The newly appointed managing director of South African fresh produce marketer Capespan Exports has told Eurofruit he will only carry out the role for six months to give the company time to identify a longer-term successor to Abrie de Swart, who left the company after just nine months at the helm.
The announcement of Ronan Lennon’s reappointment was a surprise, coming just over a year after he departed Capespan’s UK subsidiary.
Since stepping down as managing director of Capespan’s UK import operation last August, Lennon has continued as a consultant to the group, but Swart’s departure left Capespan Exports, the South African export division of the Capespan Group, with a major vacancy to fill.
“I have been consulting for Capespan on a regular basis over the past months and have been working with [Capespan Fruit CEO] Louis Kriel on projects throughout the year,” Lennon told Eurofruit.
“It was not a difficult decision to accept the invitation to spend the next six months in South Africa to allow Capespan time to find a suitable successor for Mr De Swardt.”
Just a few days after former Tesco executive Richard Brasher was named as the new CEO of at Pick n Pay, a South African retailer known to be in need of a turnaround, Lennon answered Kriel’s distress call and boarded a plane from London to Cape Town, where he will carry out his own bit of rescue work at a major South African business.
Unlike Brasher, who has to pull Pick n Pay out of a slump that recently resulted in a profit warning, Lennon arguably has a much easier task.
With years of experience working for Capespan and its former incarnation Unifruco, he knows South Africa and the country’s producers well and will be expected to inspire a good deal of confidence among suppliers.
During the 1990s, he enjoyed an extended stay in South Africa as part of Unifruco’s European team.
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