Jumia Technologies AG Sponsored ADR Stock

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Jumia's Results Conference Call for the Second Quarter of 2026. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to Ricardo Pinho, Head of Investor Relations for Jumia. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our second quarter 2026 earnings call. With us today are Francis Dufay, CEO of Jumia; and Antoine Maillet-Mezeray, Executive Vice President, Finance and Operations.

We would like to remind you that our discussions today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Moreover, these forward-looking statements may speak only to our expectations as of today. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise these statements. For a discussion of some of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from the forward-looking statements expressed today, please see the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 20-F as published on February 24, 2026, as well as our other submissions with the SEC.

In addition, on this call, we will refer to certain financial measures not reported in accordance with IFRS. You can find reconciliations of these non-IFRS financial measures to the corresponding IFRS financial measures in our earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website.

With that, I will hand over to Francis.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Jumia's second quarter 2026 earnings call. 2025 was an important year for us as we demonstrated the resilience and scalability of our model. Since taking over as CEO in November '22, I have consistently emphasized our path to profitability, and Q2 '26 marks our continued execution on that commitment.

Over the past few years, Jumia has been building an e-commerce model designed specifically for Africa, adapted to the unique structural supply, logistical and consumer realities of our markets. In 2025, we proved that this model delivers scale with improving economics and Q2 '26 confirmed that the flywheel is turning. Q2 is another strong data point and one that demonstrates the resilience of our model.

We faced real external headwinds this quarter, supply disruptions in phones and electronics, fuel surcharges and demand pressure from price declines in certain crops. Despite this, we delivered sustained growth in orders and quarterly active customers, continued improvements in our unit economics and a meaningful reduction in adjusted EBITDA losses year-over-year.

Importantly, we deliberately chose to protect our margins and unit economics in this uncertain environment rather than chase GMV at the expense of profitability. We can't say with certainty how long these headwinds will last, but Q2 proved that we have the right fundamentals to navigate this kind of macro uncertainty without losing our path to profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis. We are confident that our path to Q4 breakeven is intact.

This foundation continued to drive operating momentum in the second quarter. GMV grew 23% year-over-year, adjusted for perimeter effects, even though external headwinds weighed on growth in our higher-value categories. Performance was resilient across our markets, reflecting the continued strengthening of our marketplace fundamentals and efficient execution.

Profitability metrics continue to move in the right direction. Adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed meaningfully year-over-year to $8.7 million from $13.6 million in Q2 '25, confirming our path to our Q4 '26 breakeven target. The business continued to absorb higher volumes with improving efficiency while maintaining a disciplined approach to costs. Based on the progress we made in '25 and the momentum continuing into Q2 '26, we remain confident in achieving our target of adjusted EBITDA and positive cash flow in the fourth quarter of '26 and delivering full year profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis and positive cash flow in 2027.

We are also announcing today a $50 million capital raise anchored by a $25 million investment from the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group, also including investments by Axion, one of our largest shareholders as well as selected new investors. I will come back to the capital raise later in my remarks.

The headwinds we anticipated coming into 2026, supply disruptions in memory chips and phones, the disruption of air freight through the Middle East and rising fuel costs had a tangible impact on our Q2 results. The impact was felt primarily on GMV in the phones and electronics categories and on our fulfillment costs through fuel surcharges. While supply and fuel prices volatility persists into the early third quarter of '26, these dynamics do not change our path to profitability.

On the contrary, they proved the resilience of our model. Our model can withstand this environment well. It is locally embedded and sourced predominantly via sea freight that makes us less exposed than cross-border platforms that depend on airfreight. Q2 is proof that this foundation holds even under pressure, notwithstanding its impact on top line growth. We maintain our confidence in Q4 '26 breakeven and we reiterate our adjusted EBITDA guidance for '26.

GMV growth reflected a category mix shift. Fashion, Beauty and Home & Living performed strongly, driven primarily by our international sellers as well as local marketplaces. These are categories with lower average item value, but significantly higher take rates for Jumia than in the phones or electronics categories. The phones and electronics categories were impacted by supply disruptions caused mostly by memory chips and CPU shortages, especially impacting the supply of entry-level smartphones around $100 in high demand in our markets.

Air freight disruptions through the Gulf also temporarily disrupted smartphone supply chains. Supply volatility persists into the early third quarter of '26 and prices remain elevated versus January and February, with some brands more heavily impacted than others. We also saw a specific slowdown in certain electronic subcategories driven by shortages from particular suppliers of high-value products.

On the demand side, growth was also tempered by Ivory Coast, where the decline in cocoa farm gate prices reduced purchasing power, particularly at country. Despite all of this, we still delivered 23% GMV growth year-over-year adjusted for perimeter effects. Gross profit expanded 28%, demonstrating the resilience of our model and the strength of the underlying platform. More broadly, we believe value-focused platforms are likely to gain market share during periods of rising costs and inflation as consumers prioritize affordability. This is a dynamic we expect to see work in our favor should the current cost environment persist.

Usage trends remained strong across our platform. Adjusted for perimeter effects, physical goods orders grew 28% year-over-year, driven by expanding in-country geographic coverage, improved assortment and sustained consumer demand. Adjusting for perimeter effects, quarterly active customers increased 23% year-over-year, reflecting continued traction in both acquisition and retention. Repeat behavior continues to improve with 44% of new customers from Q1 '26 making a repeat purchase within 90 days, up from 42% in Q1 '25.

Improving platform usage trends reflect the continued progress in our fundamentals, expanding assortment, competitive price points, growing reach of our distribution network and efficient marketing. Average order value for physical goods decreased to $34.6 from $36.3 in Q2 '25. This reflects the category mix shift that I have discussed already on this call, lower average item value but higher take rates. Nonetheless, orders did not become less profitable. In fact, the gross profit per physical goods order increased to $4.9 in Q2 '26 compared to $4.8 in Q2 '25.

Revenue totaled $52 million, up 14% year-over-year, driven by higher usage and improved monetization. First-party sales represented 10.6% of total GMV compared to 13.1% in Q2 '25. This shift in mix with marketplace revenue now representing a larger share is part of the reason why revenue grew 14% despite GMV adjusted for perimeter effects growing 23%.

Now turning to profitability. The progress made over the past 3 years continues to translate into measurable operating leverage. Cost improvements across general and administrative, technology and content and fulfillment expense represent long-term and sustainable savings. Commission and take rate increases implemented in mid-January '26 continued to support gross profit expansion with limited impact on seller growth. This validates our strategy of progressive monetization on the back of greater volumes and better seller experience.

We also drove continued growth in higher-margin revenue streams. Marketing and advertising revenue rose up 88% year-over-year and value-added services revenue up 61% year-over-year. Both reflect improved platform monetization. These changes are consistent across markets and reflect stronger marketplace fundamentals. On advertising specifically, that growth was driven by increased marketplace density and continued improvement in our self-serve tools.

Seller adoption of sponsored products remains at an early stage with only 26% of sellers currently using retail media advertising compared to 19% in Q2 '25. So there is meaningful headroom ahead. We have deliberately kept the return on advertising spend for our sellers relatively high at this stage, prioritizing advertiser activation and building a credible proof point over near-term advertising yield. Greater monetization will be unlocked as seller density keeps improving.

Fulfillment cost per physical goods order was $2.04, down 7% year-over-year on a reported basis or down 4% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. This reflects productivity gains and economies of scale in fulfillment operations, increased call center automation and improved logistics partner rates. Most fulfillment operating expenses are incurred in local markets and denominated in local currencies. Two items partially offset this improvement in the quarter, nonrecurring termination costs from fulfillment headcount reductions, a onetime item now behind us and temporary fuel surcharges from local logistics partners following fuel price increases.

Despite these effects, the underlying cost trajectory remains favorable. Looking ahead on fulfillment, we are focused on executing our cost improvement roadmap. This has 2 main work streams. First, improving staff efficiency in our fulfillment centers through better tools, processes, performance monitoring and incentives for our agents. Second, reducing friction and inefficiencies for our 3PL partners, including loading time reduction and lowering the opening and operating costs of pickup stations. Both are ongoing, and we expect to see the benefits compound as volumes scale into the second half of the year.

Technology and content expense declined 2% year-over-year, reflecting ongoing headcount optimization, automation, platform simplification and the benefit of renegotiated vendor agreements, including our cloud infrastructure. As a result, adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed by 36% to $8.7 million, down from $13.6 million in Q2 '25. That is a 36% improvement while absorbing real external pressure, a good measure of the operating leverage that we have built.

Loss before income tax was $10.9 million, a 33% improvement year-over-year or 34% on a constant currency basis, reflecting higher gross profit and improved operating performance. Quarterly cash burn was $14.3 million in Q2 '26 compared to $15.3 million in Q1 '26 and $12.4 million decrease in liquidity in Q2 '25. The year-over-year increase reflects an improvement in operating loss that was more than offset by a shift in working capital contribution.

Turning to the operational highlights and execution at the country level. Q2 '26 demonstrated continued execution strength across most of our markets despite a challenging external environment. International sourcing continued to scale with 5.8 million gross items sourced internationally in the second quarter, up 96% year-over-year, adjusted for perimeter effects. This reflects the continued scaling of our Chinese seller base as well as growing volumes from our supply base for affordable fashion in Turkey.

We maintained marketing efficiency with CRM, paid online and SEO channels, supporting customer acquisition at attractive unit economics. Marketplace dynamics remain strong. The number of quarterly active sellers grew 20% year-over-year versus Q2 '25, reflecting improved vendor experience, continued investment in vendor technology and the attractiveness of our platform economics.

Growing total volumes and competitive take rates continue to make Jumia a compelling channel for sellers across our markets. Increased marketplace density is a key driver for us to keep on improving our customer value proposition and grow our retail advertising revenue. Operationally, we continue to extend our reach beyond major urban centers. Orders from upcountry regions accounted for 61% of total volumes, up from 59% in the prior quarter, both adjusted for perimeter effects. These regions are delivering strong growth while benefiting from a cost structure that scales efficiently with volume.

In secondary cities, we are addressing clear customer pain points, including limited product availability and elevated prices from local traders. As a result, our value proposition continues to resonate strongly, driving both adoption and repeat purchase.

I would now like to give you some detail on some of the countries in which we operate. Nigeria delivered a strong quarter. Physical goods GMV increased 36% year-over-year. Sustained growth was driven by a broad range of categories with Home & Living performing particularly strongly alongside continued traction from upcountry expansion. Nigeria was impacted by smartphone supply shortages in the quarter and by specific supply disruptions in other electronic subcategories. We continue to scale our logistics capacity ahead of Q4 and are progressing the expansion of our pickup station network into the north of the country, which requires no meaningful CapEx investment. Consumer demand remains strong. We see significant long-term growth potential in this market.

Kenya delivered a solid quarter with physical goods GMV up 23% year-over-year. Kenya continued to demonstrate healthy growth driven by strong supply fundamentals and efficient marketing execution. As in other markets, GMV growth was softened by the smartphone supply disruption in the quarter. Kenya remains a relatively underpenetrated market with significant upcountry opportunity, and our Q3 priority is to expand our delivery network to dozens of new cities ahead of the year-end season.

Ivory Coast's performance held close to flat over the course of the quarter. Physical goods GMV was down 1% year-over-year, reflecting a very slow quarter. Ivory Coast faced headwinds on both the demand and supply sides. On the demand side, the cocoa farm gate price decline, down nearly 60% from early '26, disrupted the sale of the March and April small harvest and reduced purchasing power for upcountry farmers and cooperatives. This had a visible impact on the upcountry markets.

On the supply side, continued disruption in electronic supply, combined with broad tax reforms disrupting the whole vendor base as the retail sector adjusts, creating additional friction. These headwinds were concentrated in high-value, lower-margin categories, so they weighed more heavily on GMV than on the underlying business. Quarterly active customers grew 5% year-over-year and quarterly active sellers grew 33% year-over-year, reflecting the marketplace that kept expanding its customer and seller base through a difficult quarter.

Egypt's performance this year confirms sustained recovery. Physical goods GMV grew 45% year-over-year, excluding corporate sales, which were still present in Q2 '25, but have since been deprioritized. Physical goods GMV grew 50% year-over-year, confirming the growth turnaround in the Egyptian market. This is being driven by the local marketplace even as competition in the online space remains more intense than in our other markets.

We are executing our playbook, extending more affordable assortment across key categories, growing our logistics network into smaller underserved cities, building our JForce agent network and leveraging both our digital and offline marketing channels. The vast majority of Egyptian households are in the lower middle income segment. And the Jumia model, which has proven itself across Africa, is well suited to serve this population. We see a large underpenetrated opportunity and meaningful runway for growth.

Ghana delivered a strong second quarter with physical goods GMV increasing 77%, driven by upcountry expansion, a scaling local marketplace and strong supply from international sellers. Ghana was also impacted by smartphone supply disruptions. Our primary focus is to continue scaling our logistics capabilities ahead of Q4 as we prepare to further expand our city coverage and improve customer experience and cost efficiency.

Our other markets portfolio collectively delivered 3% physical goods GMV growth with notable country level headwinds in Uganda and Senegal. In Q2, 2 external developments had a tangible impact on our business. Both developments were global in nature. And if anything, they reinforce the case for our model, a locally embedded seafreight-based platform is structurally better positioned to absorb this kind of disruption.

First, memory chips and CPU price increases. The supply disruption in entry-level smartphones affected our phones category across most markets. We also saw a specific slowdown in other electronic subcategories driven by shortages from particular suppliers of high average item value products. Supply disruption persists in the early third quarter of 2026 and prices remain elevated versus early '26 levels. We continue to mitigate the concentration risk by diversifying our supplier base. This diversification work is central to the resilience of our supply chain, and Q2 is proof of that with our bottom line holding up despite the disruption.

Second, the war in the Middle East. Broader oil market dynamics drove significant fuel price increases across our markets in Q2. Our local logistics partners passed this through as surcharges, which had a tangible negative impact on our Q2 fulfillment costs. While fuel prices remain volatile, fuel surcharges were lowered in a number of markets starting in early July, though they remain in place elsewhere, and we continue to monitor fuel costs closely. Our pickup station network limits this exposure, and it keeps growing. 75% of our shipped packages are fulfilled through pickup stations rather than door delivery in Q2 '26, up from 71% in Q2 '25, both adjusted for perimeter effects.

We are pleased to welcome the IFC as a new shareholder and partner, stepping in to help us grow our platform and drive impact across the continent. This is an important milestone for Jumia as it reflects positively on our credibility towards institutional investors and underscores our ability to drive social impact. In addition, new investments from existing shareholders is a strong sign of their confidence in our strategy and the long-term potential of e-commerce in Africa. We also welcome selected new investors with strong reputation.

A meaningfully stronger balance sheet will derisk our path to profitability and reduce our financing risk in a volatile macro environment. It will also enable targeted resource allocation to boost platform usage and improve efficiency in '26, '27. We currently intend to use the net proceeds to support our next phase of growth, enhance efficiency across our core African markets and strengthen our integrated marketplace and logistics network.

For instance, we plan to gradually increase our working capital over the third quarter of '26 in order to capture attractive supply opportunities and make targeted investments in our fulfillment operations to further reduce unit costs and give ourselves more flexibility to drive growth in '27, including through the marketing level. Capital alone is not what differentiates us.

We believe that our deepest competitive moat is our understanding of the idiosyncrasies of African commerce, fragmented addressing, cash dominant payments and last mile terrain that off-the-shelf playbooks cannot solve. Years of operating through these realities have built a logistics and fulfillment network that would be difficult, time-consuming and costly for any new entrants to replicate. We are committed to delivering the trajectory to breakeven by chasing more scale in a disciplined way, improving operational execution and further streamlining our fixed cost base.

