This is the last day of the year 2019. This year has seen a lot of activities in the innovation and business space.
Innovation Village was there to capture and report a lot of these activities and I hope we have done justice to delivering the information prompt, concise and accurate.
Here is an overview of the most significant happenings of 2019.
IPOs
One of the significant IPOs from the African continent was the listing of eCommerce company, Jumia on the New York Stock Exchange. It was greeted with pomp and pageantry but this was shortlived as it was hit with Citron fraud claim. Its 3rd quarter results for the period ending 30th September 2019 showed a 34% increase in the company’s losses from €40.6 million in Q2 to €54.6 million in Q3 prompting it to embark in cost cutting measures. These measures included offloading businesses so as to focus on growth and reduction of financial losses.
Within the last couple of weeks, Jumia suspended its ecommerce business in Cameroun, exited Tanzania and reduced its staff strength in Kenya. It also transferred its Jumia Travel business to Travelstart.
So what do we expect in 2020? More cost cutting measures which will hopefully see it reducing its losses or even breaking even.
In the Telecoms space, we witnessed the listing of Airtel Africa on the London Stock Exchange and the Nigerian Stock Exchange. Africa’s biggest mobile operator, MTN, also received the green light to list on the Nigerian unit on the Nigerian Stock Exchange this year.
One of the IPOs we had expected but didn’t happen or I’d say, hasn’t happened is that of Interswitch. We thought it would happen this year but it didn’t. However, a significant event was Interswitch’s attainment of the Unicorn status after Visa’s $200 million investment in the company. We might still see the IPO in 2020
Investments, Acquisitions and Partnerships
There were a lot of investments, acquisitions and partnerships this year that we cannot list them all here. However here are notable ones.
- The Chinese invasion with these investments – $120 million in OPay and $40million in PalmPay
- Kenya’s Twiga Foods raised $30 million…Link
- Africa focused classifieds platform, Jiji, raised $21 million…Link
- Chipper Cash, an African cross-border payment startup secured $6 million investment.
- Vivendi’s Canal+ acquired African film and television studio ROK for an undisclosed amount….Link
- Nigerian Co-creation Hub’s acquisition of Kenya’s iHUB…Link
- OneFi’s acquisiton of Amplify…Link
- Kenyan Internet Services provider, BRCK, acquisition of its rival Surf….Link
Closures
2019 also saw the closure of several businesses. Though expected in the course of doing business, it was rather painful to see some companies close shop. Here are some of the notable closures.
The first one for the year was the closure of Naspers’ Career24 in Nigeria. This happened in the first year of 2019. Another Naspers business suffered the same fate in April 2019 – aggregator-based news platform Bounce News Nigeria. Jiji and OLX entered an agreement to transfer all OLX assets in Sub-Saharan Africa to Jiji, thereby leading to the death of another Naspers’ business in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Another major closure this year was Econet Media’s Kwese TV. It started with a lot of promise about 2 years ago but it ended up in administration over $130 million debt.
Other closures are listed below:
