There has been a coup in the Classifieds industry in Zimbabwe. Econet’s Classifieds property, OWNAI, has surpassed the 100 000 listings mark overtaking the incumbent, Classifieds.co.zw to be the largest online Classifieds site in Zimbabawe.
Re-launched in November 2015, OWNAI is the rebranded Tengai. Tengai was last year when it launched. Thereafter, it was pulled down.
According to the company on its website, “Ownai is derived from the Shona term ‘Onai’ meaning ‘to see’ and combining that with ‘buy and own it’, we have refreshed the word to be spelt with ‘own’ in it.”
It seems it is back with a vengeance. It currently has over 100 000 listings and it is growing by the day. As at the time of this post, it has about 105 000 listings.
OWNAI is positioned for greatness as it has a lot to gain from its affiliation with the biggest MNO in Zimbabwe; from Econet’s market share of over 55.5% to its popular mobile money product, EcoCash.
I guess OWNAI will soon be a household name like EcoCash in Zimbabwe and Econet might be looking at extending this property across its operations in Africa.
I am sure the OWNAI would have noticed the emergence of a big threat in the recent merger of Ringier Africa and One Africa Media to form Ringier One Africa Media (ROAM). Africa has two other big competitors namely Naspers, OLX and Rocket Internet’s Africa Internet Group.
Likewise the emergence of OWNAI may revive talks between Classifieds.co.zw and One Africa Media which was whispered in 2015.
Though the country, Zimbabwe, is going through tough times with its economy, there is still an appetite for trading. Traditionally, most of the trading is done offline, there is really an opportunity to take it online and even more specifically, via the mobile phone.
According to the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Potraz) report for the fourth quarter of 2015, the total number of mobile subscriptions increased by 2,2% to 19,5 million from 19,1 million recorded in the previous quarter, while active subscriptions increased by 2,9% to 12,8 million from 12,4 million recorded in the previous quarter.
Mobile data usage went up 27,4% to record 1,203,378,839MB from 944,268,192MB recorded in the previous quarter and mobile internet made up 95,6% of total internet subscriptions.
