Nearly four decades ago, War­ren Buf­fett made a move that shocked Wall Street. In 1988, he didn’t just buy a stock; he made a life­time com­mit­ment. And bet HIS com­pany on it. Berkshire Hath­away went ag­gres­sively all-in on The Coca-Cola Com­pany ($KO), sink­ing an as­ton­ish­ing 35% of Berk­shire's eq­uity port­fo­lio and roughly 20% to 25% of the en­tire com­pa­ny's book value into a sin­gle bev­er­age busi­ness. Buf­fett——through the strong in­flu­ence of Char­lie Munger——saw the mas­sive, hid­den, off-balance-sheet power of an un­ri­valed global fran­chise. Long be­fore glob­al­iza­tion be­came a 1990s buzz­word, Coke was al­ready miles ahead of the curve. They had built an un­matched dis­tri­bu­tion moat ca­pa­ble of putting a bot­tle into the most re­mote areas of the world, in­clud­ing even deep into de­vel­op­ing economies and poor African vil­lages. In fact, the word "Coke" was one of the most rec­og­nized words glob­ally across mul­ti­ple lan­guages, hard­wired into a sim­ple human emo­tion: hap­pi­ness ("Coke and a smile"). What's that worth? On a bal­ance sheet-nothing. In reality--everything.
  While stan­dard ac­count­ing strug­gles to price that kind of in­tan­gi­ble brand eq­uity on a bal­ance sheet, Buf­fett and Munger knew that no other fran­chise on earth com­pared .Fast for­ward 38 years to today. Many in­vestors dis­miss Coke as a "boring, slow-growth ma­ture stock." But if you look closely at the num­bers——specif­i­cally unit case vol­ume, which is Buffett’s ab­so­lute fa­vorite met­ric for track­ing Coke’s core health——the growth ma­chine is run­ning at full throt­tle.
  Look at how 1988 num­bers com­pare di­rectly to today : 1988 Unit Case Vol­ume Growth: Global: +7%....Domestic (U.S.): +6% To­day's Unit Case Vol­ume Growth: Global: +5% over­all (dou­ble Wall Street ex­pec­ta­tions and com­pletely out­class­ing peers like PepsiCo, which re­ported vol­ume de­clines) Asia Pa­cific Re­gion: +8% ex­plo­sive vol­ume growth (su­per­charged by im­mense de­mand in emerg­ing eco­nomic en­gines like India and China) Domestic(U.S.): Hold­ing in­cred­i­bly steady and ma­ture 3%+, cap­tur­ing struc­tural mar­ket share from clearly fad­ing com­peti­tors. Think about the sheer scale of that achieve­ment. Here's a con­sumer goods giant that was al­ready dom­i­nant 38 years ago and its still print­ing near-double-digit vol­ume ex­pan­sion across major global re­gions today. Once in a gen­er­a­tion, an op­por­tu­nity like Apple or Amer­i­can Ex­press pops up. But once in a LIFETIME, there is a Coca-Cola. It takes im­mense con­vic­tion and iron-clad guts to back the truck up and risk an en­tire em­pire on a sin­gu­lar the­sis. Char­lie and War­ren have a per­fect bat­ting av­er­age of 1,000 when it comes to rec­og­niz­ing those ex­traor­di­nar­ily rare, struc­tural life­time op­por­tu­ni­ties. That's what's moved the nee­dle for Berkshire the past 60 years. It re­quires unique pa­tience
  Decades later, KO con­tin­ues to prove them right.