While we are currently navigating an uncertain international environment, we believe that our business fundamentals, which were rebuilt from '22 to '25, mostly in tougher times than this, are strong and resilient. We do expect some temporary disruptions, but it does not change our midterm adjusted EBITDA targets or our belief in Jumia's long-term opportunity for growth.

With that, I will now turn the call over to Antoine to walk you through the financials in more detail.

Thank you, Francis, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I will now walk you through our financial performance for the second quarter. Starting with revenue. Second quarter revenue reached $52 million, up 14% year-over-year or up 15% on a constant currency basis. This reflects strong volume growth, partly moderated by a higher share of third-party sales related to first-party sales as third-party transactions generate commission income rather than full sales revenue.

Marketplace revenue for the second quarter totaled $28.8 million, up 34% year-over-year and up 36% on a constant currency basis. Third-party sales were $23.5 million, up 26% year-over-year or up 29% on a constant currency basis. Growth was driven by solid performance in the marketplace, including healthy usage trends and higher effective take rates. Marketing and advertising revenue was $3.5 million, up 88% year-over-year or up 87% on a constant currency basis. This reflects continued growth in sponsored products and increased seller adoption of retail media advertising, which reached 26% of sellers in the second quarter of 2026 compared to 19% in the second quarter of 2025.

We have maintained a relatively high return on advertising spend for our sellers by prioritizing long-term user activation over near-term monetization. With advertising revenue currently representing 1.6% of GMV, we see meaningful upside potential as sellers density increases. Value-added services revenue was $1.9 million, up 61% year-over-year or up 66% on a constant currency basis, reflecting growth in warehousing fees. This growth was supported by higher volumes flowing through our storage infrastructure, largely attributable to demand from Chinese sellers together with improved monetization of our warehousing services.

Revenue from third-party sales was $22.8 million, down 3% year-over-year or down 4% year-over-year on a constant currency basis, impacted by supply and demand headwinds in higher value electronic items alongside the strong pace of marketplace growth. We generally undertake first-party activity in an opportunistic manner to complement the breadth of the product assortment on our platform, its scale will naturally vary with market conditions.

Shifts in the relative proportion of first-party and third-party sales trigger variations in revenue as we record the full sales price as revenue for first-party sales and only a percentage of the sales price commission for third-party sales, both net of returns and VAT. While we track revenue, we recognize that the relative proportion of first-party and third-party sales can impact its interpretation. Accordingly, we utilize gross profit alongside revenue to steer our operations.

Turning to gross profit. Second quarter gross profit was $30.7 million, up 28% year-over-year or up 31% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Gross profit margin as a percentage of GMV increased by 92 bps to 14.2% for the quarter compared to 13.3% in the second quarter of 2025, reflecting continued progress in the marketplace monetization. As we enter 2026, we implemented broad-based increases in commissions across most countries, leveraging the scale and improved service levels we have built with sellers. In Q1 2026, gross profit margin was 13.9% of GMV. In Q2, we maintained and slightly improved that level to 14.2% despite a more challenging external environment.

Two factors converge here. First, the supply headwinds were concentrated in phones and electronics, our lowest margin categories. That meant the top line impact of the disruption was larger than the gross profit impact. Second, we deliberately choose to protect our margins and unit economics rather than compensate for lower GMV by discounting or sacrificing take rates. Marketing and advertising revenue up 88% and value-added services revenue up 61% also contributed to the take rate increase year-over-year. We expect those trends to continue supporting gross profit growth going forward.

Now moving to expenses. We continue to see the benefits of our cost initiatives in the second quarter with additional improvements expected to materialize over the coming quarters. Fulfillment expense for the second quarter was $12.7 million, up 18% year-over-year and up 21% in constant currency, primarily due to higher volumes. Fulfillment expense per physical goods order was $2.04, down 7% year-over-year or down 4% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. This reflects productivity gains and economies of scale in fulfillment operations, increased call center automation and improved logistics partner rates despite temporary fuel surcharges from our logistics partner and nonrecurring termination costs in the quarter.

Sales and advertising expense was $5.5 million for the second quarter, up 33% year-over-year, both in reported and constant currency. We view this increase positively. We are scaling high ROI marketing investments on the back of stronger product fundamentals, improved quality of service and higher platform reliability. This drives not only top line growth, but also better unit economics as higher volumes and improved customer retention contribute directly to operating leverage and margin improvement.

Technology and content expense was $9 million for the second quarter, representing a decrease of 2% year-over-year or a decrease of 3% on a constant currency basis, driven primarily by continued headcount optimization and savings from renegotiated seller contracts. Second quarter G&A expense, excluding share-based compensation expense, was $15.2 million, down 5% year-over-year and down 4% on a constant currency basis. The year-over-year decrease was primarily driven by staff costs with general and administrative expense, excluding share-based compensation expense, which decreased by 7% to $7.8 million, driven mainly by a 10% reduction in headcount versus the second quarter of 2025.

The second quarter of 2026 included a tax expense of $0.9 million compared to a $1.3 million tax benefit recognized in the second quarter of 2025. We continue to streamline the organization. The total headcount has declined by 11% since March 31, 2026, with just over 1,770 employees on payroll as of June 30, 2026. At the end of the fourth quarter of 2022, when current leadership was installed, we had 4,318 employees. We delivered on our commitment to reduce headcount by at least 200 full-time employees in 1 quarter ahead of the 2-quarter time line we had indicated.

AI-driven automation across each of our operations, finance support functions and technology teams, including in relation to cybersecurity and code quality workflows is enabling us to drive further headcount efficiency, and we expect to continue reducing headcount going forward. Importantly, AI is also helping us solve problems on the ground. In logistics, it improves routing and reduces fake deliveries. In customer service, it enables faster resolution with fewer agents. And in seller operations, it streamlines onboarding and compliance monitoring.

Two examples illustrate the impact. Content quality control previously performed manually on a sample basis is now automated, expanding coverage from a sample to the full catalog at a fraction of the team and cost. Service level agreement monitoring and customer orders, previously a manual sample review performed retrospectively now runs automatically across more than 40,000 daily orders in every 60 seconds, enabling us to intervene before customer premise are missed. Beyond cost reduction, this is improving the quality of service we deliver to customers and sellers.

Turning to profitability. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was negative $8.7 million, a 36% improvement year-over-year or 35% on a constant currency basis. Loss before income tax was $10.9 million, a 33% improvement year-over-year or 34% on a constant currency basis, reflecting higher gross profit and improved operating performance.

Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the second quarter with a liquidity position of $48.3 million, including $47.4 million in cash and cash equivalents and $0.9 million in term deposits and other financial assets. Our liquidity position decreased by $14.3 million in Q2 2026 compared to a decrease of $12.4 million in Q2 2025, reflecting continued improvement in operating loss that was more than offset by working capital dynamics in the quarter.

Net cash flow used in operating activities was $11.8 million in the second quarter of 2026 compared to a net cash used in operating activities of $12.7 million in the second quarter of 2025. The result includes a cash outflow related to an increase in working cap of $3 million in the second quarter of 2026 compared to cash inflow related to a decrease in working cap of $4.1 million in the second quarter of 2025. Despite this working capital dynamics, net cash used in operating activities nonetheless improved year-over-year, reflecting the continued strengthening of our marketplace flywheel.

In summary, we delivered another quarter of solid execution and strong top line growth while continuing to improve cost efficiency. Progress on structural cost reductions, automation and cash discipline reinforces our confidence in meeting our near-term objectives and moving closer to profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis. Looking ahead, we remain focused on operational discipline, margin expansion and prudent and informed capital allocation, positioning Jumia for sustainable growth and long-term value creation.

I now turn the call back over to Francis for a discussion of our updated guidance.

Thank you, Antoine. Let me now turn to our expectations for 2026. Our focus for 2026 remains delivering profitable growth through the fourth quarter of '26 by scaling usage, improving operational efficiency and continuing to reduce cash burn. Usage growth is the clearest evidence that our fundamentals remain intact. Physical goods orders grew by 28% and quarterly active customers grew by 23% year-over-year in the second quarter, both adjusted for perimeter effects.

Gross profit grew by 28% year-over-year, reflecting continued progress in marketplace monetization. Importantly, we deliberately chose to protect our margins and unit economics this quarter rather than chase GMV at the expense of profitability. With continued cost discipline, our adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed by 36% year-over-year. We have updated our GMV growth target for '26 given the volatility and uncertainty surrounding the market for higher-value categories.

Our adjusted EBITDA and cash flow targets remain unchanged. Reaching them does not require pursuing GMV growth at any cost. We will keep prioritizing healthy usage growth and sales growth in lower value but higher-margin categories. Based on current trends, we are updating our full year 2023 guidance. For the full year '26, we anticipate GMV to grow between 20% and 30% year-over-year, adjusted for perimeter effects.

On profitability, we expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of negative $25 million to negative $30 million. We confirm our strategic goal to achieve breakeven on an adjusted EBITDA basis and positive cash flow in the fourth quarter of '26 and to deliver full year profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis and positive cash flow in 2027. Looking specifically at the third quarter, GMV is projected to grow between 15% and 25% year-over-year adjusted for perimeter effects.

Thank you for your attention. We'll now be happy to take your questions.

Your first question for today is from Brad Erickson with RBC Capital Markets.

So I guess 2 for me. So you've got the supply chain headwinds, you got the cocoa pricing in Ivory Coast and then the Middle East affecting fulfillment costs. Can you kind of run through what sort of your duration assumptions you've embedded in your guidance? I realize they're all kind of generally out of your control, but just curious what you've embedded in the outlook regarding each of those?

And then secondarily, on the capital raise, can you just expand a bit on kind of why now? And how much of this was kind of a necessity to really hit your expectations for Q4 versus just kind of fortifying the balance sheet a bit more.

Brad, thanks for your questions. So first question, on the headwinds, so we -- I mean, you've noticed all the careful language we've used today about headwinds. And I think it's consistent with what we described in the -- when we released the first quarter as well to give everyone plenty of understanding of what was happening. You've seen in our guidance that we're keeping a fairly broad range, and that's on purpose, right, both for the third quarter and for the whole year because, well, there are a lot of those factors we can't really make strong assumptions on when it will end. We believe it will normalize over time. But when it comes to fuel prices, I have very little control over that, as you can imagine. And we have to pay a surcharge so our local partners don't run out of business.

And when it comes to -- I think the major headwind on the top line, which is supply of electronics. So mostly entry-level smartphones and somehow computing and some smart TVs. So anything that uses memory chips that are in short supply at the moment, it's really hard to put -- to set a time line for that. We saw some improvement after May. So June was better. We still see clear headwinds in the third quarter now. It's really hard to say when it's going to improve significantly. And I mean, it's obviously not in our control.

So that's why on purpose, we're giving pretty broad range on GMV growth. But looking at the bright side here, I mean, our gross profit does not track GMV one for one, as you've noticed. And we remain highly confident in our ability to deliver on the bottom line. Our model is resilient and can adapt to a specific external shock in a given category on one specific line of cost like fuel. And in spite of those external events, we're able to maintain a pretty -- a fairly tight range and the same range on the EBITDA because the model is adapting, and we have all the usage take rate and efficiency engines that are still working.

To your second question about the raise, why now? And what's the point kind of? I think -- so I've said a dozen times in the past, we don't need cash to make it to breakeven, and that hasn't changed, right? What hasn't changed as well is that the plan -- I mean, the plan is not changing, clearly. The absolute focus is profitability in Q4 and full year '27 cash and adjusted EBITDA breakeven as well. Why we're doing this raise now?

I think the big trigger is clearly the opportunity to onboard the IFC, the International Finance Corporation. The IFC is one of the most reliable and the best names you can get on your cap table when you operate like us as a listed company in Africa. They bring with them credibility in the eyes of other institutions. They run very, very deep due diligence on the ground with the teams, and it shows that our model can support that kind of scrutiny. And they invest as a partner. I mean their mandate is to develop private sector in Africa. They invest as a partner. We're going to drive impact together on a number of topics. And it's also going to help us get better access, better understanding from local regulators and public institutions.

So in our position, getting the IFC was something important. And so that's what's driving the timing. We're adding to the raise selected current investors like Axiom and new investors with pretty strong names and strong reputation. And so we also chose not to go for crazy amounts, right? I think the $50 million amount really -- I mean, it is useful for us. It strengthens the balance sheet, but we also try to be mindful of dilution for our shareholders.

In addition to the IFC trigger, if I may say, we're obviously operating now in an international environment that is a lot more volatile than when we drafted our budget 6 months ago -- I mean, late '25. And I think everyone will appreciate that strengthening the balance sheet in that environment does make sense. And we will have ways to use a bit of extra cash in very specific targeted initiatives in the coming months and quarters.

Your next question is from Jack Halper with Cantor Fitzgerald.

This is Cameron on for Zack. Just 2 quick ones for me. First, on the guidance, you lowered the GMV outlook but held adjusted EBITDA targets. Could you just talk about some of the areas of the business where you're seeing the strongest growth right now and how this may be supporting profitability targets in the back half and into '27?

And then on advertising, you continue to see some nice acceleration with increasing advertiser adoption. Can you just talk a little bit about the product roadmap from here? What are the key drivers to continue expanding penetration? And where do you see advertising reaching as a percent of GMV in the long run?

Yes. Thanks, Zach. So to your first question, so we indeed lower -- I mean, we adjusted our GMV outlook for the whole year, and we gave a range of 15% to 25% growth next quarter. But we stick to our profitability targets, as you mentioned, on an adjusted EBITDA basis because we see resilience in the model in many other aspects, right? So as we mentioned, our GMV is impacted by external headwinds, mostly the supply of affordable smartphones and some electronic suppliers.

But on the other hand, when you look at volumes and gross profit, we have very strong support from other categories that are lower value categories, so they don't support the GMV really well, but they have great impact on gross profit. I'm talking home living, fashion, beauty, accessories, kids and so on. So lower value categories, but where take rate is significantly higher than in smartphones. I mean, typically for smartphones, the take rate will be between 4% and 6%.

We are obviously many times higher than this in the categories I've just mentioned. And that's really supporting our increase in gross profit as a percentage of GMV. You've seen that this quarter, we're above 14% of GMV. It's about 1 point increase versus last year, which is significant. And that's really -- I mean, these categories are really helping us drive improved monetization and take rate on top of the increases in commissions that we've passed earlier in the year. Of course, advertising is also strongly supporting with very significant growth versus last year, but I'll come back to that when I answer your question.

And then when you look at the rest of the P&L, I think -- I mean, what's obvious is that we are and we remain absolutely manacle about cost efficiency. So we keep on reducing unit costs in fulfillment, minus 7% year-over-year per order in spite of the additional fuel surcharges in spite of that and in spite of termination costs that are in the cost base for this quarter for Q2 as part of our headcount reduction plan. So that's still working, and we keep on working and getting more savings on fulfillment, both from warehouse efficiency and from deliveries and logistics.

And then obviously, we've been working really hard on the fixed costs. So we create some buffer so that our model can absorb external shocks whatever happens. So we -- you see the improvement in tech costs. Antoine mentioned the improvement -- I mean, the slight improvement in G&A year-over-year in spite of positive tax impact that we had last year and that is not recurring this year.

So the actual improvement in removing this one-off effect is pretty significant. And for example, I mean, we have already over-delivered on our target to reduce headcount by 10%, and we've front-loaded as much as we could in the second quarter so that we get the full benefits without the termination costs at the end of the year. So that's what is enabling us to maintain the guidance on the bottom line in spite of headwinds that do impact the GMV. And that's what's giving us this fairly high level of confidence.

