C O C A - C O L A , H U I Y UA N J U I C E , A N D C N O O C 33 As soon as Deng Xiaoping opened the door to foreign invest- ment again in 1979, Coke was back, opening a bottling plant in Beijing in 1981. It now has 35 joint venture bottling plants across the country and controls slightly more than half of China's mar- ket for carbonated drinks. China is currently Coke's third most important market after the United States and Mexico, and it is very likely to become the company's leading market in the future. According to Coca-Cola's figures, consumption of Coca-Cola's many offerings in China soared from three 8-ounce cans or bot- tles per capita in 1998 to 28 in 2008. When you talk about a pop- ulation of 1.3 billion people, that kind of growth in per capita sales attracts attention. THE CHINESE JUICE MARKET Impressive as Coca-Cola's results sounded, it wanted more. While overall soft drink sales in China have grown by 42 percent since 2004, the increase in sales of fruit juices have increased by 89 per- cent. It didn't take much to convince Coca-Cola that the juice busi- ness was the way to go. The dominant player in China's juice market is the Huiyuan Juice Group, and in September 2008, Coca-Cola offered $2.4 billion for the company. It promised to be the most expensive acquisition that Coca-Cola had ever made. At the time that Coca-Cola made its offer, Huiyuan controlled around 40 per- cent of China's market for non-concentrated juices. The company was launched in 1992 by Zhu Xinli, and its history is remarkable. Zhu was the second son in a large farming family in a small vil- lage in Huiyuan county, in the northeastern coastal province of Shandong. His father was a follower of Confucius and named each of his sons after a Confucian ideal. Zhu's given names signify "new" and "appropriateness." At the age of 36, Zhu studied economics at a local college and soon was put in charge of economic development for Huiyuan American Management Association / www.amanet.org