“The buyer is king. In Ukraine, in Nigeria - everywhere. " How the Ukrainian online marketplace Jiji conquered Africa.

“The buyer is king. In Ukraine, in Nigeria – everywhere. ” How the Ukrainian online marketplace Jiji conquered Africa.

Anton Volyansky lives in Kiev and runs a company of 370 people, 300 of whom work in Nigeria. He is the CEO of Jiji, which is the # 1 online bulletin board market in Africa. We asked Anton to tell how the Ukrainian project took over Africa, how the African corporate culture differs from ours, and how Jiji works from the inside.

What is Jiji.

Jiji is an African online classifieds platform where you can buy or sell electronics and cars, rent or lease real estate and transact in dozens of other categories. Since its founding in 2014, Jiji's audience has grown to 10 million monthly unique visitors, with 2 million active ads totaling over $ 10 billion posted on the platform.In 2019, Jiji acquired its main competitor, OLX Africa, and raised $ 21 million in investment. The company continues to conquer Africa in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania.

Why Africa.

This is the result of the macro approach of the Ukrainian company Genesis, whose portfolio asset is Jiji. We were evaluating global markets: looking for empty niches, high volume and low competition. Nigeria is one of the youngest and most populous countries in the world. 200 million people, half of whom are under 15, is a huge potential for an e-commerce project.

In 2014, Genesis was already developing local online media in Nigeria, with the help of which the first research was carried out. The percentage of the local population online was low, there were few smartphones, and people did not trust online shopping. Almost every second online seller turned out to be a scammer.

We realized that we can fairly accurately predict the development of the Internet in Nigeria for 5 years ahead, because it was as if we were looking into the past, which was already in Ukraine.

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Investments from all over the world.

There are 3 big topics online that make money: social media, search, message boards. We were lucky to find a large and relatively empty market. We recently raised $ 21 million from six investors led by UAE-based Knuru Capital.

Today, in Nigeria, Jiji has already reached recoupment and does not require large additional investments, so we will send new money to Kenya, Ghana and other African countries. The main costs are taken by marketing to expand the audience of buyers and sellers. The total amount of investments since 2014 is about $ 50 million from funds from Europe, USA, UAE.

Purchase OLX.

In 2019, we bought OLX in Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania. They failed to successfully develop their product in the African market and compete with us.

OLX company is large and well-known all over the world. Many thought that they would buy us, but it turned out the other way around. At the time of the deal, Jiji's audience in Nigeria was 12 times that of OLX.

The first reason for our victory is the targeted approach to local users. While OLX was instilling a generic model in Africa from other markets, we created a separate development, marketing and product team for Nigeria. Secondly, we found a point of growth – the development of the bulletin board not towards peer-to-peer sales from person to person https://de.reviewing.site/page-audio-technica-ath-ag1x-test-ein-gutes-gaming-headset-mit-einem-killerfehler-pcworld, but made a bias towards small business in the role of salespeople. This is a different approach to classify development that OLX could not use. They already had a working global model, which is expensive to redo.

Third, our company has become an ideal customer. We have built a brand with a good reputation, to which you can confidently convey your audience without image loss. Now traffic from the OLX website and application goes to us. Also, an agreement was signed that for two years OLX will not compete with Jiji.

This is enough to strengthen the leadership position.

KPIs, people, bots.