Jumia Group is a company which operates a range of online marketplaces. The company was founded by Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec in 2013. Its headquarters are currently in the Yaba area of Lagos, Nigeria. The company initially started out as the Rocket Internet Company. However, the rapid growth of the company allowed it to secure strategic investors, including CDC, Goldman Sachs, Orange, MTN and the Millicom group. On June 23, 2016, Africa Internet Group, Jumia Market's parent company announced that it was bringing all its known e-commerce companies under the Jumia umbrella.
History
Jumia Market was founded by Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec in February, 2013. The company started operations in Nigeria and Pakistan that same year under the name Kaymu; after receiving an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Rocket Internet. The company grew from an employee base of ten to sixty within first nine months and opened operations in Ghana and Morocco in October, 2013. By June 2015, Kaymu had expanded its operations to Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Croatia and Angola Mozambique, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, Slovenia, Sri Lanka, Bulgaria, Uzbekistan, and the Philippines, bringing the total number of countries to 35. Jumia Market employs eBay's business model, serving as an online mall where sellers and buyers meet to make transactions. The company launched its smartphone apps for Android, iOS and Blackberry in September, 2014 tapping into the tremendous growth of mobile technology, especially on the African continent. In March 2016, AIG announced that top tier investment bank, Goldman Sachs and French Insurance company AXA, had joined its list of investors with both investing a cumulative sum of over $300 million. The company is headed globally by Massi Spalazzi, who serves as Chief Executive Officer, while Andrea Di Natale serves as the company's Chief Operating Officer. In June 2016, AIG, via a combination of a live Periscope broadcast and Twitter feed updates, announced that it was merging all its online brands into one company: Jumia. As a result, platforms exploring food, real estate, automobile and general goods market, became a part of the Jumia franchise. By the first quarter of 2019, Jumia was already operating in several countries in Africa, including Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt and Uganda among others. The Kenyan Jumia is the most popular online shopping platform in the country
Products and services
In October 2015, Jumia Market Village, an offline store, was created to help attract customers who were skeptical about the safety of online transactions. The store was designed to create an environment for customers who were looking to interact with sellers face to face and customers who could not complete payments through the Internet. Jumia Market launched AIG Express, a logistics network, in May, 2015 to help ease logistics and operations management in Africa. AIG Express aims to provide faster delivery time while creating 100,000 jobs in Africa. Jumia Market SafePay was launched in May, 2013 as an avenue for safe payments on its platform. SafePay is an escrow service that allows buyers to pay directly to Jumia Market for items bought plus the cost of delivery, while sellers have to ship the item purchased to the buyer before receiving the money from Jumia Market. In countries like Uganda, where Jumia is operating Mtn Mobile money as one of the payment methods, the customer pays into a Jumia mobile money account after which Jumia pays off the seller.
Controversies
Jumia Market, like other startups backed by Rocket Internet, has come under heavy criticism for its duplicate business model. Rocket Internet has been accused of not having any original business ideas and taking business models that have succeeded in Europe and the U.S. and cloning them in emerging economies. Jumia Market has been described as a company that copied the eBay business model.
