Coca Cola India, determined to put the pesticides controversy behind it, is paving the way for future growth.

Along with its bottlers, the company is making a fresh investment of about Rs 70 crore, this fiscal. This is further to its investment of Rs 100 crore last year. The company''s plans involve focusing on topline growth and on aggressive cost cutting to improve bottomline figures.

According to Sanjiv Gupta, president and chief executive officer, Coca-Cola India, topline growth would be driven by continuing with its affordability strategy and driving home consumption. The bottomline focus will be through aggressive cost reduction. The company proposes to follow a high-volume, high-growth, low-cost model for sustained long-term growth, he said.

To achieve topline growth, the company intends to continue with its strategy of aggressively slashing prices of all its products and also introducing more packs at different price points. The focus is to increase consumption of colas at home.

The company recently slashed prices of the 1.5 litre and 2 litre pet packs to Rs 30 and Rs 35 respectively and will now launch new 600 ml packs priced at Rs 15 and 2.25-litre packs priced at Rs 40 each. The 600-ml pack is positioned at the entry level while the 1.5-litre and 2.25 litre packs will be promoted as being ideal for special occasions and value-for-money packs.

Other plans include relaunching Sunfill, Coca-Cola''s powder concentrate soft drink and variants of Fanta.

The company is hoping the initiatives will help it to get over the pesticides controversy which negatively impacted its volumes last year.

Coca Cola has identified states like Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu as having high potential to increase sales and realize full market potential in 2004-2005.

In the current fiscal, the company plans to enhance its distribution by expanding the number of its outlets by over 23 per cent and distributor network by over 40 per cent. It will also invest in low-cost automation to increase service frequency and increase chilled availability.

Last year Coca Cola put in $100 million in improving distribution lines and operations.

According to the company, introducing the Rs 5, 200 ml pack was a very successful initiative and even though it was a lower-margin-per-case model, the strategy proved so profitable that it will continue to be employed as a long term strategy for out-of-home consumption.