And then back to your second question on advertising. So main drivers of our progress this quarter are definitely better tools. We rolled out a new platform last year, and we keep on expanding the product range, if I may say, our core product is obviously sponsored products. In the second quarter, we started building revenues from what we call sponsored brands, which allows brands to get display advertising on category pages or search pages, and it's working pretty well.

And the second driver is expanding usage across the vendor base. So you see this quarter, we have 26% of our vendors that are using the product versus 19% last year. It's significant progress, but it gives you an idea of how much headroom we still have to drive revenue in that segment. To make sure we keep growing, of course, we've allocated the teams and resources to educate our vendors, but we've also deliberately chosen to keep very high return on ad spend for our vendors.

We don't want to monetize too hard right now. We want to prioritize vendor activation. And then greater revenue will come as marketplace density keeps on improving and usage keeps on increasing among our vendors. We're fairly confident about that revenue line for the coming quarters. Our target is to reach 2% of GMV equivalent in revenue from advertising. We're not there yet, but it's totally achievable in the medium term.

Your next question for today is from Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

What was GMV in electronics and phones specifically on a year-over-year basis? And then secondly, if you could quantify kind of what overall GMV growth would have been excluding electronics and phones?

Yes. So we have not disclosed specifically the GMV of electronics and phones. However, on Page 11 of our slide deck, you can find it without the exact figures, but you get a good understanding of the share. So phones GMV is between 10% and 20%, basically. Other electronics would be slightly above 20%, including computing, TV and other products like styling terminals. You can see in that slide the year-over-year decrease in absolute GMV from phones. So it's actually decreasing in absolute terms.

Interestingly, you'll also see in that slide that in items sold, the share of phones is holding better, which means that we have been more resilient in accessories, for example. We have a very strong supply of phones and electronics accessories largely from our international vendors from China, and that enables those categories to hold really well on items sold. But the GMV -- the impact on the share of GMV of the company, sorry, not absolute amount in share of GMV is clearly visible here.

Reasonable to assume the 5 points of GMV guidance reduction is entirely electronics and phones? Or is it.

No, that's a fair assumption, yes. That's broadly the idea, yes.

Moving on take rate, nice improvement relative to marketplace take rate relative to GMV. I get the mix shift probably had a pretty big impact on that just from electronics and phones. But curious how much of that is a structural change if you've changed your take rates, increased any of them on certain categories or regions?

So we did not change the take rate by category this quarter. All of our take rate increases happened in the first quarter. So we increased our commissions across the board and across countries mid-Jan 26. So of course, when you compare year-over-year, you still have this impact, but we did not do anything specific on take rate this quarter in particular.

And so the improved ratio of gross profit now above 14% of GMV is a reflection of, well, that take rate increase earlier in the year. There's a slight impact -- there's an impact, obviously, of the mix shift, although it's not in dramatic proportions. And then there's the impact of better advertising and sales of logistics services.

Reasonable to assume improvement is mixed year-over-year is -- from the take rate in early in the year.

So do you mean versus last year?

Correct.

Or versus last quarter?

So quarter-over-quarter would be the mix shift change the year-over-year...

Yes. So quarter-over-quarter, you have mixed and you also have the fact that the new increased commissions were implemented only mid-Jan in Q1. And so it was on orders starting mid-Jan, which get delivered a bit later. So you can assume we lost about 20 to 30 days in the first quarter to get the full impact of the increased commissions. So there is that as well.

Competitive environment, anything changed meaningfully there? I know some of your competitors have moved towards more fast-moving consumer goods in some of your more developed markets and specifically on primary cities. I know that could potentially help you guys as you focus on secondary cities, value products, et cetera. But maybe that dynamic and then anything else to be aware from a competitive environment standpoint?

Yes. I think when we look at local platforms, I mean, platforms with operations on the ground, like specifically local African competitors, we see no change like Konga in Nigeria, Kilimall in Kenya, we don't see any specific change of trajectory. When we look at Egypt, which has always been and will remain a more competitive market, we see our core -- our biggest competitors investing fairly heavily on big cities and quick delivery, quick commerce, heavily focused on groceries, which is really not our segment.

We are still -- consistent to our strategy of focusing on the lower middle class, going to smaller towns. For example, now in Egypt, we're opening new cities in the Upper Nile Valley. So we're targeting -- I mean, we're fighting different battles. We were not really targeting the same segments. I think it's better this way.

And then when we look at nonresident platforms like Temu, we have seen -- so we see them -- I mean, they're still operating in Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco and a bit in Egypt, although customers are more difficult in Egypt for them. We've seen an increase in traffic in Nigeria, but due to very specific events. And we see it going down as we speak now. And we don't see any material change in the intensity of competition or the cost of online bidding under -- in Nigeria. So no meaningful change as we speak.

We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session and conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Jumia's Results Conference Call for the First Quarter of 2026. [Operator Instructions]

With us today are Francis Dufay, CEO of Jumia; and Antoine Maillet-Mezeray, Executive Vice President, Finance and Operations.

We'll start by covering the safe harbor. We would like to remind you that our discussions today will include forward-looking statements.

Actual results may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Moreover, these forward-looking statements may speak only to our expectations as of today. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise these statements.

For a discussion of some of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from the forward-looking statements expressed today, please see the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 20-F as published on February 24, 2026, as well as our other submissions with the SEC.

In addition, on this call, we will refer to certain financial measures not reported in accordance with IFRS. You can find reconciliations of these non-IFRS financial measures to the corresponding IFRS financial measures in our earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website.

With that, I will hand the call over to Francis.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Jumia's first quarter 2026 earnings call. 2025 was the year we demonstrated the resilience and scalability of our model and '26 is the year we plan to demonstrate our path to profitability.

Q1 '26 showed that our momentum towards profitability is continuing and in several important ways, accelerating. Over the past few years, Jumia has been building an e-commerce model designed specifically for Africa, adapted to the unique structural supply, logistical and consumer realities of our markets.

In 2025, we proved that this model delivers scale with improving economics and Q1 '26 confirms that the flywheel is turning.

This foundation drove our strong operating momentum in the first quarter. GMV grew 32% year-over-year adjusted for perimeter effects. Growth was broad-based across our core markets, reflecting the continued strengthening of our marketplace fundamentals and efficient execution.

Profitability metrics continue to move in the right direction. Adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to $10.7 million from $15.7 million in Q1 '25. The business absorbed higher volumes with increasing efficiency while maintaining a disciplined approach on costs.

Excluding the onetime costs related to our Algeria exit in February '26, adjusted EBITDA loss would have been $9.7 million, reflecting an underlying improvement of 38% year-over-year in our core business. Based on the progress we made in '25 and the momentum continuing into Q1 '26, we remain focused on achieving our target of adjusted EBITDA breakeven and positive cash flow in the fourth quarter of '26 and delivering full year profitability and positive cash flow in '27.

I should also note that we are monitoring the broader macro environment, including cost increases in memory chips and the ongoing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East as well as the potential effects on global supply chain, shipping costs and commodity prices.

While we have observed limited impact on our business to date, we remain attentive to downstream risks, including potential pressure on smartphone components availability and transport costs. We believe the resilience of our model and the diversity of our supplier base positions us well to navigate this uncertain environment. Notwithstanding these external matters, we reiterate our guidance for 2026.

Let me walk you through the key highlights of the quarter. Usage trends remain strong across our platform. Adjusted for perimeter effects, physical goods orders grew 31% year-over-year, driven by expanding in-country geographic coverage, improved assortment and sustained consumer demand.

Our focus remains clearly on physical goods, which accounted for nearly all orders and GMV this quarter. Digital transactions through the JumiaPay app now represent a residual share of our orders as we continue to prioritize transactions with stronger economics.

Relatedly, TPV and Jumia Payments gateway transactions have become less meaningful as indicators of our operating performance and effective as of the first quarter of '26, we will discontinue the quarterly disclosure of these KPIs.

Adjusting for perimeter effects, quarterly active customers increased 25% year-over-year, reflecting continued traction in both acquisition and retention. Repeat behavior continued to improve with 47% of new customers from Q4 '25 making a repeat purchase within 90 days, up from 45% in Q4 '24.

Demand was broad-based across electronics, home & living, fashion and beauty and consistent across most countries, reflecting a similar quality of execution and inputs across our markets.

Adjusted for perimeter effects, GMV grew 32% year-over-year in reported currency. Average order value for physical goods increased to $36 from $35 in Q1 '25. Revenue totaled $50.6 million, up 39% year-over-year, driven by higher usage and improved monetization.

First-party sales represented 46% of total revenue, supported by continued strength from international partnerships, including Starlink in Nigeria and Kenya.

Now turning to profitability. The progress made over the past 3 years continues to translate into measurable operating leverage. Cost improvements across general and administrative, technology and fulfillment are structural.

In addition, we renegotiated third-party logistics contracts in February and March and implemented increases in commissions and take rates across most countries in mid-January '26. This reflects the scale of our platform and improved service levels delivered to sellers.

Importantly, these commission increases had limited impact on growth, validating our strategy of progressive monetization increases on the back of greater volumes and better seller experience.

We also drove meaningful growth in higher-margin revenue streams with marketing and advertising revenue up 44% year-over-year and value-added services revenue nearly tripling, which both reflect improved platform monetization. These changes are consistent across markets and reflect stronger marketplace fundamentals.

Fulfillment cost per order was $2.06, flat year-over-year on a reported basis or down 10% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. This reflects productivity gains and economies of scale in fulfillment operations, increased call center automation and improved logistics partner rates. Most fulfillment operating expenses are incurred in local markets and denominated in local currencies.

Technology and content expenses declined 8% year-over-year, reflecting ongoing headcount optimization, automation, platform simplification and the benefit of renegotiated seller agreements, including cloud infrastructure.

As a result, adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to $10.7 million from $15.7 million in Q1 '25. Loss before income tax was $17.8 million, an 8% increase year-over-year or 21% decline on a constant currency basis, primarily reflecting noncash foreign exchange losses.

Quarterly cash burn increased to $15.3 million in Q1 '26 compared to $4.7 million in Q4 '25. The shift from the previous quarter is consistent with typical seasonal dynamics. This compares favorably to the $23.2 million decrease in liquidity in Q1 '25, demonstrating the improvement in our financial trajectory.

Now turning to operational highlights and execution at the country level. Q1 '26 demonstrated continued execution strength across our markets. Supply fundamentals remain solid with improvements in both local and international sourcing.

Growth was supported by strong performance across multiple categories with fashion and beauty among the top contributors to items sold growth year-over-year and with international items continuing to gain share.

Efficient marketing deployment, including CRM, paid online, SEO channels, supported customer acquisition at attractive unit economics. In the first quarter, we sold 4.9 million gross items internationally, up 87% year-over-year adjusted for perimeter effects.

This reflects the continued scaling of our Chinese seller base as well as growing volumes from our supply base from affordable fashion in Turkey.

Operationally, we continue to extend our reach beyond major urban centers. Orders from upcountry regions accounted for 62% of total volumes, up from 58% in the prior year quarter, both adjusted for perimeter effects.

These regions are delivering strong growth while benefiting from a cost structure that scales efficiently with volume. In secondary cities, we are addressing clear customer pain points, including limited product availability and elevated prices from local traders.

As a result, our value proposition continues to resonate strongly, driving both adoption and repeat purchase.

Now at the country level. Nigeria delivered a strong quarter. Physical goods GMV increased 42% year-over-year. Sustained growth was driven by a broad range of categories with home & living performing particularly strongly alongside continued traction from a country expansion, where a large part of the addressable market remains untapped.

We opened over 80 additional pickup stations during the quarter, further extending our delivery network. I should note that Nigeria experienced a significant increase in local fuel prices during March, which created headwinds in our 3PL cost negotiations. However, consumer demand remains sustained and strong.

Kenya performed strongly with physical goods GMV up just below 50% year-over-year. Performance was driven by continued strong supply fundamentals and efficient marketing despite similar headwinds to other countries in the phones category.

Strong performance in home & living driven by local suppliers and in fashion, driven by international suppliers more than offset the tighter supply in phones. Kenya remains a relatively underpenetrated market for Jumia with vast opportunities up country and we continue to invest in expanding our reach.

Ivory Coast growth gradually moderated over the course of the quarter. Physical goods GMV was up 16% year-over-year. Growth was affected by 2 converging headwinds.

First, supply disruption in appliances, which is market specific and in smartphones, which is a global dynamic, both felt directly in the market where we have our highest penetration levels.

And second, a sharp decline in regulated cocoa farm gate prices down nearly 60% effective in March '26, which reduced the purchasing power of a large share of the upcountry population. Cocoa is the primary export of Ivory Coast and approximately 6 million people depend on it for their livelihoods.

This is a meaningful demand side headwind that we expect to persist in the second quarter. However, we remain confident in the fundamentals of our business in Ivory Coast, where we hold a very strong position with a trusted brand and healthy monetization.

Egypt's performance this quarter confirmed sustained recovery. Physical goods GMV grew 3% year-over-year, excluding corporate sales, which were still material in Q1 '25, but has since been deprioritized.

Physical goods GMV grew 56% year-over-year, confirming genuine market level recovery. Very strong dynamics on the supply side of our marketplace are driving top line acceleration, supported by improved assortment and seller engagement. Our buy now, pay later offering continued to gain traction with strong penetration in high-value categories.

Egypt experienced a fuel price increase in March as well, which we are monitoring. However, core marketplace dynamics remain positive. We are also expanding our delivery network through pickup stations in more remote regions, which are poorly served by physical retail.

Ghana delivered an exceptional first quarter with physical goods GMV increasing 142%, driven by a country expansion, the scaling of local marketplace and strong supply from international sellers. Ghana was largely unaffected by the disruption in the electronics segment.

Our current focus is to continue building logistics capacity to sustain this rapid expansion with stronger customer experience and cost efficiency.

Our other markets portfolio also performed well, collectively delivering 10% physical goods GMV growth. Uganda experienced a nearly 1-week internet blackout during the quarter, temporarily impacting volumes, though the market still delivered growth for the period.

In February '26, we completed our exit from Algeria, which represented approximately 2% of GMV in '25. The winddown resulted in total onetime exit costs of approximately $1 million, reflecting employee termination benefits and asset impairment, which were all recognized in our Q1 '26 results.

Over the medium to long term, this decision simplifies our footprint and improves operational focus, allowing us to allocate resources more efficiently towards markets with stronger growth and profitability profiles.

We have not seen significant changes in our competitive environment in Q1 '26. The softening of competitive intensity trends observed in the second half of '25 has continued with competitive intensity remaining subdued across our core markets.

The recent disruption of air freight going through the Middle East is expected to create headwinds for non-resident platforms that rely on direct international shipping, contributing to a more level playing field for locally embedded operators like Jumia.

Most of our supply comes via sea freight, which was not impacted. We are also seeing increased regulatory scrutiny on cross-border platforms across several of our markets, further reinforcing this dynamic.

We are navigating an international environment that is evolving quickly with 2 main developments having the potential to impact our business. First, the memory chips and CPU price increases.

We saw a delayed impact on entry-level phone prices and the availability of components for products like smart TVs taking place gradually over Q1. Phone prices increased by approximately 20% between late '25 and early April.

We do not see this as a fundamental long-term shift, but it is impacting our business in the near term as supply chains reorganize. Distributors remain temporarily reluctant to release fresh inventory, while prices may increase further and older, cheaper inventory in some markets is still temporarily competing with our more recent supply.

We are mitigating this by diversifying our supplier base for smartphones and scaling our marketplace across both local and international sellers.

Second, the war in the Middle East. The most immediate impact was the disruption of air freight through the UAE from Asia, which affected some smartphone distributors. Supply routes have since reorganized through other hubs.

