Jumia, the regional e-commerce platform appointed Kenneth Oyolla as its new chief commerical officer in Kenya.
Mr Oyolla takes over from Diana Owusu-Kyereko who was the outgoing CCO of Jumia Kenya after being in the role since June 2017. She is now the new CEO for Jumia’s Ghanaian arm effective this month.
Mr Oyolla brings a wealth of experience in his new capacity. He held both the Geneal Manager in Sub Saharan Africa and Global Head of Marketing roles in Nokia between 2010 and 2014. He was also the Global Head of Marketing Activation at Microsoft , Commerical General Manager at Multichoice, CEO of Blueflame Technologies and the Group Head of Commerical at IPS before heading off to Jumia.
He brings forth experience in branding, marketing, business development and ecommerce which fits quite well with Jumia.
Mr Kenneth Oyolla joins Jumia at an interesting time for the company. The ecommerce giant made substantial changes to its operations in 2019. They closed a number of operations in Rwanda, Tanzania and Cameroon. They closed off Jumia Travels that was taken over by Travelstart. In Kenya, they laid off 6% of the workforce.
The corporate restructure seems to be aimed at improving its profitability. Jumia Group disclosed in their SEC filing that they made €130.6 million (Kshs 14.6 billion) in revenue in 2018 but made a consolidated operating loss of €169.7 million (Kshs 18.99 billion). Their Q3 2019 revenue increased to €40.1 million up from €33.6 million the previous quarter. Since Jumia is now a public company, they would want to turn a profit for their shareholders and probably made their corprorate restructure a necessary evil.
