E-commerce firm, Jumia recently released its financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2021. According to the result, Jumia’s Annual Active Consumers reached 7.0 million in the second quarter of 2021, up 3% year-over-year, largely due to the continued acquisition of new consumers whilst engaging the existing ones.
Jumia’s orders reached 7.6 million, up 13% year-over-year. This was the fastest volume growth of the past 5 quarters.
Jumia’s Annual Active Consumers are unique consumers who placed an order for a product or a service on its platform, within the 12-month period preceding the relevant date, irrespective of cancellations or returns. Generally, this is assumed to be a useful indicator for the adoption of Jumia offering by consumers within its markets.
In terms of trends by categories in the report released, Brand Spur observed the following:
- Phones and electronics categories continued to see volume declines during the quarter while some of the essential categories such as beauty & personal care or FMCG faced tougher comps, having experienced very strong growth at the onset of the pandemic in the second quarter of 2020.
- The fastest-growing category on Jumia was food delivery, which posted the highest ever number of quarterly orders, up almost 60% year-over-year and accounting for 22% of total orders on our platform during the quarter. Food delivery is the first area of the business where we deployed our growth acceleration efforts late last year to reignite usage growth after the disruption experienced at the onset of the pandemic.
JumiaPay Transactions increased by 12% from 2.4 million in the second quarter of 2020 to 2.7 million in the second quarter of 2021, the fastest Transactions growth rate of the past 4 quarters. JumiaPay Transactions growth was supported by accelerating volume growth in the business, in the food delivery category in particular.
Overall, 35.4% of Orders placed on the Jumia platform in the second quarter of 2021 were completed using JumiaPay, compared to 35.6% in the second quarter of 2020.
The e-commerce firm saw its Sales and Advertising expense increased by 115% to $17.1 million in the second quarter of 2021 from $7.9 million in the same period last year, as we increased marketing investments across channels to accelerate user growth. This expense was in line with the Sales and Advertising expense in the second quarter of 2019, which reached $16.7 million.
Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec, Co-Chief Executive Officers of Jumia, commented,
“We are executing on our acceleration strategy to drive usage growth on our platform and are encouraged to see early signs of success in our business, including posting our fastest growth rate in Orders in the past five quarters.
Over the past 18 months, we have significantly diversified our product category mix, improved our unit economics and strengthened our balance sheet. To build on this momentum and drive the long-term growth of our business, we increased investments this quarter in Sales and Advertising and Technology while continuing to expand our Gross profit after Fulfillment expense.
While we start to see early signs of usage acceleration, these investments are long term in nature and we expect them to pay out over time, as we continue to execute our strategy. Our current focus is on accelerating both e-commerce and fintech adoption, by engaging consumers and sellers into the variety of our services and making our platform even more compelling and relevant as part of their everyday lives.”