There are also delayed effects. Disruption to helium supplies creates additional uncertainty for chip production and the majority of our markets have seen fuel prices begin to rise from March, which is expected to weigh on local logistics costs, particularly for middle-mile trucking operations run by our local partners.

The impact on our Q1 P&L has been limited with extra costs primarily in Nigeria. If high fuel prices persist, we should expect greater pressure in Q2, potentially partially offsetting the savings from our 3PL rates renegotiations.

That said, our strategy of building pickup stations throughout countries is very helpful in this regard as it means that we have already decorrelated a significant share of our delivery costs from fuel prices.

In particular, 74% of our ship packages are fulfilled through pickup stations rather than door delivery in Q1 '26, up from 67% in Q1 '25, both adjusted for perimeter effects.

We have also taken steps to electrify our last-mile delivery fleet in Uganda and we are looking to replicate this successful pilot in more countries as we continue to reduce our dependence on fuel in logistics operations.

'25 was the year when we showed that our business model is on the right track. It delivered growth and improved economics at the same time. '26 is the year when we intend to show that this model will take us to profitability.

In this regard, Q1 is a strong data point that is consistent with Q4 '25 trends. We see sustained growth despite an uncertain environment, continued operational leverage and improved unit economics across the whole P&L, resulting in significantly reduced losses.

We are committed to delivering trajectory to breakeven by chasing more scale in a disciplined way, improving operational execution and further streamlining our fixed cost base. While we are currently navigating an uncertain international environment, we believe that our business fundamentals, which were rebuilt from '22 to '25, mostly in much tougher times than this are strong.

We do expect some temporary disruption, but it does not change our midterm profitability targets or our belief in Jumia's long-term opportunity for growth.

With that, I will now turn the call over to Antoine to walk you through the financials in more details.

Thank you, Francis, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I will now walk you through our financial performance for the first quarter.

Starting with revenue. First quarter revenue reached $50.6 million, up 39% year-over-year or up 28% on a constant currency basis. Results reflect sustained customer demand and consistent execution across our platform.

Marketplace revenue for the first quarter totaled USD 27 million, up 50% year-over-year and up 35% on a constant currency basis. Third-party sales were USD 23.2 million, up 45% year-over-year or up 31% on a constant currency basis.

Growth was driven by solid performance in the marketplace, including healthy usage trends and higher effective take rates.

Marketing and advertising revenue was USD 2.2 million, up 44% year-over-year or up 31% on a constant currency basis. The improvement was driven by continued growth in sponsored products, supported by strong tools rolled out in mid-2025 that increased seller adoption, improved return on ad spend and drove greater density and competition on our marketplace.

With advertising revenue currently representing roughly 1% of GMV as we are improving this figure, we see meaningful opportunity to scale this profitable source of revenue.

Value-added services revenue was USD 1.7 million in the first quarter of 2026, compared to USD 0.6 million in the first quarter of 2025, driven by strong growth in warehousing fees, reflecting higher volumes flowing through our storage infrastructure, largely driven by demand from Chinese sellers and improved monetization of our warehousing services.

Revenue from first-party sales was USD 23.1 million, up 30% year-over-year or up 21% year-over-year on a constant currency basis, driven by strong momentum with key international brands.

Turning to gross profit. First quarter gross profit was USD 29.4 million, up 48% year-over-year or up 33% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Gross profit margin as a percentage of GMV increased by 160 bps to 13.9% for the quarter compared to 12.3% in the first quarter of 2025, reflecting continued progress in marketplace monetization.

As we enter 2026, we implemented broad-based increases in commissions across most countries, leveraging the scale and improved service levels we have built with sellers. Q1 2026 was already tracking the expected impact with gross profit margin expanding by 160 bps year-over-year, marketing and advertising revenue up 24% and value-added services revenue nearly tripling.

We expect these trends to continue supporting gross profit growth going forward.

Now moving to expenses. We continue to see the benefits of our cost initiatives in the first quarter with additional improvements expected to materialize over the coming quarters. Fulfillment expense for the first quarter was USD 12.2 million, up 29% year-over-year and up 17% in constant currency, primarily due to higher volumes.

Fulfillment expense per order, excluding JumiaPay app orders, was $2.06, flat year-over-year or down 10% year-over-year on a constant currency basis, reflecting productivity gains and economies of scale in fulfillment operations, increased call center automation and improved logistics partner rates.

Sales and advertising expense was USD 5.1 million for the first quarter, up 64% year-over-year and up 54% in constant currency. We view this increase positively. We are scaling high ROI marketing investment on the back of stronger product fundamentals, improved quality of service and higher platform reliability, driving not only top line growth, but also better unit economics as higher volumes and improved customer retention contribute directly to operating leverage and margin improvement.

Technology and content expense was $8.9 million for the first quarter, representing a decrease of 8% year-over-year or a decrease of 10% on a constant currency basis, driven primarily by continued headcount optimization and ongoing renegotiated seller contracts.

First quarter G&A expense, excluding share-based compensation expense, was $16.8 million, up 4% year-over-year and down 3% on a constant currency basis. The year-over-year increase was primarily driven by staff costs with general and administrative expense, excluding share-based compensation expense, which increased by 16% to USD 9.1 million, driven by approximately USD 0.8 million in onetime termination benefits related to our Algeria exit and the appreciation of local currencies against the U.S. dollar compared to the first quarter of 2025.

We continue to streamline the organization. The total headcount has declined by 8% since December 31, 2024, with just over 1,980 employees on payroll as of March 31, 2026. At the end of the fourth quarter of 2022, when current leadership was installed, we had 4,318 employees.

We are actively working to further reduce headcount, continue process automation and leverage AI tools. We expect to reduce our headcount by at least an additional 200 full-time employees over the next 2 quarters.

More broadly, AI and automation are becoming meaningful drivers of efficiency across Jumia. We are deploying AI tools across our operations, finance processes, headcount efficiency programs in our technology organization, encompassing cybersecurity monitoring and software development, which supported the net FTE reduction and drove efficiency gains year-over-year.

Importantly, AI is also helping us solve problems on the ground. In logistics, it improves routing and reduces failed deliveries. In customer services, it enables faster resolution with fewer agents and in sellers operation, it streamlines onboarding and compliance monitoring.

This is not only reducing cost but also improving the quality of service we deliver to customers and sellers, reflecting our ongoing commitment to structural cost efficiency.

Turning to profitability, adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was negative $10.7 million or negative $10.9 million on a constant currency basis. Loss before income tax was $17.8 million, an 8% increase year-over-year or 21% decline on a constant currency basis, primarily reflecting noncash foreign exchange losses.

Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the first quarter with a liquidity position of $62.6 million, including USD 61.5 million in cash and cash equivalents and $1.1 million in term deposits and other financial assets.

Our liquidity position decreased by $15.3 million in Q1 2026 compared to a decrease of $23.2 million in Q1 2025. Net cash flow used in operating activities was $12.5 million in the quarter, including a broadly neutral working capital contribution.

The improvement reflects the continued strengthening of our marketplace flywheel driven by higher volumes, improved payment flows and stronger bargaining power with large third-party accounts.

In summary, we delivered another quarter of solid execution and strong top line growth while continuing to improve cost efficiency. Progress on structural cost reductions, automation and cash discipline reinforces our confidence in meeting our near-term objectives and moving closer to profitability.

Looking ahead, we remain focused on operational discipline, margin expansion and prudent and informed capital allocation, positioning Jumia for sustainable growth and long-term value creation.

I now turn the call back over to Francis for a discussion of our updated guidance.

Thank you, Antoine. Let me now turn to our expectations for 2026. Our focus for '26 remains on accelerating growth, driving further operating efficiency and continuing our progress towards profitability.

We are seeing continued strong momentum validated by our Q1 results, which give us confidence in reaffirming our full year '26 outlook. We are navigating an evolving international environment.

While we expect some temporary disruption from memory chips and CPU price pressures and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, our business fundamentals are strong. Our Q1 '26 results demonstrate continued execution and we have not changed our midterm profitability targets or our belief in Jumia's long-term opportunity for growth.

For the full year '26, we anticipate GMV to grow between 27% and 32% year-over-year adjusted for perimeter effects. On profitability, we expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of negative $25 million to negative $30 million.

We confirm our strategic goal to achieve breakeven on an adjusted EBITDA basis and positive cash flow in the fourth quarter of '26 and to deliver full year profitability and positive cash flow in '27.

Looking specifically at the second quarter, GMV is projected to grow between 27% and 32% year-over-year adjusted for perimeter effects.

Thank you for your attention. We will now be happy to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question for today is from Jack Halpert with Cantor Fitzgerald.

I just have 2, please. So on the memory chip inflation, are you maybe able to quantify this at all in terms of the impact in the quarter? And maybe how much of this has been resolved already versus expected to continue in 2Q and beyond?

And just is it more about consumers like deferring purchases trading down? Or is it more of a supply availability issue? That's the first question.

And then the second question, just on the AI efficiency you guys mentioned and I think the planned 200 reduction in headcount. First, just how much of this headcount reduction is tied to the Algeria exit, if at all? And then maybe on the AI side, what are a few examples of areas you're seeing the most efficiency in the business from AI currently?

Let me take the 2 questions and Antoine will also comment on the AI impact across our business. Starting with memory chips, CPU prices inflation. So to quantify the impact, you can look at our presentation where we show the share of smartphones category in our mix.

You'll see that the whole smartphones category, I mean, is directionally roughly 10% of our sales in GMV. This is usually a category with lower unique contribution. It's lower margins than, let's say, fashion, for example. So it definitely has -- I mean, it's not 10% of our gross profit, as you can imagine. It's not the whole category that's in danger. Obviously, it can impact the growth of the category and it has in the first quarter.

It's likely to continue in the second quarter. But we're not talking of a major impact over the whole top line of Jumia, okay? It's something that we have to flag because it's global trends and it's relevant for our business, but we're talking impact on a fraction of our total business and it will not wipe out like half of the sales, obviously.

It's limited. And most importantly, we see it as temporary. The timing here is that we had delayed impact really. A lot of people asked us questions, sorry, late 2025 and in the first month of '26 and really not much was changing on the market at this time.

And then prices -- the price increase of directionally 20% that we've mentioned on entry-level smartphones was mostly felt in the month of March across key countries. So that's directionally what happened.

We believe it's a matter of timing. I mean we're used to those kind of supply disruptions and market reorganizations. So it doesn't last forever, but we know that for a couple of months, supply may be disrupted.

Some brands may be doing better and some brands may be more disrupted, which we've seen in the market. Some brands will be running out of stocks. Some brands will still be available with sometimes lower price increases. For example, we see that Samsung has had lower price increases because they have much better integration of the whole supply chain. But basically, we see it as temporary disruption as the supply chain reorganizes.

And when it comes to consumer impact that you were asking, we see a mix of both, right? We see a mix of, of course, prices increasing, so consumers are trading down. When people are still buying smartphones, that will never change, but they are buying lower specs with the same amount of money in their pocket.

And on the other hand, we also see supply -- I mean, pure supply availability issues on very specific brands in very specific markets. So as we mentioned in the -- earlier in the call, we've been more impacted in the Ivory Coast, for example, than in Kenya in terms of pure supply availability.

So all of that is having an impact, some level of impact, but we see it as clearly temporary. It's not -- I mean, it's not a long-term challenge. We will keep on selling smartphones and the market will reorganize. And what matters is that we have access to the best supply, the best prices and our distribution is a huge advantage when it comes to selling smartphones across Africa.

And then to your second question about headcount, the 200 target is not tied to Algeria. So most of the impact on Algeria is already behind us. So the 200 headcount reduction that we mentioned has nothing to do with the exit from Algeria. Antoine, do you want to comment on the use of AI across our team?

Yes, I can take this one. Thank you. Obviously, we're using AI in tech, be it in cybersecurity or coding. We are able to be much, much more productive thanks to the different tools that we are using. We pay a lot of attention to be agnostic in terms of tools so that we don't end up with 1 or 2 suppliers that will change pricing policy overnight.

But we are going much further than pure tech. We're using AI in accounting, for instance, to automate bank reconciliations. If you want a very pragmatic example, we're also using AI in HR.

Basically, we have a lot of database, which are very structured and ready to be used consumed by AI, allowing us to produce smarter reporting in a much faster way and being able to share the information across our very large footprint, resulting in better efficiency.

Your next question is from Brad Erickson with RBC Capital Markets.

Just a couple of follow-ups on that first question. I guess with maintaining the full year guide, it looks like maybe a little bit of deceleration built in there through the year. I guess would you say that outlook kind of reflects this idea that some of these headwinds you're talking about are sort of dynamic and adjusting and reflected in Q2, but then sort of stabilize through the year?

Or is there any contemplation in the range that maybe things get worse?

Well, in the current international environment, if you -- Brad, if you know for sure what's going to happen, please tell me. We could make a lot of money. Well, more seriously, we acknowledged some level of uncertainty in the international environment with very specific aspects that can have a negative impact on our P&L.

We mentioned chip prices and fuel prices. We remain confident in the range that we have given as guidance for the full year and for the second quarter. It accounts -- I mean, it covers, it includes some level of uncertainty.

But I think it reflects -- I mean, the fact that we stabilized that range reflects our opinion that most of the disruption we're seeing is temporary. So we're seeing real headwinds like the demand side headwinds in the Ivory Coast due to cocoa prices is real and can be felt on the ground.

Smartphone price increases and supply disruption is real and can be felt on the markets. But we all see that as quite temporary and really not disrupting the fundamentals of our business, neither the midterm or long-term opportunity.

So we -- and we're also seeing continued strength in the trends in several countries, especially Nigeria, which is still growing over 40%; Ghana, which is growing over 100%. So in short, those headwinds and that level of uncertainty is not structurally challenging our business and it's not something we expect for the long run.

So this range of 27% to 32% top line growth that we're giving for the second quarter as well is our best assessment in the current environment based on the early results of the quarter that we're already seeing and reflects the level of confidence in our business model.

Got it. And then you called out marketing and being a strong point in your prepared remarks. I guess just within your outlook, how much kind of flexibility do you think you have on marketing given some of these other headwinds you're talking about?

And I guess how much kind of like offense do you feel like you can play here in 2026 in terms of putting your foot down on marketing? Or is it still fairly measured given how some of the macro factors you're talking about? Just kind of the upside, downside considerations there with marketing spend.

Yes. I think 3 things on the marketing side. So first of all, I think we remain at spend ratios that are very reasonable for an e-commerce company of our size, right? Our ratio of spend is slightly lower than much, much bigger peers in emerging markets, which shows frugality and efficiency in that field.

So we were very -- I mean we're confident in our ability to spend very efficiently our marketing budget and driving strong returns. Second, we still have major improvements coming over the year in terms of efficiency and the better use of our marketing channels, especially online.

And third, we are very reactive as well. A large part of those budgets are spent on online channels where it's very easy to pilot on a monthly, weekly, daily basis. So we are able to make decisions if needed, if we see lower traction in a given market.

We're very dynamic in reallocating budgets when we need to on a daily or weekly basis. At this stage, we believe we still have -- I mean we do have sufficient traction and that justifies the amount that we're spending. But we are very flexible and we can be extremely reactive if we see different trends.

Got it. And then one last one. Just when you think about the journey to cash flow positive in the next year, you talked about the headcount reduction here in the next few quarters. Besides that, just what are kind of some of the major pain points on reaching that goal that you still -- you feel like you still have to get through?

You mean the goal of cash flow positive?

Correct.

I would not talk about pain points. I mean I'll let Antoine comment as well, but I think the path is pretty clear, right? I mean if you look at our numbers, now it's just -- it's not just us talking. You have very clear verifiable numbers showing that we're able to scale, we're able to improve the unit economics, get operating leverage and further reduce the fixed costs.

So that's a very clear trajectory that takes us to breakeven. It's mostly an execution game. It's mostly an execution game. I would not say we have blockers or pain points. We know very much what we're working on.

We need to keep on scaling the top line and keep on delivering those improvements in the unit economics and further reducing in absolute terms of fixed costs. I think you can see a clear trajectory in the last 2 quarters. It's extremely consistent. It's all about execution unless there would be a major macro disruption that we're not seeing at this stage, it's really about execution.

Your next question for today is from Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum.

Very nice quarter and execution. Laundry list of, let's call them, crosswinds, some headwinds in Q1 into Q2. Outside of those, it feels like the business is actually outperforming because you reiterated the guide, you outperformed in Q1. Q2 guide is in line despite kind of all of those challenges.

So I guess trying to take a step back and maybe normalizing for a lot of those outside factors, how you feel about the progress thus far in the year internally?

Yes. Thanks, Ryan, for putting it this way. I mean we -- Antoine and I are very deeply in the business and we -- it's sometimes good to step back and realize the progress. I mean we have a tendency to look more at the problems than the successes, but it's how we managed to push it forward.

But yes, I think there are very clear bright side this quarter. It's very clear and that's what you see in our presentation on the operating leverage. And we see that we, again, this quarter, just like in the fourth quarter of '25, we're able to show significant GMV growth.

So the business model is working while clearly improving all the unit economics. So 31% GMV growth that translates into a significant improvement of 64% of all gross profit after fulfillment and marketing costs. So that's real operating leverage and we're able to further reduce our fixed cost, thanks to pretty hard work on tech specifically this quarter, but also a lot happening in G&A that will pay off in the coming quarters. You see the 1/3 32% improvement in adjusted EBITDA.

So I think the bright -- I mean, the key message of this quarter is we're able to show very consistent improvement after Q4 with significant growth that's sustained in spite of the environment and continued progress on the unit economics and fixed costs. And we expect that to continue. There's no reason why the trend should change in the coming quarters.

Very good. We've noticed -- you mentioned Nigeria strength. We've noticed an expanded pickup station footprint there, particularly in secondary cities. Can you talk about Nigeria, but also you mentioned it in Kenya and others, but kind of the upcountry expansion, how you think about that strategy with pickup stations?

And then if maybe that strategy has evolved or changed in recent kind of months as you guys have rightsized the cost structure, infrastructure and overall company?

So I'll talk about Nigeria right afterwards. But overall, across countries, we keep on expanding our reach. So basically opening new pickup stations in new cities that we're not covering or densifying the network in existing bigger cities.

This is a very important component of our growth plan because it basically increases the addressable market, right? We are building our distribution network and partnering with local entrepreneurs.

And if we don't have -- I mean, if we do not build the distribution network in a given city, it means that city is outside of our addressable market. So by expanding this network of pickup stations, we are increasing our addressable market, which is arguably one of the easiest and cheapest ways to grow our top line.

This is happening across all countries, but Nigeria is the most striking example. A few months back, Nigeria, we are still covering about 1/3 of the addressable market of the population. If we look at the cities where we had established distribution, the total population was about 1/3 of total population, which is massive room for improvement.

In our more mature markets, we're close to 60% in Ivory Coast, for example. So it gives you an idea of the potential that's still untapped in a country like Nigeria. So we're very -- I mean, we're happy about the growth in Nigeria.

We believe we can still get more than that. The growth in Nigeria is largely driven by up country. So distribution expansion, that's a big driver. But we're also seeing very favorable trends across categories and supplies.

We mentioned home & living as a strong category this quarter in Nigeria. We're seeing strong engagement on our local marketplace. We're seeing increased supply from international vendors, mostly from China, but also from Turkey in Nigeria.

So I think we have lots of tailwinds in Nigeria and the hard work of the past couple of years is really paying off, which is critically important in a market where, first of all, there's so much potential to address.

Second, the competitive intensity has reduced around us. And third and quite importantly, it's a market where we have good unit economics after -- especially after the devaluations over the past few years, local unit costs are fairly low and while it's quite profitable to scale in Nigeria to put it this way.

Your next question is from Fawne Jiang with Benchmark Company.

First of all, your international seller growth appeared very strong. Just wonder how should we think about the merchant ramp-up and the typical lead time from onboarding to more meaningful GMV contribution, particularly considering you are opening a new sorting center [indiscernible] and how would that potentially impact your take rate going forward?

Yes. So that's an important question, guess -- so how can I put it? So the growth we're seeing today in volumes items sold and the whole business from international sellers is actually the result of the last 3 to 4 years of work.

Typically, the timelines when a supply -- when a new Chinese vendor is onboarded, we expect meaningful contribution after more than a year, sometimes 2 years or more to deliver volumes and margins.

It's because we onboard vendors who don't always -- I mean, don't know very well our markets. They need to test the waters first, they send small supply to the countries. And then gradually, they will scale their inventory in our most important countries.

So this process does take time. So they learn the market and they commit more and more working cap and inventory to our countries. And so what you see today is really the result of like 3 to 4 years of real hard work.

What we see on the ground in China, I mean, since the whole tariff thing last year, we've seen that strong -- I mean, much stronger enthusiasm and strong engagement with Chinese vendors. We've seen more and more vendors willing to join our platform and sell on Jumia.

The trend has been very well maintained over the past quarters and consistent now. And this increased -- this increased volumes of onboarding of vendors is going to reflect over time, but it's not yet fully felt in the numbers.

So the good news here is that we really have a pipeline of vendors and the pipeline of supply coming to Africa that will get -- should get stronger over time due to the medium- to long-term structural nature of the work we're doing with our Chinese vendors.

And in terms of margins, as we mentioned in the past, the rise of international supply is accretive to our margins. These vendors typically operate in categories that have higher -- sorry, gross profit ratios such as fashion, accessories, home & living and so on.

They are also much better contributors to our margins when it comes to purchasing advertising services and using our storage services. So at the end of the day, it enables us to get higher monetization from those sellers and from the local marketplace.

Understood. Another, I guess, topic I want to touch upon is actually your fulfillment leverage. You guys continue to show the leverage there. Just given you are going to very high growth momentum, especially in some of the countries, how sustainable is, I think, the fulfillment leverage? Are any logistic capacity constraints or upcoming investment we should be mindful?

I'll spend some time on fulfillment. It's an important one because it's our biggest cost bucket. So first of all, I mean, we're still seeing some leverage on costs this quarter with the fulfillment cost per order that's declining 10% in local currency and it's almost all local OpEx. So the local currency view is relevant.

But we're not happy with the progress, right? In dollars, we're flat year-over-year at $2.1 per gross order. We want to do better than that. So just to set the stage, we're not happy with the progress here, although there is some leverage that visible in local currency.

We believe those cost per order should keep on going down going forward. And scale should play in our favor. There can be very specific temporary cases where like very high volumes lead to some level of inefficiency, but that's really not what should happen across countries and over the long run.

So looking specifically at the improvements and the leverage we have on that fulfillment cost per order, we have a lot of work that has -- well, that has been ongoing over the past 2 quarters already.

On the fulfillment -- so on fulfillment staff cost, which is about 1/3 of the cost here, we have a big push for higher productivity and more automation. We're rolling out at the moment, for example, new tools at the warehouse to increase productivity and tracking of the workforce.

So we believe we have some potential to improve there. And on the transport side, which is around 2/3 of the fulfillment staff cost, about 60%. So on transport, which is basically all the money we're paying to our local logistics partners.

We have recently implemented a renegotiation of all the fees, I mean, a reduction of all the fees. Some of that will be partly offset by the fuel price increases, which will lead to surcharges in some countries.

But over the long run, as prices will normalize, we expect the surcharges to go away. And we are working to improve also the efficiency of our local partners for logistics, so we can renegotiate their fees. So we're working on new tools to make middle-mile trucking more efficient for our partners so we're able to split the savings with them. And this will be operational later this year.

So we still have a lot to do and we still have a lot of efficiencies to capture there. It's a lot of hard work, right? We're using more and more AI to make it more efficient in supply chain as well. Part of it depends on tech progress, which we're seeing on the ground and scale should be a tailwind in this regard. Yes, I hope that answers the question.

Yes, that's very helpful. Lastly, more on housekeeping. Can you provide some color on the FX -- latest FX trends for your key countries?

Yes, Antoine, do you want to take FX?

Yes. So you can see that we've had a disconnect between the progress we made on the adjusted EBITDA basis and the net loss before tax. And this was driven by Forex exchange, which was noncash.

If you compare to Q1 '25 last year, we had a net FX gain of USD 2.1 million. And this year, we have recorded a loss of $3.5 million. Again, that swing is not cash-based. There is no cash impact.

And this reflects the impact of FX swing on intercompany balances that we have between the total holding and the operations. We are working actively on this one to reduce the impact of the Forex by accelerating repatriating cash and other restructuring operations.

This was for the finance and accounting part. On the business side, before Francis comments, if you want, we see some impact, but what is important for us is that the movements are not too violent so that our vendors do not hesitate to import in the countries, which has been the case this year. So so far, we are able to handle properly the FX swing that we are seeing.

Yes. I'll just add briefly on that. We've seen huge swings in FX over the past 4 years across our key countries like Nigeria and Egypt. There's no such thing happening right now. Local currencies have been behaving much more strongly even over the past few months.

And as Antoine mentioned, the most important part here is that it's not impacting suppliers' confidence. It's not impacting customers' purchasing power in any significant way and we're not seeing any disruption in the business because of this.

We have reached the end of the question-and-answer session and conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Jumia's Results Conference Call for the Fourth Quarter of 2025. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Ignatius Njoku, Head of Investor Relations for Jumia. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. With us today are Francis Dufay, CEO of Jumia; and Antoine Maillet-Mezeray, Executive Vice President, Finance and Operations. We would like to remind you that our discussions today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements.

Moreover, these forward-looking statements may speak only to our expectations as of today. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise these statements. For a discussion of some of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from the forward-looking statements expressed today, please see the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 20-F as published on March 7, 2025, as well as our other submissions with the SEC.

In addition, on this call, we will refer to certain financial measures not reported in accordance with IFRS. You can find reconciliations of these non-IFRS financial measures to the corresponding IFRS financial measures in our earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website. With that, I'll hand over to Francis.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Jumia's Fourth Quarter and Full year '25 Earnings Call. 2025 was the year we demonstrated that we can turn the playbook we began building several years ago into tangible results. Over the past few years, Jumia has been building an e-commerce model designed specifically for Africa, adapted to the unique structural, logistical and consumer realities of our markets. In 2025, we proved that this model positions us to scale with the right economics.

As we shared at our Investor Day in November, the question was never whether Africa is ready for e-commerce. Demand has always existed and much of it remains underserved. The real question was when e-commerce would be ready for Africa. We believe that Jumia has now answered that question. This foundation drove our strong operating momentum in the fourth quarter. Physical goods GMV grew 38% year-over-year, adjusted for perimeter effects.

Growth accelerated as the quarter progressed, reflecting strengthening demand and improved execution across our markets with seasonal events, including Black Friday, contributing to volume acceleration during the fourth quarter. At the same time, profitability metrics continued to move in the right direction. Adjusted EBITDA improved, cash burn was meaningfully reduced and the business absorbed higher volumes with increased efficiency.

Based on the progress we made in '25 and the momentum exiting the year, we remain focused on achieving our target of adjusted EBITDA breakeven and positive cash flow in the fourth quarter of '26 and delivering full year profitability and positive cash flow in 2027. Let me now walk you through the key highlights of the quarter. Usage trends remain strong across our platform. Adjusted for perimeter effects, physical goods orders grew 32% year-over-year, driven by expanding geographic coverage, improved assortment and sustained consumer demand.

Our focus remains squarely on physical goods, which accounted for nearly all of total orders and GMV this quarter. Digital transactions through the JumiaPay app now represent a residual share of our orders as we continue to prioritize transactions with stronger economics. Adjusting for perimeter effects, quarterly active customers increased 26% year-over-year, reflecting continued traction in both acquisition and retention.

Repeat behavior continued to improve with 46% of new customers from Q3 '25 making a repeat purchase within 90 days, up from 42% in Q3 '24. Demand was broad-based across electronics, phones, Home & Living, Fashion and beauty and consistent across both countries, reflecting a similar quality of execution and inputs across our markets. Adjusted for perimeter effects, physical goods GMV grew 38% year-over-year in reported currency.

Average order value for physical goods increased to $37 from $35 in Q4 '24, reflecting a mix shift towards higher-value categories such as appliances. Revenue totaled $61.4 million, up 34% year-over-year, driven by higher usage and improved monetization. First-party sales represented 49% of total revenue, supported by continued strength from international partnerships, including Starlink in Nigeria and Kenya. Now turning to profitability.

The progress made over the past 3 years continues to translate into measurable operating leverage. Cost improvements across general and administrative, technology and fulfillment are structural. In addition, we renegotiated third-party logistics contracts and implemented increases in commissions and take rates across most countries in mid-January '26, reflecting the scale of our platform and improved service levels delivered to vendors.

These changes are consistent across markets and reflect stronger marketplace fundamentals. Headcount declined 7% in '25 to approximately 2,010 employees. This is a more focused organization built to support significantly higher volumes without proportional cost growth. Looking ahead, we are targeting a further reduction in headcount in '26, primarily across technology and G&A, driven by continued efficiency initiatives and organizational streamlining.

Fulfillment cost per order improved to $1.97, a 12% year-over-year reduction on a reported basis, reflecting productivity gains and economies of scale in fulfillment operations, increased call center automation and improved logistics partner rates. Technology and content expenses declined 6% year-over-year, reflecting automation, platform simplification and the benefit of renegotiated vendor agreements, including cloud infrastructure.

As a result, adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to $7.3 million from $13.3 (sic) [ $13.7 ] million in the prior year quarter. Loss before income tax was $9.7 million, a 45% decrease year-over-year or 17% decline on a constant currency basis. Quarterly cash burn declined to $4.7 million in Q4 '25 compared to $15.8 million in Q3 '25, reflecting tighter working capital management and improved operating efficiency.

While we may continue to look opportunistically at financing options, based on our current trajectory, we continue to believe our existing liquidity is sufficient to reach profitability without raising additional capital. Turning to operational highlights and execution at the country level. Black Friday was a standout moment in our history. The event delivered strong volumes, higher customer engagement and improved repeat behavior.

Performance during and after the event highlighted a strengthening marketplace flywheel as improvements in assortment, affordability and reliability reinforced our value proposition for Africa's value-conscious customers. We also continue to strengthen our international sourcing capabilities, particularly in China. To support this priority, we recently opened a new office in Yiwu, China, our second in the region and located within one of the world's largest wholesale commodities.

This expansion strengthens our direct sourcing capabilities and deepens collaboration with a broader set of international suppliers. This enables us to expand assortment at attractive price points and deliver competitively priced goods to African consumers at scale. In the fourth quarter, we saw 6.1 million gross items internationally, up over 80% year-over-year, reflecting the continued scaling of our Chinese vendor base and a more diversified supply pipeline.

Operationally, we continue to extend our reach beyond major urban centers. Orders from upcountry regions accounted for 61% of total volumes, up from 56% in the prior year quarter. These regions are delivering strong growth while benefiting from a cost structure that we believe scales efficiently with volume. In secondary cities, we are addressing clear customer pain points, including limited product availability and elevated prices from local traders.

As a result, our value proposition continues to resonate strongly, driving both adoption and repeat purchase. Now at the country level. Nigeria delivered a standout quarter. Physical goods GMV increased 50% year-over-year, while physical goods orders grew 33%, marking the fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.

