Ecommerce : The ultimate chance for Africa

E-commerce or Africa’s ultimate chance (to reach the global consumption market).

Internet is one of the biggest disruptor’s tool of those past 50 years if not the biggest.

More than 1 human out of 2 is an internet user!

Today, there are more than 4 billion internet users worldwide for an estimated 7.5 billion global population. Which makes a penetration rate of 53%. This figure is inspected to grow as access means to the internet are more and more available even in the most remote areas on the planet.

This growing connected population creates great opportunities for business online and makes it possible for the e-commerce sector to become a real industry in the economy. On the other side the European e-commerce market is already getting saturated after a succession of massive growth those past years, as in 2017 where the market grew by 15,7%*. Big players such as Amazon, Alibaba, Ebay or others like Zalando or C-Discount in France are obligating new enters and small competitors to rely on niche markets to save their rentability.

So as their market is getting crowded, it is interesting to ask why European players don’t search for new opportunities elsewhere than their domestic market. Indeed, the one market that is ignored by those big players is the one and only Africa. But this continent is still a huge market for profit, a land that allies huge consumption market and a high market growing opportunity.

Moreover, Africa has one of the most connected population on earth but is still the continent is  paradoxically not integrated to the globalized system of consumption of goods and to the global market in general.

But first to succeed in Africa  as a company, you understand and integrate its particularities.

So with all the means available  

The thing is that Africa has a big potential as a market and can be an impulsion  point for global growth. (put good points here). However, on an objective basis, the continent still a very complex market to manage, a market almost unique in its kind due to its singular culture and recent history made of colonization and wealth confiscation, so important for growth. This situation makes it difficult for big or innovative companies to easily integrate the African market today, and just apply to it the same products and tactics that they’ve been applying all over “developed” countries. Surely, the automatic need of adaptation to a so particular African  market made the continent a bad candidate for the modern way of doing business that is innovative, simpler and faster than ever ! Africa is also yet  facing numerous barriers that are hampering his way to integration in the world’s (economic) affairs. As matter of fact, the bancarisation rate, evaluated to “” in “” according to “”. A market can’t fill to the global economic and financial system with this bancarisation rate. But what is the most stunning, is how all those rather big banking Companies established so long ago on the African territory didn’t improve the situation.

Another reality is that African consumption market is still at a post-independence configuration in which consumption goods (clothes, household appliances, electronic devices etc..) are essentially second hand goods sent from western countries. In other words, goods that have a limited life expectancy  and a highly reduced performance rate. It is useless to say that this type of goods are no longer fitted for a market aspiring to be “emergent”. These  goods are not environmentally-friendly and are mostly destined to finish in huge open-sky urban garbage, so widespread on the continent. Nevertheless, today we can see with the huge internet expansion and the spread of online shopping, that everybody with a basic internet connection and a payment mean can research purchase and be delivered of whatever they found available online and in nearly every part of the globe.

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