of the pie.Nigeria-based Jumia Group has e-marketplaces in 14 African countries with over 5 million product or services listed. Naspers, one of the largest technology investors on the planet, has bought South Africa’s e-marketplace Takealot. Mobile cash operator, Safaricom (designers of M-Pesa), has also launched an e-marketplace, Masoko, offering products ranging from electronic devices to food.Singapore companies can include to Africa’s e-commerce market Beyond selling services and products on Africa’s e-marketplaces straight to African customers, the continent’s thriving digital economy uses rich opportunities for Singapore companies seeking higher growth and market diversification.Enterprise Singapore, a federal government company under Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Market, is accountable for assisting Singapore business grow and globalise.
This includes enhancing networks overseas so business are able to acquire market access. Africa, for one, is a big and diverse market. Through our abroad centres in Accra, Nairobi and Johannesburg, we are able to construct networks with regional governments and deepen relationships with personal sector partners. On-ground presence helps us to see the marketplace with a sharper focus. In addition, Business Singapore arranges cluster-based organisation missions for our companies to discover brand-new digital chances for themselves.In the in 2015 alone, Enterprise Singapore has actually helped more than 10 regional companies to break into Africa’s digital technology area consisting of e-commerce platforms and cross-border payments.Arcadier, an e-marketplace supplier
, is working with Stripe-backed Nigerian payment gateway company, Paystack, to allow its users in Nigeria to send out and get payments for purchases made on its platform. The Singapore company has actually likewise tattooed a partnership with the Cross River State government to sell cocoa beans and associated processed products like cocoa butter, power and alcohols to the international market through their platform.Singapore business can capture early mover benefit, particularly in synthetic intelligence and information analytics. Visenze, a digital company, powers visual commerce through smart image recognition solutions. Global merchants like Rakuten and ASOS form part of its customers. Here in Africa, Visenze is
offering visual search options for South African style e-commerce website, Spree. The collaboration has actually resulted in Spree clinching the CXA Digital Innovator Award for being the very first African online seller to present an image-based search feature.Demand for complementary services E-commerce can not thrive without the ideal infrastructure. An unbanked population combined with inefficiencies in logistics, for instance, are a few of e-commerce’s biggest obstacles. McKinsey estimates that around 2.2 billion of the world’s unbanked live in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.Singapore-based Red Dot Payment, has actually partnered Finserve Africa, a subsidiary of Equity Bank, to facilitate international payments for East African e-commerce buyers. Another home-grown business, TransferTo, is helping with cross-border mobile payments for Africa’s largest telcos– Safaricom, MTN and Airtel. TransferTo is likewise powering Africans to buy and sell from worldwide e-marketplaces by facilitating M-Pesa top up into their PayPal accounts and vice versa. Singapore business can provide attempted and evaluated solutions to support Africa’s fintech industry.Major infrastructure advancements are already underway in Africa, such as the train linking Kenya’s port city Mombasa to its capital city Nairobi. This is set to improve the continent’s supply chain effectiveness and minimize logistics costs. Our regional players have end-to-end supply chain capabilities in areas such as shipping, warehousing and logistics to strengthen the development of Africa’s e-commerce market. Singapore’s logistics services have the included advantage of being known to be competitive and safe and secure
, with high fulfilment rates. Ascent Solutions, an IoT business that specialises in freight security and track and trace for clever logistics, is providing ingenious services to logistics partners in Africa. These services are helping their customers protect valuable possessions and items on the move.The race to get a piece of Africa’s digital pie is intensifying. Pulling together these capabilities, Singapore companies can reproduce the success for Africa and assistance in connecting the continent to the rest of the world. Together with African partners, we can enhance and strengthen the continent’s digital facilities, and ride the wave of urbanisation and increasing middle class.Rahul Ghosh is local group director of sub-Saharan Africa for Enterprise Singapore.
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