were nothing short of remarkable, given the circumstances. Congratulations and we look forward to working with you in the coming year.
We're a bottling partner of The Coca-Cola Company across North and West Africa, where our teams produce, commercialize and distribute the world's most-loved brands and a wide choice of high-quality beverages.
Our project in Africa started in 1989 with a concession from The Coca-Cola Company to operate in Equatorial Guinea. The resulting venture was later joined by Guinea Conakry, Mauritania, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau and The Gambia.
Equatorial Coca-Cola Bottling Company (ECCBC) was created in 1997 to combine the operations of all these countries and serve as platform for future growth. In the last two decades we have expanded our operations to new territories in Africa, such as Ghana, Morocco and Algeria; and today ECCBC bottles and distributes the Coca-Cola Company's portfolio in 13 African countries, reaching over 100 million consumers, serving more than 200,000 points of sale and achieving 1.4 billion transactions per year.
To become the best beverage company in each of the countries that we operate in and the leading Coca-Cola system bottler in Africa.
We are accountable and transparent in everything we do. As responsible members of our communities, we think globally and act locally.
As a leading company in Africa with roots in a family business, we understand the tough realities of the countries where we operate and respect both their diversity and their heritage.
We share the hopes and aspirations of our local communities and we believe in what we do. We have fun at work and we are passionate about refreshment, consumers, customers and people.
Whilst our production, quality and execution are consistently excellent, we can adjust to the challenges of our markets with speed and agility.
We are more than the sum of our parts through trust, collaboration and dedication. We don't just work hard, we work smart.
We work together in harmony with our communities in order to preserve the natural environment for future generations.
Countries
Production lines
Employes
Turnover
(M€)
Millions of transactions
Bottling plants
Covid-19
After the closure of many of our points of sale, as movement and certain business activities became restricted, we sought out new ways to reach our consumers: either by ensuring that our customers were still able to reach the consumer in this difficult climate or by developing novel ways to reach them ourselves.
Throughout the pandemic, we have mobilised multi-disciplinary teams across our territories in record time, to design and implement bespoke solutions for the challenges that each of our markets face. By adopting a learning by-doing approach and sharing learnings across the business units our teams were able to react with speed and flexibility, incrementally improving their solutions, delivering results and producing valuable insights.
As a company, one of the biggest challenges we face in these uncertain times is to anticipate the needs of our customers and consumers. However, in the last few years we have worked hard to improve our agility so that we can always offer the best service and the best products to our consumers regardless of emergent conditions. Going forward, we will build on these initiatives, learning from our successes in 2020 and striving to keep this entrepreneurial mindset alive, as we seek to deliver better and more responsive service to our customers and consumers.
Covid-19
As a result, many of our projects for the year had to be postponed as we responded on a country-by-country basis to the pandemic. Here is a short (and by no means exhaustive) summary of some of the ways in which our teams have sought to meet the needs of our communities during the pandemic.
Investing in Our Future
Since the company began its activities in 1989, Equatorial Coca-Cola has consolidated its position as an integral part of its local communities, by supplying the world's favourite beverage brands to them and through social and environmental actions that seek to address their needs.
This historic relationship has now been formalised with the establishment of Equatorial Coca-Cola's Head Office on the African continent. This strategic move underlines the company's optimism about Africa's future, its commitment to playing a part in its social and economic development and its desire to be ever closer to its customers, consumers and stakeholders. Equally important in our decision-making was Casablanca's excellent regional connections, which place the leadership team - working under the New Operating Model - closer to the company's day-to-day operations and enable us to react in an agile manner to the evolving needs of our customers.
We always look for opportunities to create value for all our stakeholders and a big part of that is finding ways to make our business more customer-focused. This move will enable Equatorial Coca-Cola to deliver that value, guided by our vision of becoming the best beverage company in each of the countries we operate and a leading Coca-Cola bottler in Africa. We have been close to our communities for more than 30 years and this move presents a platform for us to develop an even more meaningful and fruitful relationship with them for the shared future.
Investing in Our Future
Investing in Our Future
Investing in Our Communities
And so whenever we can, Equatorial Coca-Cola has endeavoured to contribute to the achievement of the SDGs and align our strategy to join people everywhere who are working to make our joint future brighter.
Investing in Our Communities
However, as explained in the Our Projects section, a deep analysis of the past years and emerging risks made clear to us the need for our sustainability strategy to evolve, broadening its scope to address a wider set of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues.
This reflects our belief that our success is tied up with that of our local communities, and that when they thrive, so do we. That is also why, even though its scope is expanding, our strategy will continue to be guided by the UN's Sustainability Development for 2030 and Coca-Cola's global targets for 2030.
Look out for changes in coming editions about how we are adapting our strategy to meet to the needs of the future, both for our communities and our planet.
Investing in Our Communities
We believe that increased transparency from companies will be key to facilitating this collaboration. When companies are transparent about how their business impacts their communities and the planet, we can work toward to find solutions to making that impact overwhelmingly positive.
In 2020, we demonstrated this belief by taking part in a worldwide study carried out by the United Nations Conference On Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in partnership with the Family Business Network (FBN). The study aimed to investigate the extent to which family businesses have adopted transparent and comparable measures of their contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
We are committed to continuing to work with a wide range of partners to contribute to the achievement of the UN's SDGs for 2030.
Investing in Our Communities
Since the Coca-Cola Company's 2018 announcement of the World Without Waste program, recycling has been the top priority in Equatorial Coca-Cola's sustainability strategy as we partner with them to fulfil its far-reaching commitments.
Investing in Our Communities
This issue is particularly stark in Africa, and in response, we join hands with our partners to improve the access to water and build sanitation infrastructure across our territories.
Investing in Our Communities
The Coca-Cola system has consistently worked to address this need and it will continue to be a focus area for Equatorial Coca-Cola going on into the future.
Investing in Our Communities
However, they face a number of barriers to empowering themselves economically. This affects not only them, but it also means that Africa cannot access the dormant workforce that it needs to build a better future. We seek to breakdown these barriers and help them achieve their potential.