The co-CEOs of Jumia have stepped down: “African e-commerce giant Jumia has made a change in management as co-founders Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec step down effective today as co-CEOs”. You may wonder why it took that long. My position remains that what Jumia is trying to do is hopeless. There is no human who can run a B2C ecommerce business in sub-Saharan Africa and make money in the way Jumia is operating. I made that point in the Harvard Business Review many years ago and it remains so.
From Kalahari to Mocality, OLX to old Konga and Jumia, the result will be the same: B2C ecommerce is a waste of time. The challenge is marginal cost paralysis which destroys value as you scale the business. In other words, you cannot compound and leverage anything because your unit economics does not improve as you expand.
The viable path to B2C ecommerce in Africa is the type Copia runs in Kenya. Where you cannot do that, go for B2B as TradeDepot, Mintyn and other companies do. But the traditional B2C ecommerce will burn your money.
Jumia remains a great company with many latent opportunities. I challenge the new CEO to adopt the double play strategy around its ecommerce’s one oasis. There are many great pieces in that company. But it has to restructure to unlock great moments out of the firm.
If Jumia can invite me to its Board, I will invest $100,000 tomorrow morning in the company. One area I will focus on is how it can overcome the marginal cost issue, and unlock profitability via a double play strategy. Hope they take me up! Jumia, let’s do it. I buy (to have skin in the game) and join your Board. We will fix this company.
from Yahoo Finance here
The two founders, who until today shared the chief executive role, have been at the helm of Africa’s only publicly traded company on the NYSE for over a decade, overseeing Jumia’s pan-African expansion across 11 countries as well as its product journey that now includes a marketplace, JumiaPay, its payment arm and a logistics platform.
Francis Dufay, who previously held the CEO role at one of Jumia’s fledging markets, Ivory Coast, will now replace both co-founders as acting CEO, the company’s Supervisory Board said in the statement. Dufay has been with Jumia since 2014, holding multiple senior leadership roles, more recently executive VP, Africa, responsible for the group’s e-commerce business across the continent.
According to the Supervisory Board, Dufay and Antoine Maillet-Mezeray — previously Jumia’s Group chief financial officer — have been appointed members of the company’s Management Board. Maillet-Mezeray, having stayed with Jumia for over six years and driving the company’s finance function and “further developing it in a public market context,” has earned a promotion too: executive vice president, Finance & Operations.
“We thank Jeremy and Sacha for their leadership over the last decade to envision and build a company that became the leading pan-African e-commerce player,” Jonathan Klein, chairman of the Supervisory Board, said of the announcement. “As we look ahead to the next chapter of Jumia’s journey, we want to bring more focus to the core e-commerce business as part of a more simplified and efficient organization with stronger fundamentals and a clearer path to profitability. We look forward to working closely with Francis, Antoine and the leadership team to execute on these objectives and continue on our mission of offering a compelling e-commerce platform to consumers, sellers and the broader Jumia ecosystem in Africa.”
