Jumia, a pan-African e-commerce platform, on Friday, 12 April, 2019 commenced trading as JMIA at $14.50 per share on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) after listing on the world’s biggest bourse, with all Jumia employees across Africa ringing the “bell” at the same time in each country and in New York. Intra-day trading saw its share gain as much as 61 percent to $23.41.
The offering which is being made only by means of a prospectus makes Jumia the first African tech company to be listed on the NYSE.
The listing comes about a month after Jumia filed for a New York Initial Public Offering to raise capital for its expansion plan in the growing African market and follows announcement of its largest shareholder, MTN Group, which said it was selling off its stakes in Jumia.
With other large companies such as Twitter, Alibaba and Snap listed, Jumia said it wanted “to show the digital innovation happening in Africa and the opportunities from Africa in terms of tech and e-commerce”.
“We contemplated several venues, ultimately, we met a lot of investors and New York seemed the more natural place given the number of investors familiar with the business model. More investors with marketplace and tech focus on New York than in London. We made a logical choice,” the company said in a statement.
Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, co-founders and co-chief executives, Jumia, said, “This achievement has been made possible thanks to the hard work of our teams, the trust of our consumers, as well as the commitment of our sellers and partners. All stakeholders deserve credit for this milestone, and we are just at the beginning of a long and great journey. We are going to continue to focus on our mission and to work even harder to help consumers, sellers, partners and all stakeholders benefit from this technological revolution.”
Jumia says it sees a lot of upside in going public after being private for seven years.
“Raising the public profile is going to help us bring more sellers to Jumia. Many sellers or partners are yet to know about us, and once they do, we hope they will be keen to work with us. We also hope this will help us build even more trust with consumers, in particular those who are still not comfortable with e-commerce, may now see us as an established company and, we hope this will help our growth and consumer adoption. We also hope that this will help us with talent recruitment, retention, as we aim to attract more attention from top talent,” Jumia stated.
In an updated SEC filing, Jumia indicated it is offering 13,500,000 ADR shares for an opening price spread of $13 to $16 per share, representing 17.6 percent of all company shares. The IPO could raise up to $216 million for Jumia.
The e-commerce company has delivered GMV growth of 63.3 percent in 2018. Revenue from third party sales grew by 121.5 percent. Jumia has also delivered for the last two years positive platform contribution at group level, and for the biggest market, Nigeria, positive contribution after all fulfilment expenses during the second half of 2018.
Founded in 2012, Jumia started a mission to improve the quality of everyday life in Africa, by leveraging technology to deliver innovative, convenient and affordable online services to consumers. Jumia is currently active in 14 African countries with more than 81,000 active sellers transacting online with millions of consumers. The e-commerce platform directly employs more than 5,000 team members in Africa.
Jumia grew its customer base to 2.7 million in 2018, up from 2.7 million Active Consumers in the preceding year.
The online retail giant’s platform includes Jumia Travels, Jumia Food, Jumia Pay, and Jumia Deals, although it sold off Jumia House Nigeria and Jumia House Ghana in 2017.
Documents from the US security exchange commission (SEC) showed that Mastercard Europe pre-purchased $50 million in Jumia ordinary shares, after it agreed a few weeks ago to invest and become a major shareholder, forming strategic partnership with Jumia.
JUMOKE AKIYODE-LAWANSON & SEGUN ADAMS
