Africa has one of the maximum digitally connected populations on the earth, with 400 million internet users. Sacha Poignonnec, co-founder and co-CEO of Jumia, Africa’s largest internet organization, discusses why the e-trade opportunity in Africa is so tremendous for agencies massive and small in this interview with McKinsey’s Georges Desvaux. An edited transcript of his feedback follows.
From the outside, you look at Africa, you read the information, and you watched it’s going to be very tough—the entirety is going to be very hard. We began the commercial enterprise in Lagos, and on a primary day, we had consumers shopping for cell phones. I turned into so surprised. On the first actual day we opened the internet site, nobody knew us, but ten consumers bought mobile phones. We were very surprised by the urge for consumers’ food for products that can be high priced now and then. We were amazed that we should discover a manner to make the deliveries happen.
A lot more high quality than negative matters were going on. I’m very bullish about e-trade in Africa because what’s specific in this continent is you have this vast population—over one billion humans—and they are very related. There are extra than 400 million net customers in Africa; that’s the second one-biggest internet-person population on the earth, just after China. And but distribution for goods and offerings is challenging. And it’s infamous that in Africa, it’s more difficult for consumers to discover goods, and it’s extra tough to store. Because of the cell and the net, clients now have a manner of accessing goods and offerings more efficiently.
Understanding Africa’s clients
Consumers in Africa need the identical aspect as customers anywhere else: they want suitable products at an excellent price, correct satisfactory. And for us, clients need to save time and save cash. It’s an equal issue. I talk to quite a few enterprise companions who’re considering Africa and the way distinctive its miles. There are a few matters which can be equal anywhere.
In terms of consumer segments, what’s surprising is that we have many consumers who are not necessarily inside the large city regions. From an interloper, one ought to suppose, “OK, e-trade is for the inhabitants of Lagos and Cairo and Nairobi.” We have a variety of clients who stay within the small villages and inside the small towns. Why? Because they see a variety of choices on Jumia and don’t really have that preference inside the regions in which they stay. For them, it isn’t easy to have access to the products.
Overcoming barriers to enterprise
One of the boundaries, glaringly, of e-trade, is the logistics because we have to pass the goods from the traders who’re selling the products to the consumer who is ordering the product. And logistics is manifestly a huge mission for whoever is aware of Africa. In Africa, there’s no address gadget in a maximum of the towns. For a person to find a patron, you need to have a neighborhood partner who is aware of the consumer, based totally on very subjective statistics. And, for instance, in case you say in a city in Africa, “I stay in the 1/3 road by the church with the blue door,” that’s the cope with.
You and I would not find this purchaser. But in case you companion with the right neighborhood participant, who has the right nearby knowledge, they could discover those consumers because they keep in mind that. Now the challenge, of the path is that to have quite a few fragmented logistics players is a risk until you have got what we created, that is a superb set of standard generation gear and tactics that we provide to the nearby players as a way to operate their last-mile, coins-on-delivery, door-to-door-shipping groups consistent with global requirements.
Building Africa’s commercial enterprise surroundings
I very plenty accept that e-trade gives a much more secure and inexpensive way for small companies to develop because the funding required is smaller, but you can reach so many purchasers. For instance, one of our biggest sellers in Tunisia commenced from scratch, and he became designing T-shirts. Then he began to promote them online. And then he turned into promoting extra T-shirts, and he hired one individual to assist him with the production of the T-shirts, and now he has 20 employees. And he’s selling perhaps 80 percent of his merchandise online, and now he opened a store.
This is one of the many examples that we see where a person can start from zero and develop. Start small, make investments, and from there, you develop, and you then pass from online to offline instead of doing the identical component as in Europe or the USA, where the merchants move offline to online.
