Jumia Shuts Down Jumia Travel in Nigeria, Closes Rwanda Operations in Ongoing Restructuring Drive

The season of Jumia shutting down its businesses across its markets in Africa is not over yet. The African ecommerce giant has shut down its travel and flight marketplace, Jumia Travel, in Nigeria 6 years after launching the service.

Now with the shutdown of the service in Nigeria, Travelstart, an online travel company will take over all the operational business of Jumia Travel in Nigeria. Already, the Jumia Travel website is showing a ‘stubborn’ pop up that redirects users to Travelstart’s site.

This is the first service of the ‘African Alibaba’ to receive the axe in Nigeria. For now, its other services Jumia Mall and Jumia Food will continue to operate in the country.

Beyond Nigeria, Jumia has decided to shut down its food delivery operations in Rwanda, a country it has been in for 6 years.

“We regret to inform you that Jumia will suspend our on-demand delivery operations in Rwanda on January 9th 2020.”

Jumia said in a notice to its customers yesterday.

This shutdown marks a closure of its entire operations in the country and it follows a recent trend of Jumia closing down its entire operations in Cameroon and Tanzania, citing low performance in those markets.

Beyond the shutdown of its businesses, Jumia has also embarked on laying off staff in its Kenyan market with about 6% of its workforce there cut off last week. All these have been done within the last one month.

These events reiterate the already visible fact that Jumia is aggressively reviewing its portfolio in the 11 African countries it is present in- closing down its not so performing verticals/markets. Clearly, there is a need to ‘focus its resources on its other markets’ where the growth is strategic to the scale of Jumia.

With Jumia bleeding millions annually, the company will continue to adopt some strategic tweaks over the next few months in a move towards profitability by its predicted 2020.

How many more verticals/markets the company plans to let go off to achieve stability remains to be seen.