Performance was broad-based across key categories and channels with geographic expansion continuing to deliver results. Initiatives launched in the Northern region in the third quarter of '25 are translating into steady active customer growth, while the South-South and Southeast regions sustained strong performance. This momentum was supported by an improving macro environment in '25, including greater currency stability as well as the positive effects of structural reforms.

Kenya performed strongly with physical goods orders up 50% year-over-year and physical goods GMV increasing 48% in reported currency. Performance was driven by a strong shopping season with Black Friday delivering a clear uplift. Ivory Coast delivered a strong performance with physical goods orders up 15% year-over-year and physical goods GMV increasing 31% in reported currency, reflecting higher value baskets and improved mix.

Growth was driven by strong momentum in home and appliances as well as TVs alongside solid performance in Beauty. Ivory Coast remains a significant growth opportunity, and our market-leading position supports a continued focus on profitable growth. Egypt's performance this quarter validated the growth turnaround. Physical goods orders increased 23% year-over-year, while physical goods GMV grew 2% year-over-year, reflecting a return to positive growth.

Excluding corporate sales, physical goods GMV grew 56% year-over-year, confirming a full market recovery. Growth was broad-based across core categories, supported by an optimized mass market assortment and a strong Black Friday campaign that contributed over half of quarterly volume. The buy now, pay later offering continued to deepen with record penetration in high-value categories, driving stronger conversion and higher ticket sizes.

Upcountry expansion remained a tailwind with volumes shifting further towards these areas. Ghana delivered an exceptional quarter with physical goods order up 82% year-over-year and physical goods GMV increasing 124% in reported currency. This performance was supported by continued expansion of an increasingly loyal customer base, underscoring improving engagement and highlighting the scalability of our model in Ghana.

Our other markets portfolio also performed well, collectively delivering 18% physical goods, GMV growth and a 16% increase in physical goods orders. In February '26, we announced our decision to cease operations in Algeria, which represented approximately 2% of GMV in 2025. We expect a short-term impact from employees and lease exit costs and asset liquidation.

Over the medium to long term, this decision simplifies our footprint and improves operational focus, allowing us to allocate resources more efficiently towards markets with stronger growth and profitability profiles. The competitive environment remained rational during the quarter with competitive intensity continuing to normalize across our markets. We are seeing less aggressive behavior from certain global entrants in selected countries, including Nigeria, while our local market share continues to build.

At the same time, we are seeing increased regulatory scrutiny on nonresident and cross-border platforms across several countries. Recent examples include the introduction of a new tax on the profits of nonresident e-commerce platforms in the Ivory Coast as well as Ghana's VAT Amendment Act, which requires nonresident digital and e-commerce platforms supplying services into Ghana to register for VAT and comply with local VAT requirements.

These regulatory developments contribute to a more level playing field. As we begin '26, our focus shifts from rebuilding to scaling. First, we plan to accelerate top line growth across our existing markets. Upcountry regions already represent the majority of our volumes, and we still see significant opportunity to deepen penetration by leveraging the infrastructure and partnerships already in place. Second, we will continue to strengthen our value proposition by expanding and refining our product assortment.

Improving availability, affordability and relevance remain central to driving higher conversion and order frequency. Third, marketing represents a meaningful growth lever for -- in 2026 and an important contributor to operating leverage. After rebuilding and stabilizing our off-line channels, we see significant opportunity to scale and optimize online marketing channels that remain underpenetrated, including CRM, paid online marketing, SEO and affiliate partnerships.

As volumes increase, these channels benefit from improving efficiency and targeting, allowing us to support growth while maintaining attractive returns on investment. Fourth, '26 is about operating leverage. With our current cost base, we believe the platform can support meaningfully higher volumes. As scale increases, we expect fulfillment, technology and G&A costs to grow materially slower than revenue, driving margin expansion. We also intend to scale high-margin revenue streams.

We believe that advertising remains underpenetrated and offers meaningful upside while Jumia delivery improves asset utilization and contributes incremental margin with limited additional cost. Taken together, these priorities reinforce our confidence that Jumia has entered its scaling phase, delivering stronger growth with improving profitability and having what we believe to be a clear path to breakeven. Let me close with this. Jumia operates in markets that remain significantly underpenetrated for e-commerce.

Through years of on-the-ground execution, we have built meaningful barriers to entry, a trusted consumer brand and a playbook that demonstrably works. We believe that we are now in the right markets at the right time and finally, with the right product market fit. Our fourth quarter results reinforce that conviction. With that, I will now turn the call over to Antoine to walk you through the financials in more detail.

Thank you, Francis, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I will now walk you through our financial performance for the fourth quarter. Starting with revenue. Fourth quarter revenue reached USD 61.4 million, up 34% year-over-year or up 24% on a constant currency basis. Results reflect sustained consumer demand and consistent execution across our platform. Marketplace revenue for the fourth quarter totaled USD 31 million, up 36% year-over-year and up 24% on a constant currency basis.

Third-party sales were USD 26.7 million, up 33% year-over-year or 22% on a constant currency basis. Growth was driven by solid performance in the marketplace, including healthy usage trends and higher effective take rates. Marketing and advertising revenue was USD 2.9 million, up 42% year-over-year or 33% on a constant currency basis. The improvement was driven by continued growth in sponsored products, with advertising revenue currently representing roughly 1% of GMV, we see meaningful opportunity to scale this channel.

Value-added services revenue was USD 1.4 million, up 79% year-over-year or up 64% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Revenue from first-party sales was USD 29.1 (sic) [ USD 29.9 ] million, up 33% year-over-year or up 23% year-over-year on a constant currency basis, driven by strong momentum with key international brands. Turning to gross profit. Fourth quarter gross profit was USD 34.2 million, up 43% year-over-year or up 31% year-over-year on a constant currency basis.

Gross profit margin as a percentage of GMV was 12.2% for the quarter compared to 11.6% in the fourth quarter of 2024, reflecting continued progress in marketplace monetization. As we enter 2026, we implemented broad-based increases in commissions across most countries, leveraging the scale and improved service levels we have built with vendors.

These changes are expected to support gross profit growth going forward. Now moving to expenses. We continue to see the benefits of our cost initiatives in the fourth quarter with additional improvements expected to materialize over the coming quarters. Fulfillment expense for the fourth quarter was USD 14.8 million, up 15% year-over-year and up 5% in constant currency, primarily due to higher volumes.

Fulfillment expense per order, excluding JumiaPay app orders, was $1.97, down 12% year-over-year or down 20% year-over-year on a constant currency basis, reflecting productivity gains and economies of scale in fulfillment operations, increased call center automation and improved logistics partner rates. In January 2026, we also closed a new cycle of third-party logistics renegotiations, securing meaningful cost savings that are expected to further support fulfillment efficiency and margin progression in 2026.

Sales and advertising expense was USD 7 million for the fourth quarter, up 47% year-over-year and up 39% in constant currency. The increase reflects targeted investment in customer acquisition, particularly across high ROI online channels, supporting efficient top line growth. Technology and content expense was USD 9.4 million for the fourth quarter, representing a decrease of 6% year-over-year or a decrease of 8% on a constant currency basis, driven primarily by continued headcount optimization and ongoing renegotiated vendor contracts.

Fourth quarter G&A expense, excluding share-based payment expense, was USD 13 million, up 1% year-over-year and down 3% on a constant currency basis. Staff costs within general and administrative expense, excluding share-based compensation expense, decreased by 18% to USD 8.2 million. The fourth quarter of 2025 included a tax benefit of USD 4.3 million compared to $8.4 million tax benefit in the fourth quarter of 2024. Turning to profitability.

Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was negative $7.3 million or negative $10.2 million on a constant currency basis. Loss before income tax was $9.7 million, a 45% decrease year-over-year or 17% decline on a constant currency basis. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the fourth quarter with a liquidity position of USD 77.8 million, including $76.7 million in cash and cash equivalents and $1.2 million in term deposits and other financial assets.

Our liquidity position decreased by USD 4.7 million in Q4 '25 compared to a decrease of $13.6 million in Q4. Net cash flow used in operating activities was $1.7 million in the quarter, including a positive working cap impact of $9.6 million. The improvement reflects the continued strengthening of our marketplace flywheel driven by higher volumes, improved payment flows and stronger bargaining power with large third-party accounts.

CapEx in Q4 '25 was USD 1.7 million compared to $1.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2024, primarily reflecting investments in supply chain equipment ahead of the end of the year season. In summary, we delivered another quarter of solid execution and strong top line growth while continuing to improve cost efficiency.

Progress on structural cost reductions, automation and cash discipline reinforces our confidence in meeting our near-term objectives and moving closer to profitability. Looking ahead, we remain focused on operational discipline, margin expansion and prudent and informed capital allocation, positioning Jumia for sustainable growth and long-term value creation. I'll now turn the call back over to Francis for a discussion of our updated guidance.

Thanks, Antoine. Let me now turn to our expectations for '26. As we enter the next phase of scaling, we are refining how we frame profitability. Given our increasing focus on operating leverage and the underlying performance of the business, we believe adjusted EBITDA is the most appropriate metric to assess progress towards profitability. It provides a clearer view of operating performance and unit economics as non-operating items and non-cash charges become less representative of the business trajectory.

Importantly, this does not change our underlying profitability objectives, and we believe we remain on track to achieve adjusted EBITDA breakeven and positive cash flow in the fourth quarter of '26 and delivering full year profitability and positive cash flow in 2027. With that context in mind, our focus for '26 remains on accelerating growth, driving further operating efficiency and continuing our progress towards profitability.

We are seeing encouraging trends early in the year, which give us confidence in establishing our full year 2026 outlook. For the full year of 2026, we anticipate GMV to grow between 27% and 32% year-over-year adjusted for perimeter effects. On profitability, we expect adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of negative $25 million to negative $30 million. We confirm our strategic goal to achieve breakeven on an adjusted EBITDA basis and positive cash flow in the fourth quarter of '26 and to deliver full year profitability and positive cash flow in 2027.

Looking specifically at the first quarter, GMV is projected to grow between 27% and 32% year-over-year adjusted for perimeter effects, and we expect higher cash outflows in the first quarter, reflecting typical seasonality and the timing of annual contract renewals for technology and insurance. As part of ongoing operational optimization, the company has announced it will exit Algeria in February '26 and expects to incur related onetime costs. Thank you for your attention. We'll now be happy to take questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question for today is from Brad Erickson with RBC Capital Markets.

I guess just to start, if you had to kind of rank order the accelerants in 2026, you're talking about, I guess, you've got improving assortment, you're going to spend more on marketing, it sounds like, and then there's obviously just kind of the rising tide of underpenetrated e-commerce, which of those is kind of most impactful to the acceleration you see in 2026? And any other clear drivers you'd call out along those lines?

Yes, sure. I think we have 3, maybe 4 main drivers. I mean the most important one, structurally speaking, would be assortment and our ability to bring more assortment, more availability at lower price points for value-driven customers. And that's been an effort that's been pushed for the past 3 years. So it's a long-term impact. Second big driver that's quite structural as well is coverage, market coverage.

So we've significantly expanded our network back in '24 and in early '25 as well, and it will continue in '26. And as we cover a greater share of the population, well, the addressable market simply increases, and that's been a big push over the past few years as well. And then marketing started playing a more important role, I would say, in the second half of the year. And you've seen in the numbers that we've ramped up slightly our marketing investments in Q3 and Q4.

And we see very strong return investments, particularly on the online channels that we have kind of revived in the process, and it's been contributing definitely to the acceleration you see in the second half of the year. And then you have a more diffused but very important factor, which is the improvement in quality of service and satisfaction. That is really hard to pinpoint in terms of very direct impact, but it's really happening on the ground.

Got it. That's helpful. And then to the point on capacity, you've said, I think, many times, including today that you have kind of what you need in place to support a lot higher volumes. As we look forward maybe over the next few years, how should we think about lead times for kind of further investment in capacity expansion?

So you can look at it in different ways. I mean when we talk capacity, usually, I think about fulfillment and supply chains. And then you can discuss -- well, I mean, you can talk about the platform as well, and I'll take that one. When we look at the fulfillment capacity, which is the usual bottleneck for a growing e-commerce business, we believe we're in the right place in pretty much all countries until the end of '26 or maybe the end of '27. So the next 2 years should be very manageable with the capacity we have.

I'm mostly talking warehouse space and equipment. We know already that some countries will need to scale and get to -- simply to move to bigger fulfillment centers, such as Ghana, for example, in '27. But most of the countries should be fine. We don't expect major CapEx on that front because we've done a pretty big work on this topic already in '24 and '25, moving to new bigger fulfillment centers in most countries.

And then when we look at the tech platform, the tech stack, we believe we have the right tech stack to manage 2 or 3x the volumes we've been running in '25. So it would not take any major investment, additional major investment compared to the amounts you see today in our fixed costs to be able to sustain 2 or 3x the volumes.

Got it. That's great. And then following up kind of on the tech stack, and you mentioned the take rate expansion and some of the drivers there. Would you say that was kind of like a step-up to what we might consider now a market rate? Or is that more like an ongoing, say, annual thing? How should we think about that?

So take rate expansion, well, I mean, we're a marketplace. So as you scale, you should be able to take more, right? That's the name of the game for all the big players. We see that happening with our customers and vendors as well. So for example, early this year, we've already renegotiated the rates. I mean, we've enforced new rates with all of our marketplace in all countries. We need to look at it as a gradual effect.

We -- I mean, we see it as a byproduct of scale, obviously. and the gradual effect comes from improving commissions, which we do on a yearly basis, then improving retail margins -- sorry, reducing waste and very importantly, improving advertising monetization, so retail advertising, which we believe is still pretty low in our case. We're still around 1% of GMV. We believe we should be closer to 2%.

We did not deliver as much as we wanted in '25, but I believe that we've taken the right steps, the right -- I mean, we put in place the right structural enablers to be able to scale our retail advertising. We've launched a new platform for sponsored products. We've reorganized the team, and we've really scaled volume with key accounts, so we can also sell more campaigns to brands. So we're looking for -- definitely, we're looking for an acceleration here in '26.

Got it. And then just in terms of the guidance for the year, can you just -- I guess, a couple of things on what you're sort of embedding First, just around first-party, third-party corporate mix? And then second, just are there any FX changes in there? Or is it just assuming kind of FX stays in the course?

I'll take the mix, and I will let Antoine elaborate on the FX. I think high level in the guidance this year, we're not -- I mean, we're not betting on any significant volume in corporate sales. As you know, we've de-prioritized that line of business. And then we expect the mix of marketplace versus retail to be pretty much stable. I would say if we do well, we should slightly grow the share of marketplace, but we're assuming the mix pretty much stable. Antoine, you want to take the FX.

Yes. It's a bit of the same. On the FX side, we do not factor any potential improvement in our guidance. And typically, if you look at the recent evolution of the naira, this is not taken into account into the way we forecast. So a very cautious approach.

Got it. That's helpful. And then just on the exit of Algeria, I wonder, are there other countries that could be exit opportunities? And conversely, I guess, are there any countries you'd consider entering?

So I'll start with the second half of your question. We're not considering entering any new country until we hit full year breakeven. So we don't want to get distracted. And we don't want to delay the target for breakeven because we know that any new country we would open would be loss-making for at least 2 years. So that's not part of the plan until we hit full year breakeven.

And then other countries to exit, at this stage, we believe we have the right footprint with 8 core markets that all have pretty big scale and profitability potential. I think the message we gave to the teams as well in all countries is that all countries, all business units are expected to deliver scale and profitability in a very reasonable time frame.

That's the message within the whole company. And we're not shy of taking the tough decisions even though the company is doing a lot better at group level, we'll still be able to reassess the portfolio and take tough decisions if needed. But no other country where we're contemplating an exit at this stage or thinking of.

