Shanghai’s loss is about to be Suzhou’s gain, as the world’s number 1 soft drink maker is setting about moving its biggest eastern China production plant out of the big smoke after almost 40 years.
Live in Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou, Suzhou or just about anywhere else in the Yangtze River Delta? Then pick up your nearest can of coke and look at the back. Chances are you will see that it says; “bottled in Shanghai” [it may aalso reference Coke’s factory in Anhui, Nanjing or elsewhere, but Shanghai remains the “mother ship”].
That’s all about to change, with that which is Swire Coca Cola’s biggest investment to date in China; some ¥2 billion.
So grab a fizzy drink (of your choice) for the story…
In 1988, Shanghai Shenmei Beverage Food Co., Ltd. was founded at 251 Wenyi Lu, Minxing Development Zone as the first Coca-Cola bottle factory investment in Shanghai.
So off they now go, headed to Kunshan in Suzhou, by many accounts a kind of sleepy place. Not much happens here, except that is, for making money. Kunshan has for some time been China’s top performing county-level city in China, by GDP, with a slew of foreign companies invested therein.At one point as long as about 2 decades ago, LG were producing half of the world’s laptop computers in Kunshan.
Yet, even describing Kunshan as part of Suzhou is contentious. Despite it being directly under the administration of the Suzhou authorities, Kunshan is keen to distance itself at every available opportunity. Duke University is a case in hand, with the Uni’s website specifically listing its address as 市昆山市。。。, ie missing the prefecture-city level prefix that is standard in China, which would make the correct address in theory 苏州市昆山市。。。
It’s a bit odd, since from a foreign perspective at least, many people have at least heard of Suzhou. So why not promote it?
All that withstanding, today, the model for Kunshan has to a degree shifted, towards food. Therefore Coca Cola now joins Starbucks, which has placed their China R&D centre in Kunshan, to build that which was a tiny farming community half a century ago to, essentially, Shenzhen V2.0. On a smaller scale of course, but the economic effect is much the same.
This decision was in fact just announced in October. But now we know Coke, as we know it, will be coming to us out of Kunshan sooner than we think, to the annual tune of 1.6 million tonnes of canned beverages from sometime next year.
The American super giant’s move is significant on a number of levels, not least for it consolidating a multi-billion dollar high-end food industry cluster that is rapidly becoming the new hallmark of sleepy old Kunshan.
