You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: I'm here with James Quincey, our chairman and chief executive officer; and John Murphy, our chief financial officer.
Before we begin, please note that we've posted schedules under the Financial Information tab in the Investors section of our company website at www.
You can also find schedules in the same section of our website that provide an analysis of gross and operating margins.
Please limit yourself to one question.
If you have more than one, please ask your most pressing question first and then reenter the queue.
In what remains a highly dynamic environment, our first-quarter results show promising signs that a broader recovery is on the horizon.
We're encouraged by early results in markets where mobility is on the rise.
Then I'll hand over the call to John to discuss the financial details of the quarter and how we'll continue to deliver on our objectives over the course of the year.
In the first quarter, we positioned our business for recovery while executing against our emerging stronger agenda, equipping our system to win.
At the start of the year, pandemic-related lockdowns were still impacting many markets.
We moved quickly as conditions changed, improving along the way, and getting better at managing each wave and its resulting lockdowns.
During the quarter, we saw mobility increase in some parts of the world where lockdowns eased and vaccinations accelerated.
Leveraging our learnings, we drove sequential improvement in our business throughout the quarter.
And while we saw mid-single-digit volume declines through mid-February, trends have improved since then.
We're pleased to say that March marked a return to volume levels seen in March of 2019 prior to the pandemic.
We continue to see ongoing strength in at-home channels, offset by away-from-home trends which have improved sequentially but remain pressured relative to pre-pandemic levels.
We're working with our customers and bottling partners to sustain at-home momentum and capture improving away-from-home demand.
For example, in Latin America, our Prospera program with our bottlers helps the traditional trade thrive through assistance with their marketing efforts, resulting in outperformance in this critical channel.
In Great Britain, we launched Open, a business accelerator program to support pubs, bars, and cafes.
In North America, our use of mail bundles is driving incidents in pickup and delivery transactions with food service customers.
In 2020, we gained underlying share in both at-home and away-from-home channels, offset by negative channel mix.
This continues to be the dynamic affecting our share year to date.
Through our ongoing initiatives and as away-from-home demand improves over the course of the year, we'll seek to build on these wins in 2021.
There are clear opportunities to reaccelerate share positions as the recovery plays out and we'll invest to drive momentum with focus and flexibility.
In market at the forefront of the recovery, we've seen early signs that our actions taken during the pandemic are helping us outpace recovery.
It's important to note that the path to a full recovery remains asynchronous around the world.
Many markets haven't yet turned a corner and are still managing through the restrictions.
Looking around the world, in Asia Pacific, China continues to lead the recovery with volume in the first quarter ahead of 2019 results and foot traffic almost back to pre-pandemic levels.
Strong performance in India and Southwest Asia was driven by effective marketing across brands, affordable solutions, and distribution expansion with 250,000 new outlets and 45% more new coolers.
Despite the unexpected state of emergency earlier in the year, Japan expands its successful RGM initiatives geographically and across brands to help drive improvements later in the quarter.
In EMEA, vaccine rollout in Europe has been slower than anticipated and many countries have been impacted by ongoing lockdowns.
In Eurasia and the Middle East, brand Coke recruited 4.4 million consumers through affordability packages and a focus on at-home occasions.
New marketing campaigns drove improvement in flavored Sparkling soft drinks, and Fuze Tea reached an all-time-high value share in Turkey.
In Africa, mass vaccination is expected to take longer than the developed markets.
And despite ongoing volatility, Africa worked closely with our bottlers to deliver volume growth that by stepped-up execution through cooler placement and affordability packs like returnable glass bottles.
In North America, the year is off to a good start.
Ongoing strength in at-home channels was driven by core brands in our Sparkling portfolio, as well as Simply, fairlife, and Gold Peak all with encouraging results.
Away-from-home began to approve in March as vaccinations and mobility picked up.
In Latin America, we leveraged our core brands, digital initiatives, and refill packages to recover ahead of the economy and our industry despite ongoing restrictions.
While from away-from-home continues to be impacted by lockdowns, we are expanding the at-home consumption opportunity, leveraging consumer dynamics like indulgence of single-serve multi-packs.
Global Ventures continue to be impacted by lockdowns in the U.K.
But as restrictions loosen, we're focusing on driving digital engagement and traffic back to the cost of the stores.
Cost of express machines continue to deliver strong performance.
Turning our transformation, our operating units are up and running and also a very good start in the rollout of our new model.
Across markets, our newly networked organization has us working more collaboratively with the overall enterprise in mind.
Our operating unit and category leadership teams are working together to identify the most promising combinations across the industry based on economic outlook, consumer trends, channel dynamics, and execution imperatives.
We're using more disciplined resource allocation to capture the biggest opportunities, while making ongoing portfolio decisions faster and at scale.
We're focused on our streamlined growth portfolio, actively and thoughtfully transitioning brands to more powerful trademarks using a phased approach to bring the consumer with us on the journey.
And we're maximizing shelf space with new product launches and higher-velocity products to drive higher-quality growth.
