By Duncan Wyness – General Manager of Coca-Cola Beverages Africa in Mozambique

The global economic outlook has been clouded by geopolitical tensions and trade policy uncertainty, leading to projections for economic growth in 2025 being revised downwards almost across the board. Africa is unlikely to escape the impact of this volatility, with demand for its export commodities a key concern.

In times like these, African businesses will have to work harder than ever to remain profitable, but it can be done. If anything, African business leaders are better equipped than most to deal with the unexpected.

The recent experience of Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) in Mozambique is one example of a business thriving in challenging circumstances.

In spite of an extremely turbulent trading environment over the past few years, the company has enjoyed a brisk start to 2025, creating shared opportunity across the value chain and making a strong contribution to the country’s economy.

We have bounced back from the impact of cyclones, flooding and social unrest by keeping our products affordable and available, while growing the number of outlets we serve and focusing on executing to perfection in trade.

Quality internal communication has been a key factor in our ability to navigate a tough 2024, highlighting the value of active leadership and regular engagement with employees at all levels.

From our daily sales meetings, to monthly town halls, and quarterly sales incentive meetings, as well as regular union engagement, communication has got our teams working together to deliver on our targets.

To keep growing, our aim is to recruit new consumers, convert them to continue drinking our products, and retain them so that they stick with us over time.

We have the tools to achieve our ambition. It is about ensuring we have the right products, in the right places, the right offering, and the right channel, grounded in data-driven insights that identify opportunities and the optimal portfolio strategy.

This has to be followed through by executing with excellence in every single outlet we visit, ensuring our full portfolio is always available, cold, and well presented, with the correct pricing.

At CCBA, we are dedicated to creating value and delivering exceptional service across every touchpoint of our business.

It’s about driving sustainable growth for our partners and providing top-tier service that ensures product availability at every consumer touchpoint. Our route-to-market strategy emphasises optimising operations with our Official Coca-Cola Distributors (OCCDs), ensuring smooth product movement from production to final consumption.

CCBA’s digital transformation journey is an integral component to take our business into the future, remain relevant and future-proof our business.

It will give us a competitive advantage, the agility to anticipate and respond to changes in our environment and satisfy and respond to customers and consumers’ real-time needs.

Digital transformation enables increased productivity and efficiency and world–class operational excellence. This will accelerate and ensure the sustainable growth of our business.

It involves the integration of technology into all areas of the business. It challenges the status quo and impacts how we engage with customers, suppliers and stakeholders.

Digital transformation requires a culture change and being open to learning new ways of doing things as we adapt our policies and processes to become a data-driven enterprise.

This includes digitalisation of the CCBA enterprise where we are making significant investments in capabilities to create an agile workplace that is engaging and productive.

For our consumers, we are creating a more personalised, predictive and emotive experience by harnessing data and analytics.

Business intelligence and analytics provide CCBA business functions with accurate, timeous, actionable insights for growth.

We are digitising our business processes through single end-to-end Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and best-in-class third-party applications.

This ERP platform helps us meet our business’ current and future needs while providing data driven real-time business intelligence.

CCBA is a customer-obsessed, digitally enabled, growth-driven business. We strive for excellence across our value chain and partner with our customers for growth.

Despite these challenging times, we are confident in Africa’s future, and we see vast opportunities for growth.