AFRICA – Global logistics and package delivery company, UPS has partnered with Jumia, a pan-African marketplace to expand its logistics services in Africa.
UPS will leverage Jumia’s network across Africa to grow its reach in the continent, following a new partnership announced today that gives it access to the e-commerce firm’s last-mile delivery infrastructure.
The firm’s customers can pick up or drop off packages for sending across the world at Jumia’s stations in Kenya, Morocco, and Nigeria.
Plans are underway to expand the partnership to Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and the rest of its markets in Africa (Algeria, Senegal, Tunisia, Uganda, and South Africa) thereafter.
Jumia began building its logistics business seven years ago, owing to how fragmented the logistics sector was and as a pathway to grow the number of orders made on its e-commerce marketplace beyond cities — by enabling customers in remote areas to make orders.
In 2020, Jumia opened its logistic marketplace to third parties after exclusively reserving it for e-commerce and food vendors operating on its marketplace.
The company had plans to build a logistics infrastructure in Africa offering sellers and consumers dependable, convenient and cost-effective delivery services.
“Today, we are helping other businesses overcome these infrastructure challenges by giving them access to our logistics platform,” said Apoorva Kumar, Jumia’s senior vice president of logistics.
“We are delighted and humbled by the opportunity to partner up with UPS, a global logistics leader, to offer them last mile solutions in Africa.”
In its logistics marketplace, Jumia uses about 600 partners for last-mile delivery, most of whom are small logistics firms.
The e-commerce firm has 3,000 pickup stations spread across its 11 markets in Africa, all supported by a technology that aggregates demand and matches it with supply capacity on the basis of several parameters like quality of service, reachability of network, and cost of delivery.
Given the vast untapped market, e-commerce platforms such as Jumia look for partnerships to deploy innovative ways to explore the unique African business terrain.
UPS’s asset-light approach, like the Jumia partnership, offers a pathway for businesses to connect to new customers quickly and reliably around the world through global networks, potentially accelerating their revenue growth.
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