That's great. And then one last one for me. Thanks for putting up with me here. You mentioned the balance sheet, not needing to raise capital. Obviously, you've been through this kind of period the last couple of years of being just incredibly judicious with your liquidity here. Is there any other reason or areas where you maybe think about playing a little bit more offense at some point where a capital injection might make sense?

So -- yes, so it's very important for us not to need to raise capital. We don't want to have to do it. We want to be -- we want to keep control of our future, definitely. If we had more liquidity, and that's a big if, of course, there would be opportunities for us. And so we could push a bit harder on working capital to secure more assortment and better prices like we did last year after the ATM. We could be able to invest a bit more in marketing, especially now that we're seeing pretty good return on investment on key online channels.

And there would be topic in tech and product where we could be able to invest a bit to get more efficiencies, for example, and get to profitability a little faster. But that's purely hypothetical. And we believe -- I mean, as I was saying, we believe we have what we need to take it to profitability without having to raise further cash.

Your next question is from Fawne Jiang with Benchmark.

First of all, I just want to focus a bit more on your underlining core markets. Tremendous growth momentum across the board. Just wonder how should we look at the overall macro and consumption dynamic for 2026? Related to that, Egypt is clearly on a recovery trajectory. Are you expecting Egypt to catch up in terms of the overall growth rate in 2026 or longer term? Or is the market somewhat structurally disadvantaged growing at a slower pace? Just want to get a sense on the potential of that market.

Okay. Sure. Thanks. So on the macro side, I think we're now turning cautiously optimistic. Without sarcasm, I think Africa is starting to look like a very stable place related to the rest of the world. But more seriously, what we've seen over the past 1.5 years across the continent is that the macro is stabilizing. The most -- I mean, the best KPI for that is currencies. Well, the FX rates have been stable or slightly improving.

For example, the Nigerian naira is slowly appreciating against the dollar, has been appreciating over more than a year. The Egyptian pound is stable. Most of the other currencies have been stable or appreciating. And that's really changing -- that's changing the whole context for us. Having stable currencies gives trust to our customers, and it enables massive improvement on the supply side because basically importers can start importing again. They know that currency will be fairly stable.

They know what to expect. Chinese international sellers can ship again to Africa. They have more confidence that they will be paid the right amount 6 months later. So the whole stabilization on the currency front on the macro front is really helping the business. And across our footprint of 8 countries now, there should be no major disturbance in '26, no major election that should disturb the business.

We're becoming fairly optimistic now about the stability of the macro and possibly slight improvement in many countries. I think the best example is Nigeria. I mean, Nigeria has been through hell for 3, 4 years. They've come back. I mean, they've taken very tough measures. The political reforms that have been implemented were tough and almost unexpected, but it seems to be working. And the whole economy is starting to get better, and Jumia will be well positioned to take advantage of that.

And then when we look at Egypt, yes, we expect -- I mean, we do expect Egypt to catch up, right? There's no reason for Egypt to be a slow growth country among Jumia's portfolio. We believe in Egypt, we are relatively -- we're still a relatively small business in a big market, and there's definitely a lot of room for expansion.

It's obviously a competitive market. So there's more competition in the big cities, main metropolitan areas, but we still have opportunities in those areas, and there's a great opportunity to expand up country like we've done successfully in the other countries. So yes, we have big expectations for Egypt.

Understood. That's helpful. My second question is actually on the operating leverage. You guys have made substantial headway across fulfillment, G&A, R&D. One item like sales and marketing, you guys seem to be still fairly aggressive in 2025. I guess the question here is for 2026, how do you balance your user acquisition and retention, which is an important driver for your overall growth versus your marketing efficiency?

Are we expecting like operating leverage for sales and marketing line for 2026? Any color on that, especially your cohort user behavior, repeat purchase? And yes, any granularity, that would be helpful.

Yes. So just to explain first. So we've indeed scaled our marketing spend in H2 this year, but we believe for the right reasons. When you look at the presentation on Page 19, you have the breakdown of the whole operating leverage. It does make sense for us to push a bit harder on volumes because, well, all unit economics are a lot better. So now with 36% growth, we're able to get plus 100% on gross profit after free segment and after marketing.

So the leverage is working and a slight acceleration in marketing, we believe, does make sense. However, our North Star is to become profitable at the end of this year and then full year '27, most important. That's the most important thing to us. We need to hit EBITDA breakeven. So we'll remain extremely reasonable in the way we spend our marketing money. So I think ballpark, H2 this year gives you an idea of what aggressive means for us in terms of marketing spend.

Understood. Francis, another question I have is actually on your sourcing of supply. You mentioned that you opened a new center in Yiwu. How could that impact your potential, I don't know, assortment? Would that change your category exposure? How would that shape up your, I guess, AOV for 2026 and potential margin impact? Any color on yes, incremental, I think, availability?

So that's exactly what you say. It's going to help us improve our category exposure because until recently in China, we had an office only in Shenzhen, which was the right place to start with. But the Shenzhen area is mostly famous for electronics, 3P. So we have plenty of suppliers to support us on, well, electronic accessories, devices and so on. But expanding to Yiwu gives us access to a supplier base more diversified with more fashion, more home products, home improvements, and that will really help us diversify the product mix we're getting from our international vendors.

Of course, that push should help sales of relatively lower value items compared to what we're selling today, but with higher margins in percentage. So it's hard to -- I mean, it's hard to anticipate the impact on the whole AOV or the whole average item value at Jumia. But indeed, expanding in China and expanding specifically in this region should help to drive more volumes from Chinese vendors in categories where we know that the average selling point will be lower, but with very strong profitability.

Understood. Last one on my side. You mentioned -- if I heard you correctly, you mentioned that the buy now, pay later has been an important driver for your Egypt market. I just wonder, can you remind us, do you offer that product across your market? And if not, how do you see the potential of that product services as, I guess, the driver for future growth?

Sure. So what's specific about Africa when you mentioned fintech and as part of fintech consumer finance is that it's heavily fragmented. The regulation is very different market by market, and you end up with very, very different local ecosystems. Typically in Egypt, the ecosystem is very well structured. Banking regulation is very strong. Enforcement is strong.

And there has been a very strong ecosystem for buy now, pay later with strong local providers who are willing to integrate with e-commerce platforms. So we've done a big push, and we -- I think we've been the leaders in onboarding as many of those players as possible. We've done a big push in onboarding so -- consumer finance providers fully online. And now it's a significant share of our sales in Egypt, particularly for high-value items like appliances, TV, devices and so on. But that's also quite specific to Egypt.

What we see in the other markets is that we don't find the same kind of ecosystem. There are much fewer players in some countries like in Eastern Africa, it's only assets backed -- sorry, BNPL, so based on phones that can be disabled. And in most of the other countries where we operate, sorry, the ecosystem is just naturally at this stage. So it's on a country-by-country basis. And I cannot comment about when we could be -- we would be able to expand that across more countries.

Your next question for today is from Ryan Sigdahl with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

A lot has been asked here. I'm going to ask one and then just one follow-up here. I guess to be clear, I mean, very, very strong operational performance, nice acceleration fundamentals, a lot of things going very well. Curious if anything negatively surprised you in Q4. And I know we don't want to focus necessarily, but just looking at Q4 results relative to your guidance, anything to call out there?

Yes. I mean, of course, not everything went well. I will not give you the whole list, but I think I'll give you one point, for example, the advertising, so basically monetization on the advertising side, as I was mentioning earlier, is still lower than our expectations in Q4 included across the whole year, actually, and that's the reason for deviation on the bottom line on our end, unfortunately.

But yes, we did expect more in '25 and definitely at the end of the year from monetization -- advertising, sorry. What matters here is that we believe we have taken the right steps. So we've made a lot of changes on sponsored products for retail advertising earlier in the year.

And we see that revenues are really improving literally on a weekly basis. And we've been rebuilding the team and rebuilding the processes so we can now go ahead and also monetize brands with bigger campaigns. And we're looking forward to seeing the results in '26 on the back also of much bigger volumes that definitely help when you want to sell advertising.

Good segue, Francis [indiscernible] my next question is just on the ads. I think it was mentioned 1% of GMV. Where do you think that can go in '26? Or what's implied? Where can that go longer term? And then what are you specifically doing today that you're going to improve brand advertising campaigns, et cetera. But are these sponsored listings? Is this advertising around the outside of the website, but help explain, I guess, really what you guys are doing and what you're going to do incrementally.

Sure. So in Q4, our advertising revenue was about 1% of GMV. We believe that over the medium term, we should get closer to 2%, and that's the right benchmark for e-commerce players in emerging markets. It will not happen in '26, right? It will take a few years to get to 2%, but that's the right target for us with gradual improvement. What we've done in '25 to start getting there, so we have 2 different segments here.

We have sponsored products or retail advertising that we mostly sell to medium-sized and smaller market size vendors -- marketplace vendors, sorry. And then we have marketing campaigns that we sell to official distributors and brands. On the first topic, so retail advertising, we've rolled out a new tool from a company called Mirakl that was implemented in the first half of the year, took a lot -- I mean, it took some time.

It was quite well executed, I must say, from their end, but it took some time and it kind of disrupted our operations, of course, due to the transition. But we're now back on track. The teams really like the tool. The vendors give us really good feedback. It's reliable, it's stable and we see good profitability on the ads. So we are really seeing renewed momentum on that revenue line. And we're clearly going to beat last year's numbers in '26 by a margin.

And then the second stream of revenue here is campaigns, mostly sold to big distributors and brands. '25 has been disappointing [indiscernible] mostly as we -- I mean, one of the big drivers has been the reduction of revenues we get from FMCG brands because we deprioritized FMCG back in '23, '24. And of course, the marketing dollars reduced as well in the process. What we've done this year is that we've rebuilt the team. We organized the teams and the processes, set new targets and the right incentives.

We're rolling out a few specific tools and features that will be relevant for brands such as sponsored brands, for example. So you can bid for sponsored brands on the platform now has been released only a few weeks back. And now we have a much more focused and better organized team on the back of bigger volumes from -- for our brands on the platform, thanks to growth in most of our markets. And so we believe it should put us in a much better place for '26.

Your next question is from Deepak Mathivanan with Cantor Fitzgerald.

This is Jack on for Deepak. I'll start with just a little bit on competition. I know you said things are relatively rational from a competitive standpoint. But are you kind of seeing any outside competitive pressure more from the local or international side? Can you just like talk to that a little bit more about the dynamics you're seeing there?

So to be honest, we haven't seen much change in the fourth quarter. Maybe -- I mean, I would say we've seen some softening from international competitors and not much change from local platforms. We -- I mean, there are a few countries where we're competing against local platforms. We're by far the market leaders in those countries. There would be Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, for example. No, really no change.

I mean, as usual, as I'd like to repeat, we believe that we have an edge against those local platforms because of -- I mean, thanks to our scale, thanks to the learnings we can get across Africa, thanks to our sourcing infrastructure in China and with international brands that are harder for them to reach. And thanks to our tech infrastructure that requires significant investment that's not sustainable for one single market.

And then on the -- regarding international platforms, I think no meaningful change. We've seen Temu still active in Nigeria, still active in Ghana, active in Morocco, but we've seen the pressure slightly decreasing actually over the past 2, 3 quarters. We've seen big pushes and then its slowdown through the year of '25. What we're seeing now that's interesting is that local regulators are looking into the issue of international platforms, nonresident platforms.

It took a bit of time like everywhere in the world. But basically, local regulators are starting to address the fact that international nonresident platforms are not really -- not contributing at all to the local economy. So we've seen new regulation in the Ivory Coast, in Ghana to make sure that VAT is implemented on their sales that there's a tax on their profits.

And it all -- I mean, it's good news for us, right, because it contributes to a more level playing field for e-commerce players and some of the slightly unfair advantage that these guys used to have will be removed because they have to compete and also paying their taxes like everyone else.

Great. No, that makes a lot of sense. And then just my second question is sort of around fulfillment. Obviously, down again year-over-year, excluding the digital. How much runway is there for kind of more structural improvements through efficiency gains and whatnot versus like do you guys expect to get leverage just from pure like order volumes going forward?

Yes. So on that front, we have 2 things at play. We have productivity improvement, like pure productivity improvement, and then we have -- well, benefiting from scale effect and doing some work on it. So on pure productivity improvement, we still have some room to go. So we can still push more automation to our call centers, so we can manage more volumes with fewer people.

We are looking to rebuild some of our warehouse management system features this year to have faster picking, faster packing, faster inbound and so on. So still a lot we can do on pure productivity topics, and we've massively improved tracking as well on those matters. And then we benefit from scale in many ways. Of course, in the fulfillment operations, there's a dimension of fixed costs and scale definitely helps.

But also in the logistics or distribution operations, we are actually able to get much better prices from our 3 peers, thanks to volumes. A lot of our third-party logistics are running pickup stations. So they're running mostly fixed costs in those pickup stations. So when we increase volumes for them, we're actually able to discuss a new profit-sharing kind of and reduce their fees for each package.

We're also able to optimize our moves for middle mile for the truck moves, and we can renegotiate better fees, better costs for all that part of logistics. So this is actually what we've been doing through the month of January and early February as well. So we've renegotiated lower fees with most of our 3 peers in all countries, both for last mile for door delivery and pickup stations, but also for middle mile for the truck moves.

And that's definitely a byproduct of scale again, and that will keep on improving over time as we're able to sustain this growth rate. Sorry, Jack, ballpark, we're looking for about 10% year-over-year improvement in unit cost per package delivered.

Your next question is from Tracy Kivunyu with SBG Securities.

One question from me on GMV guidance for next year. Considering -- I appreciate the feedback you've given on the question on whether you're looking at constant currency performance or not. But even on a constant currency basis, the guidance looks quite light considering there is the low base effect of corporate sales in the first quarter of 2025 that should help to boost that year-on-year comparison. So I was just wondering if there are any risks to that guidance in the markets that you're factoring in? Or are you just taking a more conservative approach than you were possibly when you're releasing your third quarter results?

So we're not factoring any specific risk at market level. I think as I was mentioning, we're fairly confident with the macro environment, there are no specific events in the countries where we operate that will take place this year that might disrupt the market as far as we know. So I would say we've been -- I mean, we're providing a guidance that's realistic and related -- I mean, hopefully, a bit conservative. And -- sorry, and Tracy, I would add to that as well. I mean we're providing this guidance.

And to your question, maybe it looks a bit shy compared to the growth rate we're delivering in Q4. But it's also a guidance that we want to deliver while improving the take rate. So we're increasing commissions, we're increasing fees. We'll be tighter on some dimensions of spend. So we look -- we'll be looking for better marketing ratios and so on. So we're adding additional constraints on that growth. So we believe it's the right balance here.

Maybe also corporate sales GMV was not extremely high in 2025, so less than USD 20 million, which is not very material.

Okay. And what is the scope of the commission increase in percentage terms, if you could share that you've implemented in this year?

So we have not disclosed, but -- actually, it's public information in each country because we communicate those numbers to vendors. So it depends on countries. In some countries, we've increased by a few decimals. In some other countries, we've increased by almost 2 points.

We've had a more aggressive increase on our international vendors because we believe that we're providing now a much better service with much better volumes for them. So we want to -- we need to monetize that a little bit as well and make sure it remains profitable for them. So all in all, at group level, I mean, we should be between 0.5 point and a full point over GMV ballpark.

This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Jumia's Investor Day. My name is Francis Dufay. I'm the CEO of Jumia. I joined the company 12 years ago now as the Country Manager of Jumia in Ivory Coast, stepped up as CEO 3 years back as we were starting the broad restructuring plan that you're certainly aware of now.

