The supervisory board of the ecommerce company, Jumia, has now appointed Francis Dufay as the company’s CEO. Dufay was announced as the acting CEO after the exit of Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poginonnec as Co-CEOs. The exit of both CEOs came after a decade where Jumia was pressed to move towards profitability and was unable to. In the statement announcing their removal last year, Jumia’s board alluded to run the company from the continent.
In the statement confirming his appointment, Jumia said, “The executive search that was being conducted has now been concluded. The appointment reflects the strong confidence of the Board in the leadership of Francis and his ability to successfully scale the business to profitability.”
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Francis Dufay joined Jumia Cote D’Ivoire in 2014 and was appointed as a Vice President of the business in 2022. His tenure at Jumia is off to a good start off the strength of the company’s recently released report for Q4 2022 and for the full year 2022. While the company is still way off from profitability, it continues to show that it may get there.
In January, Dufay was quoted by the Financial Times as saying, “Our growth has correlated with increased spending on marketing and deterioration of economics. We want to improve our fundamentals to grow the business and, at the same time, significantly improve our economics and reduce our ebitda losses.”
Jumia now says it is on track to lose around $100 -120m in 2023, which is around half of its losses for full-year 2022 which stands at $207 million. “In the fourth quarter of 2022, we started implementing our strategy to accelerate our path to profitability and further strengthen our fundamentals. While the fourth quarter results only reflect a fraction of the actions we are taking, we are seeing early signs of success and remain focused on execution. In light of these encouraging signs, we expect a sharp reduction in Adjusted EBITDA loss from $207 million in FY2022 down to $100-120 million in FY2023,” commented Francis Dufay, CEO of Jumia.
“We remain more than ever confident about the growth opportunity across our markets and are making fundamental improvements to our consumer value proposition which will help us drive sustainable long-term growth.
*This is a developing story.
