The pan-African e-commerce giant is putting Jumia Pay in Nigeria on the rails, with the aim of positioning its brand on the buoyant African mobile payments market.
Jumia, the first African unicorn (name given to start-ups valued at more than $ 1 billion), does not want to miss the boom in mobile money in Africa.
Friday, August 26, the Africa Internet Group, which has now been uniformly called Jumia since its rebranding in June, announced the launch of its own brand.
Jumia Pay will be launched in Nigeria, before being gradually rolled out to its largest markets (Kenya, Morocco, Egypt and Côte d’Ivoire in particular).
Concretely, on the various sites of the pan-African e-merchant, Jumia Pay will be added to MTN Mobile money, the mobile payment solution of the South African telephone operator, Tigo Cash, the brand developed by the telecoms group. Luxembourg Millicom, where also Orange Money which will soon be available on Jumia Market (Kaymu before rebranding) in Ivory Coast and Cameroon.
Loyalty points
Which may seem a little curious since MTN, Millicom and Orange are all shareholders of Jumia. “One does not prevent the other. Especially since Jumia will be an integrator. We will capitalize on existing solutions. Our objective is to strengthen the notoriety of our brand, to fully support the ecosystem logic and to build customer loyalty, “explains a group executive interviewed by Jeune Afrique.
Thus, it will for example be possible for customers to accumulate loyalty points in this “wallet” during their purchases.
The other goal suggested by this launch is to reduce the proportion of cash on delivery payments, the cash delivery settlement that Jumia has made a trademark of. “These are 70 to 95% of payments on Jumia, with variations from country to country,” the group said in a statement received at Young Africa on Friday. Rather, he hopes to make Jumia Pay “a very popular prepayment option.”
Jumia’s revenues reached 134.6 million euros in 2015, more than double (+ 117.8%) of those made in 2014 (61.8 million euros) and almost 5 times those of 2013 ( € 29 million). The profitability of the company, it remained very clearly in the red, with a negative adjusted Ebitda at -111.3 million euros, which more than doubled in one year (-47.9 million euros in 2014) .
Young Africa
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