The New Coronation of Jumia in America

Good People, Jumia’s #1 enemy has turned into a major apostle. Citron Research which published a really damning report on Jumia has changed the color of its pens, from red to black. Yes, Jumia is a promise, and investors need to understand that. Below is Citron’s summary from the new report:

EVERYTHING HAS NOW CHANGED.
While we acknowledge that starting an e-commerce business in an emerging market will have its challenges, the rewards can be great for patient investors as we’ve seen with MELI, BABA and SE. Over the past year, the pandemic has accelerated the global shift to e-commerce and JMIA has benefited from:
• Acceleration of e-commerce adoption by Nigerian consumers
• The renewed focus on profitability
• The rapid acceptance of fintech products in Nigeria including JumiaPay
• The ability to use JMIA has a platform for ancillary products
“Investors who ignore Nigeria now have to ask themselves: What do I know that Patrick Collison doesn’t?”

But if you look at the points, Citron is just coming late to the party. In August 2019 when Jumia was working on JumiaPay, I wrote that it was the inflection point. Yes, Jumia has gotten its double play in ecommerce, just as Amazon has AWS, Alibaba has Alipay, and India’s Flipkart has PhonePe. And when it added gaming, I concluded thus: “It is good morning in Jumia”. If you look carefully, Jumia is evolving as a hybrid super-portal and if it can control demand, it would win more territories.

Jumia is the leading pan-African e-commerce platform, present across 11 countries in Africa. Its mission is to improve the quality of everyday life in Africa by leveraging technology to deliver innovative, convenient and affordable online services to consumers, while helping businesses grow as they use Jumia’s platform to better reach and serve consumers.

The Jumia platform consists of a marketplace, which connects sellers with consumers, a logistics service, which enables the shipment and delivery of packages from sellers to consumers, and a payment service, which facilitates transactions among participants active on the Jumia platform in selected markets.

On the marketplace, more than 110,000 sellers offer a broad range of goods and services.

Jumia Logistics facilitates the delivery of goods in a convenient and reliable way, leveraging an extensive network of third-party logistics service providers, seamlessly integrated through the Jumia proprietary technology platform.

JumiaPay offers a safe and easy solution to facilitate online transactions on the Jumia platform, with the intention of integrating additional financial services in the future.

Jumia is now worth, again, more than $1 billion. It sits at $1.4 billion at the moment. But Jumia has a big appointment: Nov 10. That is the day it  will release its results for the quarter ended September 30, 2020. If it does well, JMIA can hit $40 but if it does not, blame Isaac Newton for explaining gravity.

This is a new coronation – and Jumia needs to send Paystack zobo, amala and nkwobi [pay on delivery is fine]. Yes, Paystack has put Nigeria on a good side in Wall Street.

Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA (Feb 10 - May 3, 2025), and join Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe and our global faculty; click here.