Raymond Chimhandamba, Contributor09.07.18
In 2011, after about 12 years of working and traveling in the Sub-Saharan African region and Indian Ocean Islands, I joined an FMCG organization that was in the hygiene sector as business development director for Africa. My role was to grow the African business, particularly the “Base of the Pyramid” or low income opportunities. My key deliverables in the short term included appointing partners in the key markets of Nigeria, Zambia and Angola. With 12 years of African experience behind me, I had strong networks across the region so I achieved this with a fair amount of ease. I had some fairly radical recommendations for Nigeria which were not respond to warmly and I appointed a distributor in Angola. I was achieving above budget margins in Zambia. I was also looking at options to grow the adult diapers category with our distribution partners within the neighboring countries. I believed that there was a good opportunity there. But all in all, the chemistry was not quite right, so in less than a year we mutually agreed to part ways. But in that short time two things happened to me. I had learned two very key lessons that in a sense changed my life.
The firs
The firs
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