[greatwave1]

> CocaCola net profit margin as of March 31, 2023 is 22.69%.

Which means that it costs them $1 to produce every $1.23 of soda that you purchase. This is a long-shot from being "nearly free" as you claimed earlier, and materially different from "asking for money in exchange for nothing".

[amatecha]

It doesn't actually though. Like someone else mentioned, they spend an untold amount of money on advertising. Like $4 billion in 2022, aka 10% of their revenue. https://www.statista.com/statistics/286526/coca-cola-adverti...

That's not a cost to produce their product, or even ship it, or store it. That's strictly just "buying more customers", which has no bearing on my initial claim - that soda is extremely cheap to produce.

[greatwave1]

Well if you want to ignore things like advertising and other administrative expenses (which are necessary when running a global beverage company), you will still find that their Costs of Goods Sold is 40% of their revenue: https://investors.coca-colacompany.com/filings-reports/all-s...

Again, materially different from asking for money in exchange for nothing.

[giantrobot]

> Which means that it costs them $1 to produce every $1.23 of soda that you purchase.

That's not correct. The $1.23 you pay at the store includes wholeseller/distributor and retailer margins. The wholesale price of that soda is maybe a quarter of the retail price. So for Coca Cola the bottle the production cost and shipment to a distributor was less than 20% of the retail price.

[lostlogin]

I’d like to know what it costs if you remove advertising and any other cost that doesn’t directly contribute to getting sugar water into the bottle.