According to the Competition Tribunal, the merger of Coca-Cola HBC and Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) has been approved, putting an end to a decade of separate operations in South Africa. The decision gives HBC control of roughly two-thirds of Coca-Cola system volumes across the continent, a shift that could reshape supply chains, pricing and employment for local bottlers and retailers.
The transaction, first announced in 2025, involves HBC buying a 75% stake in CCBA with an option to acquire the remaining 25% within six years. A “stake” here means the percentage of ownership in the company, which translates into voting power and profit entitlement.
Coca-Cola HBC is one of the world’s largest bottlers, headquartered in Switzerland but originally founded in Nigeria. CCBA was created in 2015 after a merger that brought together the Coca-Cola Company, SABMiller and Gutsche Family Investments. Since July 2016 it has operated as a separate legal entity, currently owned 66.5% by the Coca-Cola Company and the balance by Gutsche Family Investments.
The tribunal said the approval was subject to conditions aimed at addressing public-interest concerns, although the specific conditions were not disclosed. Such conditions typically focus on competition, consumer protection and labour impacts.
Labour concerns have already surfaced. In September 2025, Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa, the South African arm of CCBA, warned that up to 680 jobs could be lost as it faced “financial constraints” and considered restructuring. The merger could either accelerate those cuts or, conversely, create new roles as the combined entity expands.
Speaking of expansion, the merged group announced a R17.6 bn bottling investment in South Africa, the largest fixed-asset project recorded in the country in the first half of 2026. The spend will fund new plants, upgraded lines and increased capacity, which may open contracts for local equipment suppliers, logistics firms and packaging producers.
Alongside the investment, HBC plans a secondary listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. A secondary listing means the company will issue additional shares on the local exchange while retaining its primary listing elsewhere, giving South African investors a direct stake in the bottling business.
For small-to-medium enterprises that supply ingredients, packaging, transport or retail outlets, the merger presents both risk and opportunity. Greater market concentration could tighten negotiating power, but the scale of the planned expansion may generate new business for local partners willing to meet the bottler’s standards.
Why a merger like this needs a regulator’s approval at all
Competition law exists on the premise that a market with fewer, larger competitors tends to produce worse outcomes for the customers and suppliers who deal with it, higher prices, weaker bargaining power for smaller counterparties, and less pressure to innovate. A competition authority reviewing a merger is testing that premise against the specific facts of the deal in front of it: does combining these two businesses concentrate enough market power to make those worse outcomes likely, and if so, can conditions attached to the approval prevent it.
South Africa’s competition framework is unusual by international standards in explicitly weighing public interest factors, effects on employment, on small business, on historically disadvantaged participants in the market, alongside the traditional competition test of whether prices are likely to rise. That is why a merger approval here often comes bundled with conditions addressing jobs or supplier commitments even when the underlying competition concerns are limited, and it is also why the specific conditions attached to an approval, once published, tend to matter more to smaller market participants than the headline approval decision itself.
What a merger of this scale generally means for smaller suppliers in the same value chain
When two large customers or two large suppliers combine into one, everyone else in that value chain deals with a single, larger counterparty afterward instead of two smaller ones, and that shift in relative size changes negotiating leverage regardless of what the regulator’s conditions say about pricing. A smaller packaging supplier or logistics provider that previously served both merging entities separately may find itself negotiating a single, larger contract with more combined volume but also more combined pressure on price and terms.
The same scale that creates that pressure, however, is often what funds an expansion large enough to need new suppliers the combined entity did not previously require, which is the standard argument for why a merger of this kind is described as both a risk and an opportunity for the smaller businesses around it rather than straightforwardly one or the other.
