(Bloomberg) -- Sol Daurella is famously media shy.
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Over the 33 years that she’s watched her Spanish family-founded business grow into the world’s biggest bottler for The Coca-Cola Co. — making her a billionaire — she’s avoided the limelight. But behind the scenes, the 58-year-old, now the company’s chairwoman, has aggressively cobbled together one of largest networks of beverage bottlers across Europe and Asia, boosting sales, profits, shares and her family’s fortune.
With the FTSE 100 index’s compiler deciding on Wednesday to add her company Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Plc to the UK benchmark, Daurella has been thrust into the spotlight she shuns. The higher profile comes with pressure to up the company’s game by getting more people to drink more of the beverages CCEP bottles and through acquisitions in markets with growth potential, something Daurella has thrived on with two large purchases just in the last few years.
“She has negotiating power... the ability to make people want to be part of her team,” said Miquel Lladó, a former PepsiCo executive who dealt with his rival’s crew in the Spanish beverage market and now teaches at IESE Business School’s campus in Barcelona.
While Daurella declined requests for an interview, she said in a statement that the company’s admission to the UK’s blue chip index represents a “significant milestone.” Chief Executive Officer Damian Gammell said it would “make CCEP accessible to more investors.” The company’s shares have jumped more than 67% since its London Stock Exchange listing six years ago, giving it a market value of £30.1 billion ($38.8 billion). Coca-Cola owns 19% of the company.
CCEP bottles one of the world’s most recognizable consumer products — Coke — as well as Sprite, Monster, Fanta and Powerade, which it distributes across 31 countries.
Coca-Cola’s strategy over the years has hinged on outsourcing the capital and labor-intensive parts of the business to third parties — like CCEP. Under license from Coca-Cola, which supplies the concentrate and shapes the strategy, its independent partners make the drinks, package them, hire trucks, distribute the products and market them in ways that appeal to local cultures.
In Spain, Santiago Daurella, Sol’s grandfather, acquired one such license in the 1950s — a dark period in the Iberian nation. Santiago Daurella was among a small, select coterie of entrepreneurs to win approval from Spanish dictator Franco to establish a business — a photograph from 1968 shows the two men seated across a desk strewn with books in Franco’s office at the El Pardo Palace. Some years earlier, Franco’s regime had approved Daurella’s license as a Coca-Cola bottler, putting his family on a path to untold riches. The clan’s net worth is now estimated to be at least $8 billion, with Sol’s own fortune making up about half that total, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Santiago Daurella and his two sons expanded their company Cobega’s reach beyond Catalonia, buying other Coca-Cola franchises in Spain, a move that accelerated after his granddaughter Sol emerged on the scene in 1992. By the early 1990s, Coca-Cola was weeding out weaker companies to rely only on a handful of “anchor” bottlers.
Sol, who had joined the family business after an MBA in Barcelona and a stint at a consulting firm, was at the forefront of the intense battle among Spanish bottlers. Marcos de Quinto, the president of Coca-Cola in Iberia at the time recalls in his memoir, “Notas desde la trinchera” that a “young and aggressive” Sol was able to forge an accord in 2013 to create Coca-Cola Iberian Partners, giving the Daurella family the biggest share of the country’s bottling business.
Three years later, she helped orchestrate a deal that created the largest independent bottler of Coca-Cola products in the world, which she now heads, folding in bottling operations in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. In 2021, the firm acquired Australia’s Coca-Cola Amatil — which controls bottling in the large Indonesian market — extending operations into the Asia-Pacific region and prompting the name change from “European” to “Europacific.” Then in 2024, CCEP and a local holding company completed the purchase of the Coca-Cola bottler in the Philippines for €1.8 billion.
“A larger Coca-Cola Europacific Partners now has 700 million consumers to please, and must get its offerings right through every channel to succeed,” says Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Duncan Fox. “The biggest potential lies with boosting carbonated volume in countries such as Indonesia and expand the Coca-Cola Co.'s market share and profitability. This requires confident consumers.”
The acquisition-driven expansion has helped fuel growth. Last year, the company reported a 3.5% increase in revenue to €20.7 billion ($21.8 billion) and an 8% jump in operating profit to €2.7 billion. CCEP is seeking to boost revenue by 4% annually and outperform the non-alcoholic ready-to-drink beverage market with the addition of Indonesia, Fox said.
“There are still a number of markets in Asia which CCEP could potentially acquire,” says ING analyst Reg Watson.
In emerging markets, there will be opportunities to grow sales volumes as people become more affluent, said Deutsche Bank analyst Mitch Collett. In developed markets, it’ll be about drawing customers to more “premium,” higher-margin packs, he said.
“Within those markets you also have the opportunity to grow from adjacents like energy drinks, sports drinks,” he said. A partnership with the owner of Jack Daniels on “pre-mixed” alcoholic drinks, currently a niche business, could give CCEP exposure to a new segment, he said.
Fifteen out of the 22 analysts following the company’s stock rate it a “buy;” two give it a “sell,” according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Some analysts worry that health-conscious consumers or regulators could eventually turn against the company. Morningstar analyst Verushka Shetty, with one of the two sell ratings, notes that the company has few paths to grow organically outside of the Philippines.
“The way they will grow is going to come from expanding geographically,” she said, adding that assets are few and far between. In fact, FEMSA, which runs a Latin American bottling business, used to own the Philippines bottler before it sold it back to Coke because the margins weren’t high enough and a sugar tax was introduced in the country, she said. Looking 10 to 15 years into the future, Shetty sees a challenge from changing habits in western Europe.
“Coca-Cola is still very much coming off the shelves, there is no question about that,” she said. “There is an aging population, and countries are becoming more health conscious. It’s a gradual drop.”
For now, however, the outlook remains strong, giving Sol Daurella the opportunity to continue to expand the business and her family’s wealth.
Sol is the most visible figure in the Daurella clan, which includes her nine cousins, their children and other relatives. The family owns more than 15% of CCEP through holding company Cobega, according to Bloomberg calculations. CCEP declined to confirm the shareholding. Cobega, which the Daurella family controls, has also invested in businesses like the Spanish franchise of Domino’s restaurants and Nespresso capsules.
Only two other members of the family — Sol’s cousin Alfonso Libano Daurella and her cousin’s ex-husband Mario Rotllant Sola — sit on CCEP’s board of directors. Also on the board is Daurella’s friend, Ana Botin, chairwoman of Banco Santander SA. Daurella sits on the bank’s board.
Although Daurella scrupulously avoids the media, she made headlines after her husband Carles Vilarrubi, a former vice-president of the soccer club FC Barcelona and the ex-vice chairman of Rothschild Spain, supported the Catalan independence movement in 2017. She also finds herself in the news as an avid golfer and horse-rider — she won the country’s show-jumping competition in November.
--With assistance from Benjamin Stupples.
(Updates with comments from Daurella and CEO Gammell in fifth paragraph, shares.)
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