Tolaram Names a Factory-Floor Operator as Its Global CTO

Kavinkumar Murukanathan, who spent nearly 15 years climbing from the factory floor at Tolaram, has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer (CTO, the executive who owns a company’s technology strategy) of the Singapore-based conglomerate, a roughly US$1.2 billion group that makes Indomie noodles in Nigeria and runs a digital bank in Indonesia. He now leads enterprise technology across operations spread over about 15 countries.

His resume reads less like a software architect’s and more like a plant manager’s, and that is the quiet signal worth reading. Across industrial groups scaling through Africa and Asia, the people being handed the technology keys are increasingly the ones who already ran the machines.

The Appointment and the New Mandate

The promotion was announced from Lagos, Nigeria, in June 2026, lifting Kavinkumar out of his most recent post as Head of IT and Digital Transformation. In the new seat he reports into the Group’s enterprise technology strategy and is expected to work alongside business leaders rather than off to the side of them.

The brief is wide. On paper it stretches across most of what a modern conglomerate calls digital, which is exactly the point of putting one accountable name on it.

• ERP modernization (enterprise resource planning, the core software that runs finance, inventory and production)
• Enterprise architecture and infrastructure
• Cybersecurity
• Data and analytics
• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Emerging-technology initiatives across global operations

That spread matters because Tolaram is not a single-product firm where one platform decision covers everything. A noodle plant in Nigeria, a neobank in Jakarta and a deep-sea port near Lagos each carry their own systems, their own data and their own failure points. The mandate asks one operator to make them speak to each other.

From Six Sigma Black Belt to the C-Suite

What sets this appointment apart is the road that led to it. Kavinkumar did not arrive at technology leadership through code. He arrived through the production line, quality programs and profit-and-loss responsibility for physical businesses.

His climb inside the Group ran roughly in this order:

1. Six Sigma Black Belt and Head of Six Sigma, running operational-excellence and process-improvement programs
2. Operations Manager and Factory Manager, owning day-to-day plant performance
3. General Manager of Flexible Packaging at the Dufil group, leading that packaging business on profitability and process optimization
4. Head of Manufacturing for Noodles and Seasoning, overseeing one of the company’s largest production operations
5. Head of IT and Digital Transformation, running enterprise-wide digital programs
6. Chief Technology Officer of the Group

Along the way he led large automation projects, manufacturing modernization, warehouse-management-system rollouts and alternative-energy work. Each of those sits at the seam where operations meets software, which is precisely the seam a conglomerate CTO has to hold. The pattern is consistent: he learned the technology by being the customer for it first.

Why Tolaram Reached for an Operator

The instinct in most of the technology press is that a CTO should be a builder of systems. Tolaram’s choice points somewhere else, and the broader data backs the choice rather than the instinct.

Smart-manufacturing and digital programs in heavy industry are increasingly owned by people who run operations, not by pure technologists. One industrial-sector survey found operations leaders own a majority of these initiatives, with technology executives owning a smaller share. Consulting research on industrial transformation makes a similar argument, that the hardest part of going digital is not the tooling but the leadership able to make a factory adopt it. Korn Ferry’s work on leadership skills for industrial digital transformation stresses exactly that gap between buying technology and getting it used.

The two profiles solve the same job from opposite ends.

For a group whose value is created in factories and ports, the adoption problem is usually the bigger one. A factory-floor operator who has signed off on automation budgets knows where digital projects go to die, because he has watched a few of them die. That is a different and arguably more useful form of technical literacy than the ability to read a pull request.

The Stack He Inherits, From Noodles to Neobanks

The job is harder than the title makes it sound, because Tolaram is several very different technology businesses wearing one logo. Its portfolio across consumer goods, fintech and infrastructure means the new CTO oversees both nineteenth-century industrial problems and cutting-edge cloud ones at the same time.

Consumer Goods and Infrastructure

The consumer engine is the noodle business, anchored by Indomie and the Dufil Prima Foods joint venture with Indofood and Kellogg’s, which sits behind a roster of Nigerian staples. The infrastructure arm includes Lekki Port, the largest private infrastructure investment in Nigeria, where Tolaram holds a 22.5% stake alongside China Harbour Engineering Company and Nigerian public shareholders. Manufacturing and ports run on heavy ERP, sensor data and logistics systems that fail loudly and expensively when they fail.

The Fintech Side

Then there is Amar Bank, the Indonesian digital lender Tolaram owns, whose Tunaiku micro-loans platform and app-only banking service run on Google Cloud and lean on AI for credit scoring and fraud detection. You can explore the consumer face of it at Amar Bank’s digital banking platform. A neobank’s technology risk profile has almost nothing in common with a noodle plant’s, which is the integration puzzle now landing on one desk.

• US$1.2 billion in approximate annual revenue across the Group
• 16,000 employees in roughly 15 countries
• Rp279 billion in estimated 2025 net profit at Amar Bank
• 70 years of operating heritage behind the enterprise

What an Operator-CTO Says About Emerging-Market Tech

Read on its own, this is one promotion at one private company. Read against the run of similar moves, it is a marker for how industrial groups in Africa and Asia are choosing to digitize.

These businesses are not greenfield tech startups. They are decades-old manufacturers and traders bolting cloud, data and AI onto plants and supply chains that already work. In that setting the scarce skill is not writing software; it is getting a factory in Lagos and a bank in Jakarta to run on systems they trust. Deloitte’s read on smart manufacturing and the human side of transformation lands on the same conclusion, that technology rises but the outcome still turns on people. Tolaram has answered that by promoting the person who knows the people.

The bet is now visible. If the operator-CTO model delivers, the next wave of digital transformation in emerging-market industry gets led from the plant floor rather than the data center, and a Six Sigma badge starts to look like a credible path to the technology chair. If it stalls on the deep technical debt these old businesses carry, the engineers get called back. The first read on which way it breaks will come from whether Tolaram’s noodle lines and its neobank end up running on anything that resembles a shared stack.