With Coca-Cola’s stock (KO) recently getting a favorable mention among meme stock traders on Reddit, it shouldn’t come as a shock shares of the beverage maker are seeing significant interest after a high-profile athlete snub.
Soccer great and well-known health fan Cristiano Ronaldo sat down at a press conference Tuesday at the Euro 2020 and angrily moved two bottles of Coca-Cola to the side (see video below). Coke is a sponsor of Euro 2020. Ronaldo — who has roughly 392 million followers on Twitter and Instagram — then picked up a bottle of water and encouraged people to drink it by saying “Agua!”
Coke responded by saying Ronaldo is entitled to his drink of choice, The Guardian reported.
Coke’s stock finished Tuesday’s session down about 0.3% as the incident blew up on Twitter. As of Wednesday morning, Coke’s ticker page was the number one most trafficked on the Yahoo Finance website (beating out hot meme stocks such as AMC and GameStop).
But it’s unlikely Coke’s stock will stay in the penalty box for too long as the business begins to partake in the global economic recovery.
The beverage giant told investors in April that global unit case volume in March was back to 2019 levels, paced by people continuing to consume more food at home during the pandemic. Coke highlighted strength in its trademark Coke brand, sparkling beverages and juice and nutrition products.
“I think it’s a great rebuilding of the momentum, getting back to pre-pandemic levels of volume in March. It’s a testament to the work on the marketing, the innovation, working with our bottlers to execute. So it is really good momentum,” Coca-Cola Chairman and CEO James Quincey told Yahoo Finance Live.
Coke reiterated its full-year sales outlook for a high-single digit percentage year-over-year gain. Earnings growth continues to be pegged at high-single digits to low-double digits.
Shares of the beverage giant have gained nearly 9% in the last three months per Yahoo Finance Plus data, outperforming the S&P 500’s 4% gain.
Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.
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