Learn By Trying

African eCommerce Round-up #2

Ben -

This is a fortnightly round-up of news, events and investments that have happened in the African eCommerce and retail-tech space. This edition covers 16th to 30th June 2021.

💰Investments & Exits

Nigeria 🇳🇬 : Classified company Jiji acquires Cars45 from the OLX Group for an undisclosed amount. I did a deep dive on the classifieds space last week. If you haven't read it, check it out here. Car listings are the second most popular category on Jiji with about $3B worth of listings. Car45's key value is its network of vehicle inspection centres. Jiji also claims to be the largest eCommerce company in Africa by GMV. Read the announcement here.

Egypt 🇪🇬 : Trella raises $42 million Series A led by Maersk and Raed Ventures - Cairo-based digital freight marketplace Trella has raised $42 million in a funding round comprising $30 million in new equity and $12 million in debt facilities. Maersk Growth and Raed Ventures led the equity, alongside Algebra Ventures, Vision Ventures, Next Billion Ventures, Venture Souq, Foundation Ventures and Flexport. Lendable led the debt facilities. Read the announcement here.

Kenya 🇰🇪 : Kune Foods, an eCommerce food delivery service, announced a $1M pre-seed investment. The announcement itself was full of cringe-worthy quotes that caused a significant backlash on social media. Read the article here.

🚀Launches

Kenya 🇰🇪 : The M-pesa "Super App" launched. The term super app here is currently a little generous given the limited functionality outside m-pesa core, but it delivers a better customer experience from the older MySafaricom App. It now includes embedded "apps" selling items such as bus tickets and event tickets. No details were given on how to submit an app to be included in the super-app, suggesting this will be more of a walled garden than an open ecosystem for now. The commission they will take from sales generated in the app is also not mentioned. Read about the app here.

📚Reports & Resources

South Africa 🇿🇦 : Naspers released their FY21 results.

The numbers themselves are breathtaking especially considering Naspers started as a newspaper company in Cape Town. Overall revenue was $29.6 billion, with $5.6 billion in profit.

The results show that Takealot, an e-commerce marketplace that Naspers own, has a GMV of $1.022 Billion, which makes it bigger than Jumia, at least by GMV. In addition, Takealot is active in South Africa only versus Jumia, which is in 9 African countries, just showing how mature South Africa's market is compared to the rest of Africa.

Other highlights:

  • Takealot's GMV grew 69% year on year.
  • Mr D, their food delivery business, grew orders by 117% (93% YoY revenue growth).
  • Takealot's group revenue was $606 million, but they made a $7 million trading loss.

📢 Announcements

Google made three announcements to support entrepreneurship in Africa.

A $3M Black Founders Fund in Africa - Offering up to $100,000 grants to approximately 50 investable startups, plus about $220,000 in Google Cloud Credits and Ad Grants. Applications close on the 7th July 2021. Apply here.

Google.org is also giving a $3M grant to the Tony Elumelu Foundation to support their annual entrepreneurship programme and provide training and funding to 500 African informal business-owners in rural and low-income communities in Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and select Francophone countries.

Unveiling of the 15 startups that are joining the 6th class of the Google Africa startup accelerator. 5 of 15 companies stand out, as they are all working on problems in retail or eCommerce. These are:

  • Chekkit - Counterfeit control from Nigeria 🇳🇬
  • Khula - Agricultural supply chain tools from South Africa 🇿🇦
  • PayWay - Digital payment platform in Ethiopia 🇪🇹
  • Tendo - Online storefront solution from Ghana 🇬🇭
  • Whoosh - Online payment gateway in South Africa 🇳🇬
  • Full list of 15 here

🌎 Other Relevant News Worldwide

Facebook announced three eCommerce focused features that they will roll out soon.

  • An AI-powered image recognition that will come to Facebook and Instagram. This will automatically identify what products are in an image and predicts their categories, like “watch,” and attributes, like colour and style.
  • WhatsApp shops rolling out in more countries, including ratings and reviews.
  • Shop ads across their platforms. Remember the hullabaloo about the change in WhatsApp's privacy policy and encryption. It was the necessary move then to allow for these ads. Therefore, expect interactions with sellers on Facebook platforms to result in ads from "similar" sellers. Read the announcement here.

Shopify announced it would take 0% commission from the first $1 million developers make from its app and theme marketplace annually. This move should increase the number of developers working on the Shopify ecosystem. African payment gateways like Pesapal, Paystack and DPO all have apps on the Shopify marketplace. Read the announcement here.

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