DUSHANBE, June 7, 2013, Asia-Plus — A Coca-Cola bottling company is going to construct its plant with annual production capacity of 100 million liters in Tajikistan and it intends to ask the Tajik Government to support this project.
“The company needs tax and customs remissions in order to start work in Tajikistan,” Mustafa Meten, the director general of the Coca-Cola Nushikihoi Tajikiston Company, told Asia-Plus in an interview.
“The factor of recoupment is very important for us, while the risk of doing business in Tajikistan is still high,” said Meten. “We are ready to work in Tajikistan because we consider this market promising. Besides, we will create 150 direct and more than 1,500 indirect jobs”
Indirect employment is employment throughout the chain of production and it refers to people that will be contracted by the company to provide intermediate components or products or services to the company – distributors, suppliers, service centers, small enterprises, companies supplying cardboard and plastic, bottle cap suppliers, repair centers. “All of them will be established around the Coca-Cola production plant,” the director general said.
According to him, initially, they plan to invest 30 million USD. “If negotiations with the government are successful, the plant will be built in a year,” Meten added.
We will recall that a delegation of Coca-Cola Icecek consisting of Hussein M. Akin, the company president for international cooperation, Metem Matin, the company director for strategy and commercial development, and Mustafa Meten, director of Coca-Cola Icecek’s office in Tajikistan met with Davaltali Saidov Chairman of the State Committee on Investments and State-owned Property Management (GosKomInvest) in Dushanbe last November.
Coca-Cola Icecek A.S. is an anchor bottler and a part of the Coca-Cola System. It is 20% owned by the Coca-Cola Company and the remainder trades on the Turkish stock exchanges. It is the 6th largest bottler in the Coca-Cola System in terms of sales volume. The company is headquartered in Istanbul.
The company, with its headquarters in Istanbul, is the bottler of Coca-Cola products in Azerbaijan, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Jordan, as well as its home country of Turkey.
Coca Cola Icecek already operates in several other Central Asian countries, but currently exports its products to Tajikistan.
