How Pepsi trounced Coca-Cola in the Middle East

ORDER A FIZZY drink in Baghdad or Beirut and chances are you’ll be served a Pepsi. Unlike anywhere else in the world, in the Middle East Pepsi has managed to trounce Coca-Cola. Its success is part random chance, part clever navigation of political fault lines that have not spared America’s big soft-drinks companies.

在巴格达或贝鲁特叫一杯碳酸饮料，你很可能会得到一瓶百事可乐。与世界其他地方不同，百事可乐在中东成功击败了可口可乐。它的成功部分源于运气，部分源于巧妙地避开了政治断层线，而这些断层线并未放过美国的软饮料巨头们。

Pepsi’s dominance has a long history. Back in the 1960s Arab governments imposed a boycott on Coca-Cola after the firm said it would open a bottling factory in Israel. Though the boycott lost steam towards the end of the 1980s, when Coca-Cola sponsored the youth football world cup in Saudi Arabia, the intervening years gave Pepsi plenty of room to cement its dominance.

百事可乐的主导地位由来已久。早在20世纪60年代，因可口可乐公司宣称将在以色列开设瓶装厂，阿拉伯各国政府对其实施了抵制。虽然抵制在80年代末可口可乐赞助沙特阿拉伯举办的世青赛时逐渐平息，但中间这些年给了百事可乐充足的空间来巩固其霸主地位。

In doing so it shrewdly played local politics, says Kamel Abdallah, a Lebanese soft-drinks tycoon. In Iraq it fostered good relations with the Arab parts of the country (Coca-Cola trumps it in Iraqi Kurdistan, where Turkey’s influence is stronger). The Baghdad Soft Drink Company hosts the largest Pepsi factory in the world, according to Haider al-Bassam, its boss. In Lebanon, the family behind the country’s Pepsi production has close ties to influential Druze factions. In Saudi Arabia, which led the original boycott against Coca-Cola, Pepsi’s market share is 70%.

黎巴嫩软饮料大亨卡迈勒·阿卜杜拉表示，在此过程中，百事可乐精明地玩转了当地政治。在伊拉克，它与该国阿拉伯地区建立了良好关系（在土耳其影响力更强的伊拉克库尔德斯坦地区，可口可乐更胜一筹）。据巴格达软饮料公司老板海德尔·巴萨姆称，该公司拥有世界上最大的百事可乐工厂。在黎巴嫩，负责该国百事可乐生产的家族与有影响力的德鲁兹派系关系密切。在最初带头抵制可口可乐的沙特阿拉伯，百事可乐的市场份额高达70%。

But there is a striking island of Coca-Cola red in a sea of Pepsi blue: the Palestinian territories that prompted the boycott back in the 1960s. Coca-Cola’s market share in the West Bank is some 90%, says Zahi Khouri, the firm’s licensee there. In 2022 he opened a Coca-Cola factory in Gaza.

但在百事可乐的蓝色海洋中，有一座引人注目的可口可乐红色孤岛：那便是曾在60年代引发抵制的巴勒斯坦领土。该公司在当地的特许经营商扎希·库里表示，可口可乐在约旦河西岸的市场份额约为90%。2022年，他在加沙开设了一家可口可乐工厂。

The factory was flattened in the Gaza war. That war also put fresh pressure on both companies, as people in the region resumed boycotting American brands in protest at America’s support for Israel. Local soft-drink brands, such as Jordan’s Matrix or Lebanon’s Zee Cola, started to eat into the American firms’ dominance.

那家工厂在加沙战争中被夷为平地。这场战争也给两家公司带来了新的压力，因为该地区民众为了抗议美国支持以色列，重新开始抵制美国品牌。约旦的Matrix或黎巴嫩的Zee Cola等当地软饮料品牌开始蚕食美国公司的主导地位。

However, by most accounts they don’t taste nearly as good. The industry’s big hitters are already clawing back whatever market share they briefly lost. For the time being, the Middle East’s soft-drinks landscape looks set to remain blue with a splodge of red.

然而，普遍认为它们的口感差得远。行业巨头们正逐步收复它们短暂失去的市场份额。眼下，中东的软饮料版图看来仍将是一片蓝海中点缀着一抹红。