By Aloysious Kasoma
Uganda is still one of the least countries in Africa to embrace the E-Commerce platform in its economic transformation journey.
In Africa, the best countries are Morocco, South Africa and Kenya but only rated between 5-6 per cent of transactions in electronic commerce. Uganda is rated at only 1 per cent.
According to the Jumia Regional Manager, Sefik Bagdadioglu, in the countries where they have presence, Uganda lags behind.
“We are doing business in over 20 countries in Africa; North and the West are the biggest in e-commerce. Our market is more in Nigeria and Egypt followed by Morrocco, Ivory Coast, Tunisia and Kenya,” he told Business Focus.
Bagdadioglu added that if Jumia is to transform using E-commerce platform in Uganda, Kenya would be used as a benchmark because of the geographical proximity.
However, despite the tremendous prosper in the Jumia 2017 Financial Year results, Uganda’s records were not captured by the leading online e-Commerce firm in Africa.
“There was 600% growth in 2017 compared to the previous year and Jumia marketplace platforms significantly scaled the number of orders with a growth of 94% in Quarter4 2017,” he added
Bagdadioglu observed that social media usage in Uganda is still low.
He added that Jumia is still investing in Uganda and they have since given priority to Kampala and Entebbe for their trade mark services in food and retail.
“Uganda is one of the emerging markets and we are still at the investment stages and we hope to hit the sale of 200,000 items sold on Jumia website daily like in Kenya,” he said.
Jumia which is optimistic of addressing daily needs of consumers across its markets, hopes to see a strong increase in the number of orders and growth of customer base.
Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, Jumia co-CEOs commented: “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”.
According to the 2017 Highlights, Jumia reached the threshold of 550 million visits across Africa in 2017. Other groundbreaking figures for 2017 include the number of products available on the platform which increased from 50,000 in 2012 to over 5 million in 2017.
There most recent Black Friday campaign saw over 100 million visits, breaking all previous sales records across all top line drivers (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.
About 8 million packages were handled through the Jumia logistic platform, a unique achievement.
