How localized decision-making can help multinationals grow profit

Following Diageo’s multimillion-dollar sale of its 58.02 per cent stake in Guinness Nigeria to Singapore-based Tolaram Group in late 2024, the new owners moved swiftly to reposition the company and strengthen its profitability.

The company operated at a loss in 2023 and 2024 financial year due to what was described as macro-economic headwinds.

Two years after, under a new management, Guinness Nigeria opened 2026 on a strong footing, recording year-on-year increase in Profit After Tax, rise in revenue.

The factors that assisted this turn around are what other companies, especially multinationals in the FMCG sector can take closer look at.

Some of the critical factors are localised decision-making, and expanded market reach – factors as said by Girish Sharma, Managing Director/CEO of Guinness Nigeria in an interview with CNBC. These factors and more have fundamentally repositioned the business for sustained growth.

According to an analyst, it was significantly important that the company has to localize its decision-making to grow profit. It has to understand its people and consumers. This is what marketing entails, he said.

“We grew distribution, we’ve become far more efficient today, and we were able to make our people more agile because we brought decision-making down to Nigeria”, Sharma said.

Looking beyond the numbers, Sharma while premium brands will continue to receive investment, he noted that future growth is likely to be driven by value-led innovation tailored to pressured consumer wallets, pointing to the recent launch of Orijin Beer in PET format as an early example of how pack sizes and propositions are being reworked to meet shifting demand.

Lessons for other multinationals

Understanding your market is as important as marketing. In the view of some marketing experts “The youthful profile of the Nigerian market is redefining how companies sell their products and services. How to speak to, attract and sell to these young chaps is a new challenge for firms. The young folks of today were born to the technology era. If we are going to serve them then we will have to unlearn a lot of things…mobile and social devices and systems including Big Data analytics tools and technologies will certainly help us to achieve this”.

It is also important to know what your consumers need and offer it in the way they need it. Guinness launched Orijin Beer in PET to meet consumers demand. For instance, Sharma added that consumer-centric innovation remains central to the company’s growth ambitions.

“Thirdly, we are very obsessed with the consumers, so we had them at the centre of our strategy – we took out a few products and became a lot more innovative in adding some. And finally, is the financial performance.”

In addition, Guinness took a second look at its culture and realized that they needed to make its people feel more empowered, more than anything else. The company also built on extremely agile, talented and treasured Nigerian company with an entrepreneurial culture and a passion for learning.