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# The company bottling Coca-Cola across Africa is set to leave Joburg after a $2.6 billion deal
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/competition-tribunal-approves-coca-cola-hbc-ccba/
- Published: 2026-09-14T03:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T03:29:59.000Z
- Description: The Competition Tribunal has cleared Coca-Cola HBC's $2.6 billion purchase of Africa's biggest bottler, with public-interest conditions it has not published.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News

Among the parties who made oral submissions at the Competition Tribunal last week were people who used to drive Coca-Cola trucks. They were employees of Amalgamated Beverage Industries first, then owner-drivers under ABI's scheme, running their own vehicles on Coke's routes. They came to argue the public-interest side of a transaction worth $2.6 billion, alongside the union that represents the bottler's current staff.

The Tribunal approved it on Friday, with conditions. Coca-Cola HBC, incorporated in Switzerland and listed in London and Athens, takes sole control of Coca-Cola Beverages Africa, which has been run out of Johannesburg since the group was assembled in July 2016 from the bottling operations of the Coca-Cola Company, SABMiller and the Gutsche family. The conditions are meant to address public-interest concerns. The Tribunal did not publish them.

## What is being bought

A bottler is the business between the brand and the shelf: it mixes, packs, distributes and sells. CCBA is the biggest one in Africa and the eighth largest in the world by revenue, delivering to more than 800,000 shops and stalls across fourteen countries. HBC is paying $2.6 billion for three quarters of it and holds an option over the rest. Once the deal closes, one company will bottle two thirds of all the Coca-Cola sold on the continent, up from the 40% CCBA carries on its own today.

HBC is not a stranger to the continent. It has bottled in Nigeria since 1951 and took on the Egyptian business in 2022, and as part of this deal it has committed to a secondary listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. S&P expects South Africa to overtake Russia as HBC's largest market once the deal is done, which matters to a company that has spent three years reducing what it earns in a sanctioned economy.

## The conditions nobody has read

What those conditions contain is known only second-hand. When the Competition Commission recommended approval in July, it said the parties had agreed not to make anyone in South Africa redundant for a moratorium period, to invest in the downstream distribution and retail side of the local business, and to pursue that Johannesburg listing inside a set time. The length of the moratorium is confidential. So is the listing deadline.

There is a reason the job question got there first. In September 2025 Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa issued a Section 189 notice covering up to 680 posts, close to a tenth of its local workforce, citing financial constraints, and weighed closing its plants in Bloemfontein and East London. Six months after that, the Coca-Cola system in South Africa stood up at an investment conference in Johannesburg and announced R17.6 billion of spending here through 2030.

Those two facts have never been reconciled in public, and the document that would reconcile them is the one the Tribunal has kept back. Completion is targeted for the end of this year.