PepsiCo will continue its commitment in China: President & CEO @ Davos forum
PepsiCo will continue to expand its presence in China, since it is “betting on a sustained and long-term relationship with this critical market,” an executive of the US-based beverage and food giant told the Global Times in an exclusive interview at the 2018 Summer Davos Forum on Tuesday in North China’s Tianjin Municipality.
“The size of the Chinese market, the rising Chinese urbanites, the everaffluent Chinese middle class, the dynamic e-commerce eco-system, China’s consumption upgrading, the new retail economy and the many untapped inland cities – all of these present great opportunities for companies in China,” Ram Krishnan, president & CEO of PepsiCo Greater China Region, told the Global Times.
“China is upgrading its economy into an innovationandefficiencydriven one,” Krishnan said, noting that “I am deeply impressed by what China has been achieving and doing all these years and I feel excited that PepsiCo is a part of that endeavor.”
Last month, PepsiCo announced plans to invest an additional $100 million to expand and transform its Shanghai Songjiang Foods plant, indicating a broader ambition in China, despite the current unstable bilateral trade relationship between the US and China.
Krishnan said that the other reason for PepsiCo’s expansion plan in Shanghai is that it “believes that in some technologies such as automation, China is now leading in the world. So there’s no point building factories elsewhere when we have the best of the technologies available here.”
Decades after establishing its first bottling plant in Shenzhen, South China’s Guangdong Province in 1981, which followed the start of China’s reform and opening-up policy, the company is now directly operating seven food plants, six large-scale potato farms, 10 co-farms and a state-of-the-art R&D center in Shanghai.
Plus, it has a strategic alliance with beverage company Master Kong, which has created over 100 beverage plant systems across China so far.
Krishnan said that over the past years of development, he hasn’t seen any major barriers for foreign food and beverage enterprises to operate in China, and feels that the market has good access and a fair competitive environment for FMCG companies like PepsiCo.
“PepsiCo is committed to being truly ‘In China, For China and With China.’ Everything we do is aligned with our ‘Global Performance with Purpose’ mission, and is aimed at ensuring that PepsiCo is not just a foreign company operating in China, but rather a global citizen fully embedded in the fabric of Chinese society,” Krishnan reiterated in the interview.