Africa’s e-commerce giant, Jumia is taking bold steps to revitalize its profits after experiencing a hard turn in 2019, e-commerce giant co-founder, Jeremy Hodara revealed to Reuters.
According to Hodara, Jumia (which is listed at New Stock Exchange) current focus is on capitalizing its payments and infrastructure network and boost revenue from services for third-party sellers on its online marketplace.
The company managed to attain a $ 4 billion peak value, before plummeting in shares by almost 70 per cent since its initial public offering (IPO) in April 2019.
“We’re going to be extremely disciplined and very focused on our path to profitability,” Hodara told Reuters on Tuesday.
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In November 2019, Jumia pulled out in Cameroon and Tanzania, as well as holding its food delivery in Rwanda, thus—still Jumia’s chief has not revealed if the company plans to shrink its market any further.
However, the e-commerce giant’s adjusted earnings before interest, tax depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) loss widened to about $49 million, a 27 per cent increase from the previous year as it burned through cash.
Despite analysts saw trouble within raising more loss, Jumia chief commented that, as the business scaled up, costs would come down and improvements of the company’s algorithms have helped.
According to Hodara, the e-commerce giant plan for growth is focused on JumiaPay, the company’s online payment platform. The company is interested in making its logistics network available to third-parties, even those not selling on its e-commerce platform.
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Jumia operations landscape
Jumia is currently operating in six regions running 12 countries, with more than 600 million people and with more than 29 million products, hotels, restaurants, and other services listed
According to Jumia, it takes up to 2 seconds 1 transaction or leads to occur, within its 4.8 million active customers which rose from 3.2 in 2018.
The company has built is services to leveraging technology to deliver innovative, convenient and affordable online services to consumers while helping businesses grow as they use our platform to reach and serve consumers.
Further, in 2018, more than 81,000 local African companies and entrepreneurs have partnered with Jumia which attracts millions of customers. Jumia has also attracted 5,000 direct jobs and many more via sellers and logistics partners.
Jumia has handled more than 13.4 million packages in 2018, 90 per cent of items sold in the marketplace, with over $ 1.5 trillion market opportunity