date:Aug 18, 2014
One advantage for Coke is that deal involves less cash upfront than a full-on acquisition, which would have been at least $12 billion at Thursday's closing stock price. That is roughly equivalent to the amount of cash Coke had in hand at the end of July. A couple of billion is something that Coke could handle without much difficulty, said Linda Montag, senior vice president at Moody's Investors Service.
Also, the gradualist approach allows Coke to sample at a distance a market in which it has a