Covid situation one of the toughest I have handled in my career: Coca Cola India CEO

It has been a very humbling journey but a journey where we got supported by everybody starting with our consumers, all the governments -- state and central -- and, our own employees in a systematic manner to start building back what was a tough situation at the start of the lockdown in March, says T Krishnakumar, President & CEO, Coca Cola India & South West Asia.


It has been a tough and trying four and a half months and counting for most of us. Being one of the most formidable players in the beverage space, it must have been extremely tough on you?
Yes, I would say it was a new challenging phase and the challenge was more because it impacted the entire community and we needed to handle it with care. We went through that phase and it had a lot of learning. It really changed our thinking on what we should do in a crisis. I believe the experience was something pretty good in terms of a learning experience because it was possibly one of the toughest situations I have handled in my working career.

India is the fifth largest market for Coca-Cola. The impact of this severe lockdown in India has been quite drastic on the overall numbers. I believe there has been a 12% decline led by India and other markets?
I want to take a step back. A business operates in a community and in my case, we were operating within India and while we did have warnings, when it hit us, it was pretty sudden. We needed to take stock of this situation. We truly believe that business is important but business is something which you are going to do for many years and forever. It is not something which we need to jump into because we know that even if there is impact, that can be made up over a period of time.

We looked at the larger picture to decide what we should do in March. We decided to start working in three phases. In the first phase, in the communities that we operate in -- the consumers were going through a tough phase because they were getting used to the whole new normal. We knew that our stakeholders like the government were trying to do the best and the right things for the community at large. So, we felt that in the first phase, we would not do anything more than what is needed to ensure that our employees and customers are safe and also mentally positive so that we could go through this crisis even if it lasted for a long period of time.

The second thing we did during this period was we stepped in and did whatever little we could do for the communities we operate in. So, we mustered together about Rs 100 crore with support from our global foundation and we invested it in two big activities which did some small sort of value addition to people and ensure they are really hydrated and also fed the migrant labourers. We worked with other NGOs to ensure that we supported the infrastructure in terms of PPE and medical infrastructure across eight states. This was the first action that we undertook because we felt it was something which will help us do something small to the communities we operate in.


The second phase came after a few weeks when we realised there was nothing but negativity and lots of news were floating around which was not very positive in nature. We said we stand for a brand which means optimism and positivity and we have gone through many crises in our 130 years of existence. So, we said that we will start inspiring people. That is the first time we communicated and talked about how the human race and humanity triumphs through positive thoughts and positive approach. These are the first two phases as we really started preparing ourselves by having the right protocols, the right way to work to ensure that we can really start working and continuing business in a proper manner.

When we translated it internally it said that the first phase was all about safety of our employees and our system employees and ensuring that we have the right protocols so that we minimise the risk for them and for our consumers. The second phase was to start the business in a systematic manner. We did this pretty much for the first two months of our operation by which time we had figured out how to start doing business safely. There was a fair amount of easing of the lockdown so we have systematically got our operations back in gear.

We now have 100% of our plants in operation. Most of our distribution channels, which include home service, ecommerce, key accounts etc. are in operation. The away from home channels at the moment are not really open. It is opening up very slowly. We are ramping up our distribution as we really go there. The good thing is we were able to shadow what is happening with the communities around us in terms of the approach taken by the various state governments and within that, we were able to start our business.

Yes there was an impact, but we have scaled up and we believe that we are in the right direction. We believe that demand is getting restored steadily, albeit it is mostly at home. Away from home is going to take a while. It has been a very humbling journey but a journey where we got supported by everybody starting with our consumers, all the governments -- state and central -- and, our own employees in a systematic manner to start building back what was a tough situation at the start of the lockdown in March.