The Recycler Issue 333

FEATURE
FEATURED
A R TIC L E
“It’s our vision to become the biggest
retailer in Africa,” Jumia Uganda’s Country
Manager Anamaiy Bajpai told African
Enterprise in 2014, and although the road
hasn’t always been smooth, it has also
brought considerable success, particularly
in terms of outside investment.
In April, Jumia was listed on the prestigious
New York Stock Exchange, and according
to the Financial Times became “the first
Africa-focused start-up worth more than
$1 billion (€881.3 million).” It has also
received investment from Goldman Sachs
and AXA, and at its peak had operations
running in more than 23 African nations.
At the time of writing, Jumia was the ninth
most-visited website in Nigeria, comfortably
surpassing rivals such as Amazon (twelfth),
and Alibaba’s AliExpress, (thirty-sixth.)
Nigeria is also home to Konga – described
as Jumia’s “closest rival” by the Mobile
Ecosystem Forum (MEF) in 2016. Founded
in 2012, the company also offers its own
“eBay-style spin-off”, Konga Marketplace,
and spent its early years jostling with Jumia
for supremacy.
“Anyone who visited Nigeria from 2012
to 2016 likely saw evidence of one of the
continent’s early e-commerce showdowns,”
wrote Techcrunch’s Jake Bright earlier
this year. “Travelling in Lagos traffic, large
billboards for each startup faced off across
the skyline, as their delivery motorcycles
buzzed between stopped cars.”
Konga’s success proved tricky to sustain,
however, and in 2018 it was acquired by
Nigerian hardware firm Zonix Enterprises,
for a rumoured $10 million (€8.81 million)
– a significant collapse from its $300
million (€264.4 million) valuation in 2014-
15, and a staggering 93% negative return for
investors, according to Techpoint.
In South Africa, meanwhile, there is
another emerging cohort of e-commerce
companies, including Bidorbuy, which
formed in 1999 and offers an auction
function as well as a straight sale function,
and Takealot, established in 2002. Further
north, Kenya is also home to a pair of
burgeoning enterprises: Kilimall, which
has expanded following its 2014 launch to
include operations in Nigeria and Uganda;
and the intriguing Copia Global. Founded
in 2012, Copia’s unique focus is not on
Africa’s growing middle class, but on “lowincome
consumers who are underserved
partly by virtue of living mainly outside
urban areas” (Quartz.)
“Other e-commerce players are focused on
the top of the pyramid with the middle class
and elite,” said CEO Tim Steel. “We built
our business on a mobile platform to bring
retail services to low to middle income
African consumers – consumers who are
remote, unbanked, unconnected, and who
may not have a valid ID or address.”
This approach echoes Jumia’s, which
has also focused on harder-to-reach,
rural customers; also like Jumia,
Copia has attracted investor interest
– raising $26 million (€22.9 million)
from backers so far.
Anyone who visited Nigeria from 2012
to 2016 likely saw evidence of one of the
continent’s early e-commerce showdowns
The companies differ in various ways
– the average value of orders on Jumia
in 2019 was $66 (€58), compared to
$10 (€8.75) on Copia. But both have
developed a “hybrid online-offline
model” allowing customers to make
orders in-store, rather than online, with a
network of partners and agents who then
purchase and process on the customer’s
behalf; these stores also act as delivery
and collection points. It is perhaps an
unusual approach, but given the wealth of
challenges African e-commerce still faces,
surely a sensible one.
6 Issue 333 August 2020