As we discussed at CAGNY, we're focusing on what we do best: marketing our loved brands in more efficient and effective ways.
campaign kicked off in markets from Asia to Africa to Latin America, the message is resonating with consumers with impressions, views, and engagement levels above last year, and intent-to-purchase metrics showing promising signs.
This campaign aligns with our transition to a more sustainable clear bottle, which is important in helping us achieve our World Without Waste goals.
Our media and creative agency reviews are progressing and we're also executing more targeted opportunities in addition to the big strategic shifts.
For instance, we've taken a scaled, digitized approach to buying trade materials resulting in up to 15% cost reduction and improved user experience, all while offering more consistent, better quality, and sustainable alternatives.
We've extended this pool buying opportunity to our bottlers, many of whom are already on board to share the benefits systemwide.
Our more disciplined innovation approach is yielding results as we balance big bets with intelligent experimentation.
Using our networked approach, we are scaling our best innovations quickly and effectively, while being disciplined with those that don't get the traction required for further investment.
Local experiments like Aquarius with functional benefits and Ayataka Cafe Matcha Latte in Japan, Fanta's exciting mystery flavor innovation in Europe, and package innovations like the 13.2-ounce recycled PET bottle in North America could all be lifted and shifted globally over time.
It's similar to what we're doing this year with our half-flavored Sparkling water.
Our big bets for 2021 include ongoing work to scale our coffee platform under Costa.
We're expanding ready-to-drink coffee in China and taking a portfolio approach to complement our powerful Georgia coffee brand in Japan.
We're also rolling out an enhanced formula and package designed for Coca-Cola Zero Sugar this month in Europe, in Latin America, and across markets globally later this year.
The improved recipe brings its taste even close to that of the iconic Coca-Cola original taste.
This was influenced by consumer insight and our focus on constant improvement.
And despite this enormous success, Coca-Cola Zero sugar still represents a relatively small percentage of the trademark.
And we continue to respond to consumer desires for lower-sugar options and the rollout will be supported by global, occasion-based marketing campaign.
Finally, it's early days but we're excited to come back and report on our expanded experimentation in flavored alcoholic beverages with Topo Chico hard seltzer in Latin America, Europe, and most recently, the U.S.
We also continue to rapidly digitize our ecosystem.
For example, a champ born in South Africa engages with consumers on social media to increase away-from-home transactions.
In China, we've used digital campaigns to harness consumer data to drive traffic and incidents leading to incremental growth.
We're using machine learning and AI tools to stay on top of a rapidly evolving consumer trends and identify emerging needs.
Our dedicated digital transformation structure is leading to strong online to offline growth.
We've seen e-commerce share gains in a key advanced markets like North America, Japan, and Great Britain.
And in markets like Turkey, where the channel is still developing with more than tripled sales and gained almost 10 points of share versus last year.
As always, we're supporting these initiatives with strong revenue growth management and execution.
Through RGM, we continue to capture at-home occasions with multi-pack options in both premium and affordable segments, while expanding distribution of smaller packaging like our sleek cans in China.
And we have affordability plays like our successful refillables in Latin America, the Philippines, and now Africa.
As part of our new organization, we're dedicating more resources to RGM, continuing to raise the bar to even higher standards.
In many markets, we're working with our bottling partners to optimize cooler placement, driving incremental volume through outstanding customer service, our cooler productivity, and innovation.
Our bottling partners are executing strongly.
And together, we are working on initiatives across the enterprise to identify more efficiencies.
We're operating in a networked way, leveraging our platform services organization to scale our collective data, marketing, digital, and supply chain capabilities.
Our system continues to evolve as shown by the pending combination of Coca-Cola European partners and Coca-Cola Amatil.
I'm especially proud of how we are delivering on our purpose as a company.
Every action is guided by our ambition to create a more sustainable business and better shared future that makes a difference in people's lives, our communities, and the planet.
Throughout the pandemic, we've focused on helping communities through relief funds from the company and the Coca-Cola Foundation.
In this next phase, we are supporting vaccination efforts in regions where distribution has been slower.
For instance, in Brazil, our system has partnered with the country's Ministry of Health to co-create a vaccine awareness campaign.
We're using our network to deliver 700,000 doses with vaccine information to more than 350,000 mom-and-pop stores.
Tomorrow, we'll release our 2020 business and ESG report, where we will highlight last year's progress.
While 2020 was a milestone year in terms of meeting and exceeding some previous goals like women's empowerment and global water replenishment, we continue to work toward an even more ambitious agenda.
This includes our 2025 and 2030 packaging goals, our 2030 climate goal, and our new 2030 water security strategy with more details to come later this year.
In conclusion, we're optimistic about the future and bullish about our ability to continue to deliver on the objectives we laid out at the height of the crisis: more consumers, more share, better system economics, and a positive stakeholder impact.
Today, I will highlight our first-quarter performance and go over our top-line and earnings guidance, which we are reiterating.
