SodaStream gives up West Bank factory

Comes as burgeoning financial boycott of Israel, spearheaded by BDS movement and other groups seeking more rights for Palestinians, builds momentum.

A Palestinian laborer working at the Israeli SodaStream factory in the Mishor Adumim industrial park, next to the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. Israel’s SodaStream is to close the controversial West Bank plant, the company said on October 29, 2014. SodaStream, which manufactures a device for making carbonated drinks at home, has 25 factories around the world and employs 800 Palestinians and 500 Israelis at the plant, according to a company spokesman. Menahem Kahana / AFPShow less

Shares of the soft drinks machine making company SodaStream International rose marginally after the company said it would close down a factory in the Palestinian West Bank that has been a focal point for a global movement to boycott Israeli goods.

SodaStream advanced 0.09 per cent in New York trading on Thursday at 10am US time. Shares have dropped more than 50 per cent this year, and on Thursday they fell as much as 3.9 per cent after the announcement.

The billionaire George Soros has been among big investors to sell holdings in SodaStream amid the controversy, which included actress Scarlett Johansson parting ways with Oxfam after the UK charity criticised her endorsement of the Israeli company’s products. All this comes as a burgeoning financial boycott of Israel, spearheaded by the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement and other groups seeking more rights for Palestinians, builds momentum.

SodaStream, headquartered in the Israeli city of Lod, has its main Mishor factory in an industrial park next to the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. The company, which is also facing slower revenue growth, said in a report on its future plans on Wednesday that it would move its operations at Mishor and Alon Tavor to its Levahim factory in northern Israel by the end of next year. The relocation will cost Sodastream US$20 million, it said.

Several western investors said earlier this year that they had sold off holdings in companies that make money from business in the occupied territories. Norway’s $810bn sovereign wealth fund, the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, a Dutch pension fund and the Presbyterian Church in the US are among those that have excluded some Israeli and US companies from their portfolios this year. The companies operate in the occupied territories, where settlements built by Israel have been deemed illegal by the United Nations Security Council and the International Court of Justice among others.

Financial and economic boycotts have been tried before, most notably when Saudi Arabia and other Opec members stopped selling oil to the West in 1973 in reaction to the support given by the US and other countries to Israel during its war with Egypt.

Soros Fund Management said in August that it had sold its shares in Sodastream. In a May filing with the US markets regulator, the fund said it had bought 550,000 shares of SodaStream during the first quarter at a cost of about $24 million.

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