Business & Finance: Italian Invasion

In Rome, the Communist-line newspaper Il Paese shrilled against a "red-uniformed army which today has an outpost . . . even in the remotest parts of our countryside." Communists launched a whispering campaign that the "army" sold a drink which could turn a child's hair white overnight. Last week, the official Communist organ L'Unita shot the works in a headline: DRINKS COCA-COLA AND DIES. (L'Unita's victim was identified by another newspaper as a heart fatality.)

All this red raging was due to what the Coca-Cola company calls "our own individual EGA." By last week its Coke selling campaign had proved so successful that five bottling plants were clanking away in Milan, Leghorn, Venice and Rome. Several hundred thousand bottles were sold daily, and the Communists rightly feared it was another victory for U.S. free enterprise. Complained one Red: "Yesterday I went into my favorite wineshop and found three people there. All were drinking Coca-Cola. The humiliation of it!"

Twin Motors. In selling its product to Italians—and thus providing a refreshing example of how to do business abroad— Coca-Cola has given U.S. methods a Mediterranean twist. Billboards plug "la sosta piacevole" (freely: The Pause That Refreshes), a fleet of 200 yellow trucks pound along ancient Roman routes from the bottling centers, and deliverymen dressed in uniforms emblazoned with Coca-Cola's red patch trundle boxes into caffe bars and wineshops. In Venice, two motor launches (see cut) chug along the Grand Canal on delivery routes.

Although the Reds yip that Coca-Cola has landed an "army of workers," shiploads of machinery and trucks, Coca-Cola has only ten Americans on its Italian staff (Italian employees run into the thousands). The company uses Italian equipment in making the drink (as in the U.S., Coca-Cola restricts itself to the sale of syrup, leaving the more profitable bottling operation to local businessmen), employs Italian printers for advertising and uses Italian trucks for distribution. Isotta Fraschini has just produced a truck which the company thinks is better-looking than the American design, and which it plans to export to company branches in other countries.

Triple Play. The Italian venture is the most spectacular example of Coca-Cola's profitable global expansion. With more than 370 bottlers operating outside the U.S. at present, the company intends to triple that number within five years.

Sometimes, when company officers think of the multitudes who still do not know the pleasures of Coca-Cola, they are awe-stricken by the prospect. It has even been known to move an executive vice president to prayer. That happened to James F. Curtis, who said, before a bottlers' convention: "May Providence give us the . . . faith ... to serve those two billion customers who are only waiting for us to bring our product to them."