While this seems like bad news on the face of things it’s kind of a wash.
The carbonated soft drink market in the US has been at saturation points with less than single digit growth for decades. You see Coca Cola and the likes picking up any new beverage flavor/trend and few if any of them are carbonated. The last two products Coke introduced in the carbonated category were Coke Zero and its variants and Vanilla Coke.
Why would you invest billions more in a mature market for a category you already dominate?
Coke owns a lot more than just carbonated beverages. Minute Maid, Dasani, Powerade. It’s kind of a frightening list actually:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_brands
They also had 35 billion in revenue last year. Popping 4 billion into a market the size of China is a smart move.