Jumia: Africa’s First Unicorn

Welcome to the first episode of Africa Built

In this two-part series, this episode explores the fascinating history of Jumia, Africa’s first unicorn, from its inception, funding, fierce competition, to its IPO journey. We uncover how strategic decisions, market dynamics, and industry behaviours shaped the rise and challenges of this pioneering e-commerce platform.

At 9:26 a.m. on April 12, 2019, Jumia rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Shares opened at $18.95 and closed the day up around 75 percent. The company had never made a dollar of profit and had lost roughly $965 million since 2012. Three weeks later, a short seller called it an obvious fraud.

This episode tells the story of how it got there. Jumia launched in Lagos in 2012 as two Rocket Internet clones called Kasuwa and Sabunta, five months after fuel subsidy protests shut the country down, into an economy whose national accounts would not officially count e-commerce for another two years. There were no payment rails. Pay on delivery was not a feature. It was the only arrangement Nigeria could support.

Along the way: the Samwer brothers’ Berlin clone machine, the founding nobody can agree on, the war with Sim Shagaya’s Konga and the leaked letter that called Jumia “destructive foreign competition,” the phone price war that handed the continent to Transsion, and Leo Stan Ekeh, the man who was too early in 2008 and came back in 2018 to buy Konga for scraps.

Fourteen years and more than $1.6 billion in cumulative losses later, Jumia trades below its IPO price and is still chasing its first profitable year.