This week we meet Marija  Đorđević , Head of Corporate Finance and Treasury at Nelt Group, a Serbian  leading company in the field of consumer goods, tobacco and pharmaceutical products, logistics services and trade marketing.

Nelt Group is an International FMCG distribution and production company established in 1992 in Belgrade, Serbia. In 2017 the group generated a consolidated revenue of 900 MM EUR through its operations across two continents,  including  15 legal entities in 8 countries in SEE and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Nelt Group is a partner of choice for more than 50 international leading companies such as - Procter Gamble, Philipp Morris International, Japan Tobacco International, Mondelez, Wrigley, Mars and others. 

What is your role and what are your main responsibilities?

As a Group Head of Corporate Finance I am responsible for treasury strategy and operations.  Financing and risk strategy are key activities.  I am also in charge of the Group Accounting and Tax centralized operations in the HQs.

How is your treasury structured?

Our treasury function is mostly centralized.  Strategy, key operations and all financing decisions are made at our HQs in Belgrade, Serbia. Finance Managers in charge of specific markets or countries have some treasury tasks to perform, but reporting to Corporate Finance.

However, given the fact that the opportunities and challenges  that we face on SEE markets are completely different to those in Sub-Saharan Africa, we have had to make some adjustments to our fully centralized treasury approach in order to achieve the best results .

Tell us about a project you are working on at the moment.

Over the last two years we have successfully completed our treasury centralization project and we are now planning for phase 2: choosing and implementing a Treasury  Management Solution ( TMS )

In parallel, we are also working on the update, innovation and full automatization of a cash flow forecasting process at Group level.

Since our African markets present different challenges to those in the rest of the Group, we are also updating FX risk policies to be able to respond more efficiently and support our operations and future growth there.

What are the main challenges you face ?

As previously mentioned, the dynamics of the FMCG sector and the diversity of the markets in which we operate, deeply influences the role of treasury.

For the SEE business segment our role is to provide continuous treasury support to very impressive business growth of the Group, while trying to keep up to date with treasury  trends  and technology innovations. Finding a way to implement them while business is constantly growing can be challenging sometimes but we have managed to successfully overcome it.

In the African markets, challenges are different.  We are not able to use standard treasury tools to support business growth and there are FX risk and convertibility issues as well as third party risks.

What areas in treasury are you most interested in? What topics would you like to discuss with peers here?

TMS selection and the implementation process, the role of treasury in supporting international growth and treasury management in the sometimes challenging African markets.