Cameroon's richest woman Kate Fotso retakes the cocoa export lead she lost last year

Kate Fotso's Telcar Cocoa has retaken the lead in Cameroonian cocoa exports, shipping 40,631 tonnes in the 2025/26 season, or 32.38% of the 125,469 tonnes the country exported.

The recovery follows the worst year in the company's three-decade history. Telcar's exports collapsed 53% in 2024/25 to 31,029 tonnes, cutting its share to 16.18% and ending five consecutive seasons of dominance. Social Business Enterprise Technology took the top position.

The collapse had a single cause. In January 2025, Fotso ended nearly two decades of partnership with Cargill, the American agricultural trading house that held 49% of Telcar and served as its principal international buyer. The split removed the company's main route to market in one step.

Fotso had worked at Cargill for five years before founding Telcar in the mid-1990s, and the relationship had been the architecture of the business. When it ended, the question was whether she could replace that volume at scale.

The 2025/26 figures, published by Cameroon's National Cocoa and Coffee Board, indicate she has, at least for one season.

The recovery is partial. Telcar exported 74,000 tonnes at its peak in 2016/17, of which 43,700 tonnes carried international sustainability certification. This season's 40,631 tonnes is barely half that, in a national market that has itself contracted.

Conditions have been difficult across the industry. Global cocoa prices spiked above $10,000 a tonne in late 2024, then fell nearly 50% into 2026 as supply recovered and demand weakened, leaving traders with inventory bought at the top.

Building elsewhere

Fotso has not waited to find out whether the cocoa recovery holds.

She committed 17 billion CFA francs, about $28.3 million, in April to a beverage production facility at Souza in Cameroon's Littoral region. That is her largest investment outside agriculture and it puts her directly against Brasseries du Cameroun, the subsidiary of France's Castel Group that has dominated Cameroonian beer for decades.

In September 2023 she incorporated Bridge Riviera Development and Hospitalities in Douala, with a mandate covering luxury hotels, real estate development and hospitality services.

She also holds a shareholding in Ecobank Cameroun and was appointed by President Paul Biya to represent exporters on the board of the autonomous port of Kribi.

The iron lady

Kate Kanyi-Tometi Fotso is Cameroon's wealthiest woman, valued by Forbes Africa at $252 million, roughly 150 billion CFA francs, which places her among the thirty largest fortunes in francophone sub-Saharan Africa.

She comes from an anglophone region in Cameroon's southwest, a detail that carries weight in a country where language marks identity. Visitors to Telcar's offices in Bonabéri, in Douala's industrial zone, who greet the security guards in French are answered in English.

Cameroon's trade minister, Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana, gave her the name the industry now uses, calling her the iron lady of the cocoa sector.

She has trained more than 21,000 Cameroonian cocoa farmers and built the company around the argument that it functions as a bridge between those growers and global buyers.

Her late husband, André Fotso, founded TAF Investment Group and led the Cameroonian employers' association. He died in Paris on 2 August 2016, and she took over management of the capital and investments he left.

Telcar has not said who is buying the volume Cargill once took, or whether the arrangement is durable.