Mateja Jesenek

Mateja Jesenek, born in 1967, graduated at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, in 1992. In 1993, she completed a postgraduate research on management of small enterprises at the University of Bologna, Italy. She carried on with her postgraduate MBA studies at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, where she was awarded the title of Master of Science, Business Administration and Organization in 1995.

Through all of her professional career, Mateja Jesenek has been intensively involved in management and marketing professional circles, in which she represents one of the prominent Slovenian opinion makers. She has contributed at many round-table discussions, conferences and other professional meetings in the fields of marketing, retailing, advertising and communications in Slovenia and abroad.

Mateja Jesenek, M. Sc., currently holds the position of General Manager and CEO of Intersport ISI, d.o.o. (since March 2012). She leads the company with 345 employees in Slovenia and coordinates the business with five other markets with 434 employees. Previous to that, she was a Member of the Management Board and Senior Vice President of the Mercator Group from the beginning of 2006 until February 2012, and in this role she was in charge of strategic marketing, communications, public relations, sales formats’ development and global supply management. She has been employed with Mercator since 1994, when she started to work with the company as a Project Manager. She then headed the Sales Promotions Department, and was appointed in 1998 to the position of Marketing Director of Mercator Group. In the years 2004 and 2005, she was both Director of Marketing as well as Deputy to the Member of the Management Board. Before she became a part of Mercator’s team, she worked in 1993 and 1994 at the Agency of Republic of Slovenia for Restructuring and Privatization as Project Manager and Financial Adviser, where she managed and cooperated in projects of privatization of Slovenian enterprises. Before that, right after her graduation, she was working for the company Kompas Consulting in the field of international trade in 1992.

Among other professional engagements, she is currently a member of Slovenian Marketing Association’s Supervisory Board. In years 2008–2010, she was an honorary chairwoman of the City of Women Society, which deals with the promotion of women in culture, and her role was also to link the worlds of business and culture in various possible aspects. In 2008, she was a member of the UNICEF Slovenia Economic Council. In recent years, she has been a member of the Slovenian Advertising Chamber’s Governing Board and a member of the Association of Commerce’s Governing Board, as well a member of the Consumer Goods Forum Marketing Committee. She was also a chairwoman of the Slovenian Association of Advertisers and a chairwoman of the Slovenian Marketing Conference Program Committee.