Baghdad, Jan. 12 (Reuters): An Iraqi company which has been selling fake Pepsi cola for the past 14 years will start manufacturing the genuine article within a few months, its director said today.
Sitting in his office at the bottling factory of the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company, Hamid Jassim looked well pleased with his visit to the US headquarters of PepsiCo last week. In a deal announced last Wednesday, his company was awarded a five-year licence as the sole distributor of Pepsi soft drinks in the central region of Iraq. He refused to give financial details but said a “multi-million dollar” sum was agreed.
“Our market is very promising and it could be one of the best in the world,” Jassim said. “The weather gets very hot here, but Iraqis don’t drink juices — they prefer soft drinks.”
Baghdad Soft Drinks Co. had been bottling Pepsi for several years when the US firm pulled out of Iraq in 1990 with the Gulf War looming. Since then, the company has been bottling and distributing non-brand cola in Pepsi bottles imported from countries such as Turkey and Iran. During years when UN sanctions were in force, the company shipped in cola concentrate from Europe and distributed a bootleg version of the global brand drink.
“Of course Pepsi were angry about it but what could we do? We couldn’t kick people out of their jobs during sanctions,” Jassim said. “We kept trying to contact them but they said: ‘We can’t talk to you.’”
The factory was closed for some weeks during last year’s US invasion of Iraq but production of the bootleg cola resumed at the company’s Baghdad plant in early May. “The men from Pepsi came here later that month, but they were hesitant (to do a deal) because they’d been out of the country for 13 years,” Jassim said.
The Baghdad Soft Drinks Co. is majority owned by over 30,000 private shareholders. Thirty-five per cent is controlled by state-owned institutions and a further 10 per cent stake belonged to Saddam Hussein’s son Uday. His stake has been frozen by the finance ministry.
The money from the new deal will be used to improve facilities and expand the company’s 1,300-strong workforce in order to raise production. Jassim hopes to add 700 employees by the end of the year, and hire another 2,000 in 2005. “PepsiCo’s return is definitely a big step for Iraq,” he said. “We will upgrade and move forward — this helps the economy as a whole.”