Then I'll provide a progress update on working capital, our ability to manage through the current commodity environment, and other factors that may impact our outlook.
2021 is off to a good start, with the quarter showing steady sequential monthly improvement.
We're leveraging our learnings and strategic initiatives from 2020 and leaning into growth in a thoughtful way.
Our Q1 organic revenue was up 6%, driven by concentrate shipments up 5% and price/mix improvement of 1%.
While shipments benefited from certain timing impacts and the five additional days this quarter versus last year, unit case volume was flat versus the toughest quarterly compare of 2020, and March volume was in line with 2019 levels, largely driven by strength in Asia Pacific.
Comparable gross margins, although still down year over year, improved sequentially, driven by less pressure from channel and package mix.
While currency was still somewhat of a drag, it was less of a headwind than prior quarters.
Comparable operating margin expanded through ongoing disciplined cost management.
We continue to reintroduce marketing spend in a targeted way, particularly as we ramp up investments in markets that are seeing recovery.
First-quarter comparable earnings per share of $0.55 is an increase of 8% year over year and was driven by top-line growth, margin improvement, and some contribution from equity income, offset by currency headwinds.
Regarding our ongoing tax case with the IRS, there are no material updates since our last report.
Our decisions and actions from last year certainly were not easy, but we are seeing the results of our efforts start to come through, and our organization is embracing the changes as we move forward into the recovery phase.
We stayed very focused on driving a healthy top line, and we remain on a journey to maximize returns, including strong cash flow generation.
We never relented on our cash flow goals and, indeed, have had an even sharper focus on managing capital spend and working capital.
Since we embarked on a journey toward best-in-class working capital performance, we've made great strides in extending our payment terms, generating a working capital improvement of more than $1 billion over two years.
In the same vein, we are implementing accounts receivables factoring programs, which are rolling out across a number of markets, and also looking at initiatives to better manage inventory days.
At the center of these efforts is a robust digitization and automation agenda.
In addition, and you've heard us talk conceptually about the network model, this is a great example of the network in action.
And when you put the right people from different parts of the organization against key initiatives, it delivers a step-change in performance.
Last quarter, we said that despite a rising commodity environment, we expected a relatively benign impact in 2021 given our hedged positions.
While this continues to be the case, we're closely monitoring upward pressure in some inputs such as high-fructose corn syrup, PET, metals, and other packaging materials as they impact us, as well as our bottling partners.
Given the environment, we'll continue to benefit from revenue growth management initiatives.
Through an intelligently diverse price pack architecture, we can produce a range of options that meet the needs of consumers across the income spectrum while also capturing value for customers.
2020 provided great learnings on how to be more logical and data-driven in our promotions, and we'll continue to be purposeful in our approach, driven by the consumer and the strength of our brands.
We'll also continue to pursue productivity across the supply chain, pushing all levers at our disposal.
And as we noted in our release, we now expect currency to be a tailwind of approximately 1% to 2% to the top line and approximately 2% to 3% to comparable earnings per share in 2021 based on current spot rates and our hedge positions.
For the full year, we now expect an underlying effective tax rate of 19.1%.
Putting it all together, our quarterly performance and the momentum we saw in March give us confidence in our ability to achieve our 2021 guidance.
We expect high single-digit organic revenue growth and high single-digit to low double-digit growth in comparable earnings per share.
We still expect recovery to be asynchronous and to see signs of a return to normal in more markets later in 2021.
We are preparing our end-to-end supply chain for stronger demand and will fuel the momentum in recovering markets as they emerge from the pandemic by accelerating investments in our brands.
There's no doubt that uncertainty remains.
Europe continues to see challenges.
Many countries in regions like Latin America and Africa expect further waves and slower vaccine distribution.
And India is seeing a surge in cases and responding with localized lockdowns.
But as we begin to lap the most difficult periods from last year, we feel good about our position and our ability to navigate the environment as a company and as a system.
Based on the lessons we've learned and the agility provided by our new network organization, we remain confident that our actions and the progress we've made will enable us to deliver 2021 earnings at or above 2019 levels.
With that, operator, we are ready to take questions.

user
q1 non-gaap earnings per share $0.55.
qtrly global unit case volume was even.
qtrly net revenues grew 5%.
qtrly organic revenues (non-gaap) grew 6%.
qtrly net revenues grew 5% to $9.0 billion.
for q2, comparable net revenues (non-gaap) are expected to include an approximate 3% to 4% currency tailwind.
remain confident in co's full year guidance.
for q2, comparable earnings per share (non-gaap) is expected to include an approximate 5% to 6% currency tailwind.
through q1, volume trends steadily improved each month, driven by recovery in markets where coronavirus-related uncertainty has abated.
path to recovery remains asynchronous around world.
coca-cola - for fy comparable net revs (non-gaap), sees a 1% to 2% currency tailwind based on current rates and including impact of hedged positions.
march volume was back to 2019 levels, with growth in at-home channels being offset by pressure in away-from-home channels.

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