Pepsi lost a key battle in the international cola wars when Venezuela's main bottler suddenly defected to Coca-Cola, ending Pepsi's decades-old dominance of the local soft-drink market.
"Treason," Pepsi spokesman Keith Hughes in Miami said.Hughes said his company would go to court to enforce a contract it thinks was violated by the deal announced Friday between the Coca-Cola Co. and Venezuela's Cisneros Bottling Co.
Coca-Cola officials were effervescent. Until now, Venezuela was one of a handful of countries where Pepsi, not Coca-Cola, ruled the market.
"For decades, the Venezuela market has been the only dark spot on the global Coca-Cola map," Coca-Cola president M. Douglas Ivestor said in a statement. "Today, it becomes one of the brightest."
Under the deal's terms, Coca-Cola and Cisneros each will own half of the new company, Embotelladoros Coca-Cola y Hit de Venezuela. Transition to production of Coca-Cola products began at Cisneros' 18 Venezuelan plants Friday.
Oswaldo Cisneros, president of the Cisneros Group, told employees Friday to take the Pepsi logo off their uniforms and replace it with Coca-Cola's, Caracas newspapers reported Saturday.
The Pepsi logo was gone from trucks seen making deliveries Saturday, and from the Caracas plant that has been bottling Pepsi for decades.
Alberto Uribe, president of Pepsi operations in Venezuela, did not respond to questions sent Saturday to his office by fax. Coca-Cola officials were away for the weekend, a switchboard operator said. Phone calls to the Cisneros' offices weren't returned.
The new joint company will take advantage of Cisneros' bottling plants and its fleet of several thousand delivery trucks, as well as Coke's cash and six bottling plants in Venezuela.
Coca-Cola, a recent arrival in Venezuela, claims about 10 percent of the beverage market here, compared to its 62 percent in Argentina, 51 percent in Brazil, 68 percent in Chile, and 61 percent in Mexico.
The new joint venture reportedly will invest $500 million in Venezuela during the next five years.
If the deal is upheld, that "would destroy our business" in Venezuela, Pepsi spokesman Hughes acknowledged.
The Cisneros family runs a multinational communications and consumer products conglomerate that includes Venezuela's biggest TV station, Venevision.