Toyota’s plans in E. Africa after buying French giant

Correspondent

Japanese conglomerate Toyota Tsusho in December 2016 completed takeover of French conglomerate CFAO for 2.25 euros (about Sh261.89 billion in prevailing forex rates), spreading its interest in Africa to 165 firms in 49 African countries. The resulting giant conglomerate, CFAO Africa, is now Toyota Tsusho’s trading and investment vehicle in Africa. In Kenya, CFAO Africa has interests in automotive, agriculture, infrastructure development and healthcare through seven companies.

Nairobi has been chosen as the hub for CFAO’s expansion into Eastern and Central Africa. Dennis Awori is the country and regional delegate in CFAO’s operations and sits on its global board. He spoke to the Business Daily about the integration process and the group’s investment plans.

It takes time to come up with structures, processes, systems, work on culture and create a new common vision and mission. This is what we have been doing over the last year or so. And it’s still ongoing because integration of this nature takes much longer than just a year. We have seen much, much closer relationship between the companies in the group. We have begun looking at the sharing of services where it does not affect the commitments that we have to manufacturers, the different clients and regulations such as those by the Competition Authority of Kenya. In bringing them together, the first step was to initiate the shared services, basically the back-office functions not for all companies, but for those that complement each other. For example, we had the companies within the Toyota Tsusho companies, those were easy to create one back-office and corporate function for them.