Breaking: Jumia’s board of directors appoints Francis Dufay as its CEO

Francis Dufay has been named the CEO of the e-commerce company Jumia by the company’s supervisory board. With the resignation of Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poginonnec as Co-CEOs, Dufay was named the interim CEO. This is coming after a decade of pressure on Jumia to become profitable, and failure to do so led to the departure of both Executives. Jumia’s board referred to managing the business from the continent in announcing their resignation from office last year.

Jumia announced his employment and stated, “The executive search being performed has now been concluded. The nomination demonstrates the board’s high regard for Francis’ leadership and his capacity to grow the company to profitability.

Francis Dufay started working for Jumia Cote D’Ivoire in 2014, and in 2022, he was promoted to vice president. Off the strength of the business’s recently released report for Q4 2022 and the entire year 2022, his time at Jumia is off to a solid start. Even though the company is still far from profitability, it keeps demonstrating that it really might.

According to Dufay’s January Financial Times remark, “Our growth has coincided with more lavish marketing spending and deteriorating economics. We want to strengthen our fundamentals to expand the business, boost our economics, and cut down on our ebitda losses. “We began putting our strategy into practice in the fourth quarter of 2022 to quicken our journey to profitability and further solidify our foundation. We are seeing early progress indicators and are keeping our attention on execution even if the fourth quarter results only represent a portion of the measures we are taking.

With these positive developments, Jumia CEO Francis Dufay predicted that the company’s Adjusted EBITDA loss would drop significantly from $207 million in FY2022 to $100–120 million in FY2023. Jumia has stated that it expects to lose between $100 and $120 million in 2023, approximately half of the $207 million it lost in 2022.

We are improving our consumer value proposition, which will help us achieve sustainable long-term growth. We remain more optimistic than ever about the potential opportunities across our markets.