In recent times, I have been having issues with my Jumia App, and it looks like the once promising e-commerce marketplace which was a hope for Africa to the world is nowhere to be found. While they are still operational like almost every company that might go bankrupt but I smell a rat and hopefully I am wrong.
Rocket internet saw that there was an untapped mine in the E-commerce industry in Africa but if they had to start, they were going to start with the most populous and economically strong country in the continent, so they hired very good consultant to work on opening Kasuwa, in 2012 a market place in Nigeria and it became a bridge between the market and the people.
Tunde Kehinde and Raphael Afaedor joined Kasuwa as part of the founding team and were instrumental in making the business acceptable in the local market. They were able to help in building its operations, day to day management, and solving the business day to day problem. It wasn't long that Rocket internet decided to rebrand and put all its Africa chain as one with the name JUMIA.
Being the first Pan-African Marketplace that was into Logistics and payment services while solving the problem of Market people and customers. It was responsible for two thing, getting the goods to the customers and getting the money to the seller and this made it King in Africa just like Alibaba is in China and Amazon is in the United States.
The company became really big and successful that it was able to get the honor of being the first African Tech Startup to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange Market (NYSC) in April 2019. The company in its aim to expand really fast, launched Jumia Travel formally Jovago in 2013, a travel service to help people with travel and logistics. The company was rebranded to Jumia travels in 2016, but was later acquired by TravelStart. Other part of Jumia businesses includes Jumia Food and it looks like this stopped functioning last year 2023, They went on to build other products including Jumia One in 2018.
The entire of this companies were under the Africa Internet Holdings and MTN acquired 33% of this company, as well as Millicom which also acquired 33% of the company. These acquisitions made Jumia a Unicorn and other companies like AXA Mansard invested money as well. Soon, Jumia began to suffer from inflation causing them to close down a lot of their businesses also, as they were still trying to survive, allegations of fraud began to fly around and even Citron research claimed that the company's financials were inflated.
All these along with competition, a challenging market, devaluation of currencies across Africa and so on has really affected the company and while they are still operating, it looks like they are living on borrowed time.
Posted Using InLeo Alpha