The Jumia marketplaces and classifieds websites ware founded in Lagos, Nigeria in 2012 and now have a presence across 23 African countries. They have just reported GMV growth of 64.5% in the fourth quarter of 2017 and significantly scaled the number of orders with a YoY growth of 94% in Q4 2017.
Africa eCommerce Holding GmbH, the holding company of Jumia, was merged into Africa Internet Holding GmbH (formerly trading under Africa Internet Group). In June 2016, all business models of Africa Internet Group were renamed around the Jumia brand.
“We made great progress in 2017 with significant growth of the business, driven by technological innovations and improved relevance of the offering of goods and services. This growth is demonstrating the robust momentum in our core businesses and markets, and the increased adoption of online services by African consumers. We are also seeing good results from our strategy to further develop our logistics platform and our payment platform. Our customers continue to benefit from increasing access to great services, quality products, improved customer experience and the tremendous convenience of being able to shop online”.
– Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, Jumia co-CEOs
Jumia 2017 Highlights
- The marketplace attracted 550 million visits across Africa in 2017. Other groundbreaking figures for 2017 include the number of products available on the platform which skyrocketed from 50,000 in 2012 to over 5 million in 2017.
- Jumia saw a huge success of Black Friday with more than 100 million visits, breaking all previous sales records (new customers, orders, items sold, visits).
- The company launched its own payment platform, JumiaPay, to further facilitate transactions between merchants and consumers and tailor its solutions to specific local needs and requirements.
- Jumia launched a consumer-facing payment mobile application (`Jumia One´), enabling customers to easily access digital services such as Airtime/Data, TV, Utilities. Jumia One is gradually integrating more online and financial solutions to help consumers save time and money and access a large set of different services from a one stop shop App.
- Over 8 million packages were handled through the Jumia logistic platform, a unique achievement. The
company maintains close control over its logistics through a fully integrated network of local providers, using Jumia technology and data
Selling on Jumia
Nigeria has had an interesting reputation in the past for scams, but today it’s a vibrant emerging economy with a GDP of $405.1 billion. The biggest economy in Africa, Nigeria is now the 30th-largest economy in the world and a country well worth considering expansion to. Africa as a whole has a population of over 1.2 billion and so represents a huge untapped consumer market
The major barrier to entry on Jumia is that you’ll need to have registered business and hold your stock in Nigeria. For most European retailers this will mean finding a partner within Nigeria as setting up an entity is probably beyond the reach of most SMEs. However, if you’re willing to address this obstacle then being first to market could pay dividends.
