Alvin Mbugua, has been appointed Managing Director, at Uganda Breweries Limited (UBL) CEO East Africa Magazine, can reliably confirm.
Alvin, as he is known by all his former colleagues at UBL, replaces Mark Ocitti p’Ongom who heads to Tanzania as Managing Director for Serengeti Breweries Limited, another Diageo subsidiary.
An ACCA Fellow, Alvin holds a (BsC) Geospatial Engineering from the University of Nairobi and Master of Commerce Degree (MCom) in Development Finance from the University of Capetown.
He completed his ACCA from Strathmore University in Nairobi.
He worked at Shell South Africa where he started as a Systems Financial Consultant in 2006 and headed to Shell Tanzania as CFO between April 2008 and November 2010. He then joined Damco, the global logistics firm as CFO for the East and Horn of Africa region till April 2013.
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In May 2013, he joined EABL as Group Financial Controller till September 2015 and in October 2015 he joined UBL as the Finance & Strategy Director till early 2018 when he was recalled to EABL Nairobi and reassigned as Head of Sales at East African Breweries (EABL), a role believed by many including Alvin himself to be prepping him for a CEO role.
While at UBL he was voted CFO of the Year 2017 in the ACCA organised and Deloitte Uganda sponsored awards.
Speaking to the May 2018 Africa edition of Accounting and Business magazine, the ACCA publication, Alvin Mbugua said that as CFO, if given chance, he wouldn’t find a problem being a CEO within the business.
“As CFO, I served on the executive team providing leadership on the key areas of the business,’ he said, adding: ‘Part of the beauty and power of being a leader is that you can move into different roles within an organisation; you can transform.”
Speaking clairvoyantly about a possible future CEO role vis-à-vis his new responsibility in sales, Alvin told the Accounting and Business magazine that: “A CEO needs to be commercially astute and have an instinct to make the right deal. To understand the customer’s perspective, having an understanding of commercial theory and practice is crucial.’
Now that he is a CEO, it is time to hit the ground running and his work is cut out.
First of all he needs to continue the sales growth trajectory left behind by Mark Ocitti, his predecessor but also return UBL to 2015 levels when the company posted UGX40.8 billion in profit and even better.
In doing all this, he needs to keep an eye on arresting Nile Breweries’ marketing share- continuing the trend left by Mark Ocitti- who reduced the gap between UBL and Nile Breweries from UGX189.9bn in 2016 to UGX126.4bn in 2017.