So I often get the question from journalists, investors, anyone outside the company, is Africa ready for e-commerce? Fair question. Obviously, the answer is yes, but it's also the wrong way of asking the question. Of course, Africa is ready for e-commerce. There's plenty of demand, poorly served demand, latent demand that can be actually served at scale and in a profitable way.

The right question is, when will e-commerce be ready for Africa? It's all about building a business model that's not a copycat of what works somewhere else, but that's truly adapted to the unique challenges that we face in our markets. We'll come to that later. We believe this is what we're building, and this is why it's working.

So let me start now by diving into the fundamentals of our markets and explaining to you what's changing today and what's supporting the rise of e-commerce across the continent.

All right, so looking at the fundamentals, we're looking at a market of 1.5 billion people across Africa and population still growing. We're looking at an e-commerce market -- addressable market of $40 billion in 2029, only in the 9 markets that's recovering. And most importantly, penetration remains extremely low. There's massive headroom for increased e-commerce penetration in our markets even compared to other emerging markets like LatAm, not to mention Southeast Asia.

More in details. We see a lot of things happening on the continent that's quite favorable for the growth of our e-commerce addressable market. We see macro factors like demographics, but we also see clear progress in business enablers that will change the way we can do e-commerce and will make it easier to drive customer adoption. If we look at the macro factors, starting with demographics, obviously, population in Africa is going to grow significantly to 2.5 billion people in 2050, that's 60% growth versus today, while all the other regions in the world will be flat or declining.

As well, we're currently operating with very low GDP per capita across Africa, around $2,000 on average in the markets where we operate. But even modest improvement, which is reasonable to expect, compounded with population growth will have massive impact on our addressable market.

And last but not least, and that's happening, Internet penetration is clearly improving. We do remain far behind what's happening in India, China or LatAm, of course. But you see that we're gaining -- we're going from 14% to 38% in the past 10 years only. There's a real trend. Internet is becoming cheaper and more accessible for local populations. That's going to help drive e-commerce adoption, obviously.

Then when we look at slightly more conjunctural business enablers in our ecosystem, a lot of things are happening. We picked a few examples here that are making our work way easier as an e-commerce platform. To start with SMEs and vendors are increasingly going online for their own needs, for their own marketing to sell on social networks. It's really improving the digital fluency, if I may say it this way, and making it a lot easier for platforms like Jumia to take them online at scale to sell in the marketplace.

Core infrastructure is slowly improving. I say slowly, I don't want everyone to get too excited. But we see progress in the road network across all countries. Electrification is progressing, and that's unlocking new markets for us. When the roads get better, we can serve new regions, new cities, that's increasing the addressable market.

When electricity access improves, while people get access to the Internet and people can start purchasing appliances and electronics from Jumia. So overall, that's fundamental trends that keep on improving our addressable market. And last but not least here, we see clear progress in the fintech and payment ecosystem across the continent, across our markets.

So payments are becoming increasingly digitized with very different payment methods across countries. It's -- there's no one size fits all, very different ecosystems. But overall, this is creating -- I mean, people are really changing the way they transact using less cash and more digital payment methods, creating trust in digital services and ultimately in e-commerce, making it easier for us to convert customers. Those fundamental trends and more conjunctural business enablers are really helping us to get the e-commerce flywheel. Our marketplace flywheel started across the continents.

Well, I expect everyone is quite familiar with the marketplace flywheel in which more demand will create, I mean, more sales will generate a more favorable business model and attract more vendors, supply and brands on the platform. And on the other hand, more supply will generate more sales, starting the positive marketplace flywheel. What's happening outside of Jumia on the background is actually helping us to get this flywheel started.

On the demand side, so demographic trends that we just discussed are -- I mean, this is really playing in favor and building up demand. But also on the supply side, more conjunctural factors, that we see. So FX stability, probably a new cycle opening for Africa with much more monetary stability is really helping to build up the supply of the marketplace. In this very specific case, we had 3, 4 very tough years across Africa with massive volatility on the currency side.

The main consequence was that the supply side of the marketplace was particularly dry. What happens in our countries when FX is a little tricky, importers will stop importing. They will keep their dollars somewhere outside of the country, and they will not risk to commit that to get inventory and sell in naira or SD or Kenyan shilling.

Now that we have more stability and more visibility on currencies, which has been the case for about 1.5 years now, we see that the supply side of the marketplace is getting a lot stronger on top of all the work that we've done, of course, to build trust with our suppliers. And then something that happened more recently, we also greatly helped by the recent pilot of Chinese manufacturers towards new markets. It puts Africa back on the map and makes it a lot easier to secure inventory, supplies more goods at a better price for African consumers.

So all this is really helping us and enabling a favorable background for the growth of Jumia. I do believe that now is finally the time for African e-commerce and more specifically for Jumia. The stars are finally aligning for us. I mean I'll start with what is under our control. For the first time ever after 13 years of operations at Jumia, we have rebuilt a business model that makes sense and that creates value for customers, for vendors and local partners and for Jumia and its shareholders. We're able to grow again while improving the economics at the same time because we're able to solve people's problem to put it in a very simple way.

I'll come back to this business model, but it's now very visible in the numbers that something is happening and what we have rebuilt makes sense. This product market fit finally. At the same time, we're entering, we believe, a much more favorable cycle for Africa with positive tailwinds on the macroeconomic side. Currency stability is the most obvious sign of this new cycle that will greatly help to boost consumer confidence, of course, working on the demand side. But as I was explaining, also improving the supply side of the marketplace, which is probably the most critical ingredient for the success of Jumia.

And all that is happening in the context of markets with massive structural runway. Our markets are massively underpenetrated when it comes to the share of e-commerce over the total retail. We're looking at huge runway for growth. We'll come to that a bit later in the presentation. And it's happening while Jumia has finally rebuilt the right value proposition. We have extremely strong brands and barriers to entry in those countries.

And we see that it's very difficult for both smaller local players or large international players to come and compete with us now that we've adapted to those markets. So we believe that we are finally on the right continent, in the right place at the right time and with the right product. Briefly on this one. So yes, quickly, Jumia is the only pan-African e-commerce player operating at scale across the continent.

We're covering 9 markets. We are leveraging unique know-how and unique knowledge of the market that we've accumulated over the past 15 years. We're delivering the same playbook, the same operating model across markets, which makes it relatively simple to implement and scalable. And obviously, we're one of the only publicly listed companies able to tap the growth of African consumers at scale across the continent.

So all that is great, but there has to be a reason why there's only one pan-African e-commerce player. It's a tough market. The African e-commerce market comes with a set of very unique challenges. We could draft a very, very long list. We chose to pick like only 7 bullet points here. But it comes -- I mean, the challenges of the African e-commerce market are absolutely unique. It's the lowest disposable income on earth when we look at the region. Africa is one big continent, but it's 50-plus small fragmented markets, which makes it very difficult to operate a business like e-commerce, where you need fixed costs and logistics and so on.

The logic ecosystems are not mature enough. Payments are not yet fully digitized. Shopping behaviors differ across cities, across countries. There are very different customer profiles. the informal market is prevalent, and we have to cooperate with informal players and the private and local private initiative to be successful. And of course, there are huge trust issues from a large part of the population whenever it comes to doing anything online and any online transaction.

So the challenge is to solve that, right? How do we solve those problems? The bright side is that we've been able to operate on the ground, very close to our customers, very close to our partners for the past 15 years. And we've learned. We've tried. We failed in some cases. We've experimented, but we've been able to build a business model that exactly addresses those problems, and we perfected our operations to solve all everything that's in this list. To give you a few examples here, well, the issue of limit of low disposable income, the way we solve it is that we've massively focused our sourcing operations or commercial teams towards bringing an amazing value for money.

We're looking for affordability above anything. We've designed our logistics as well to be very cheap, very affordable, so we don't have to charge a lot of shipping fees, affordability at all costs. The way we deal with the size of the markets is that we've made sure that we have very small, very lean and agile teams in each country, so we don't have much overhead to cover, and we're actually able to generate some cash at country level and then breakeven at group level.

The way we deal with become a clear leader in Africa in cash on delivery. Nobody likes cash on delivery in this room, I guess, we neither, but our customers need it and they love it. So we had to do it. It was not really an option. So we've built our operations. We've trained our partners. We've built our tech to make sure that we could operate cash on delivery at scale in Africa with no leakage, no issue and very efficient operations.

And today, it's working, and that's a great asset for us to bring more offline customers to e-commerce. So it's not about just about acknowledging the problems. It's about seeing these are challenges that can be solved. And because we've been blessed with very strong teams on the ground, we've been able to embed the solutions into our business models. We've been able to fully adapt the e-commerce playbook to solve the real issues that our customers and vendors are facing. And this is our moat today. This is not just about being first.

This is not just about spending money. It's about being willing to take the e-commerce playbook and change everything that needs to be -- that is changing. Today, we have a playbook that I believe is very hard, very expensive to replicate either by local competitors, sorry, or large international players who would come with a copycat of what has worked somewhere else.

All right. I'd like to spend some time now on Jumia's journey. We could write a book about it probably. Those of you who have been following the story know that it's been quite a roller coaster to put it nicely. But it's very important for me to explain to you what happened, in particular, what went wrong, so we can also clarify what we're doing right now and why we believe it's going to work at scale. All right. So on this page here, you see a very simple time line showing, I mean, in a simplified way, the 4 phases Jumia has been through.

First one has been the building phase, foundations. So from 2012 to '19. We've been building the basics of the marketplace. We've been expanding to a peak of 15 countries, I believe, quite a lot, many different verticals, a lot of time and money was spent on building the brand with, at the time, pretty strong focus on volume growth and expansion driven by the first shareholders. And that led to the IPO in New York in 2019. Starting from there, unfortunately, the company was able to raise a lot of money and burn it very fast. quite helped at the time by the COVID bubble.

But we -- I mean, what Jumia started at the time was a phase of growth at all costs, like a lot of other tech companies, and we fell into the same tracks, I believe. It came with pretty negative consequences on the quality of operations, our unit economics, our focus and so on, and I'll get to that right afterwards. Late '22, the situation had become totally unsustainable, huge cash burn that was not justified by the scale that has been reached. We were burning more than $200 million a year, and they were pretty much -- there was pretty much the same amount left on the bank account. So something had to change.

And it was not possible to raise our way out of it anymore because the music had stopped on the stock market. So that's where everything changes. That's when I was appointed to CEO of the company. That's when we changed the whole management team, and we started 3 years of pretty tough restructuring across the whole business and with a clear focus not only on cost management, but also on rebuilding the right business, the right value proposition that does make sense for African consumers so we could grow again and deliver a viable business. I'll come to that later.

But basically, this phase takes us to where we are today, entering the fourth phase in this chart here, a phase of sustainable growth, where we're able to scale again on healthy foundations with better unit economics, a refocused business on the one big opportunity, which is e-commerce at scale for the lower middle class of Africa and with now a clear path towards profitability and full year breakeven in 2027. So let's start with the second phase, the most painful one. I don't like going through this slide again, but I think it's worth explaining so everyone can understand what we've been through and why we're not making the same mistakes again.

It's been expensive learning, but still learning. So when we started that phase of growth at all cost from '19 to '22, it came with some pretty negative consequences that I guess a lot of companies have been facing in the tech ecosystem pretty much at the same time. So first of all, focus was completely diluted. Too many different verticals, too many countries, some with very little hope of breaking even. And while I do believe that in our countries across Africa, I mean, we're not short of opportunities.

There are thousands of ideas that makes sense. It's just about executing one at scale the right way across many countries and doing it well. We're not able to execute well with so many topics to deal with. We've changed that radically when clearly we focused on one big opportunity, which is e-commerce only in 9 countries that do make sense. Then growth as the absolute focus came at the expense of attention to details, clean operations and ultimately, unit economics.

So we ended up in a situation in many countries, for example, where the cost of fulfillment was higher than the gross profit. So the bigger they would get, the more money they would lose. That doesn't make sense, but that's the kind of stuff that can happen when you don't pay attention to quality of operations. This has changed radically, obviously. The whole new team that's been promoted is coming from the ground, coming from operations. We are maniacal about unit economics and details of our operations on the ground on commercial operations, fulfillment, call centers and so on.

I myself started at Jumia focusing on logistics. So quality of operations is a topic that's very close to my heart. Of course, in the process, when raising too much money, what you usually do is that you build huge overheads because you assume that it's going to solve a lot of problems. It turns out it didn't. In our case, we built big overheads, particularly from central -- in central teams that were based very far away from Africa, either in Europe or in the Middle East, which didn't lead to the best decision-making and led to quite some misunderstanding with local teams who are actually working on the ground in pretty tough conditions.

This has completely changed as well. We have now very lean overheads. I mean the staffing at Jumia has been massively reduced. We had 4,500 people on the payroll late '22. We have 2,000 today, quite a change. And then last but not least, because most of the leadership was outside the continent and never really lived in Africa, most of the decision-making that happened in Paris or Dubai could not really understand the specificities and the needs of our customers and vendors, which led to 2 things: broad disconnect between the teams on the ground and the leadership and quite from this organization and most importantly, building a value proposition that did not make sense at all.

We'll come to that later. But of course, with that, you have little opportunities to grow in a healthy way over the medium term. So most important part here is that we've learned a lot from that, and we've made the right changes. So what have we changed? So late '22, we started a phase of deep restructuring across the whole business with 4 -- with 3 main building blocks. One, refocusing on the one big opportunity.

We had had the chance -- I mean, in the previous years, we had the chance to understand that the one vertical that made sense was e-commerce, what we call physical goods. In a few countries, specifically Ivory Coast and Senegal, we had been able to scale with much better unit economics with specific categories that made sense. So we knew we had an opportunity. We knew that there was a playbook to make it happen. It was not a shot in the dark. And -- but to do that, we had to refocus. We could not keep all those businesses in countries and dilute our focus. Then we went for very tough cost management across the whole P&L. We work on gross profit, obviously.

We went really hard on fulfillment costs, marketing costs and the fixed cost base to make sure that not only that we save the company by protecting our cash in the short term, but also that we build the right unit economics on which we can scale and bring more volumes in a profitable way, which takes me to the third part. We've been -- I mean, probably the most important part, we've been finally rebuilding over the past 3 years, the right value proposition for African customers and for our vendors and partners. so we could grow again on healthy fundamentals.

It happened mostly by focusing on supply to bring amazing value for money, great assortment, right prices and right accessibility to our customers. We expanded our coverage in the countries by building the logistics network to cover more -- several millions of more people. And we changed our marketing playbook to be able to address the diversity of our customers.

So let me get into the details, starting with the refocus. Well, that's probably the most simple part to explain, right? I mean we had one big opportunity, which is e-commerce at scale in Africa. We chose to exit a few verticals that did not make sense. For example, our classifieds business that was extremely small, almost profitable, but with low opportunities to scale and complex to handle. So we left something bigger with Jumia Food, our food delivery platform, operating in 8 countries that was a lot more emotional at the time, but we were unable to scale with the right economics.

The barriers to entry in that business were way too low compared to what we've been able to build in the e-commerce field, and we chose to leave. Operations were quite complicated as well. And it was a big relief when we were finally able to focus only on e-commerce. We also deprioritized and shrunk some categories within e-commerce, such as groceries. Groceries have been all the hype in e-commerce in the U.S. and in Europe for many years. But it turned out that in our countries, the economics after logistics did not make sense. So we dropped it. So that was for verticals and businesses.

We then looked at the country as a country's portfolio. We chose to exit 2 countries, Tunisia and South Africa for different reasons. Tunisia was a fairly small addressable market and the business environment was deteriorating quite fast. It was just not worth the effort, not worth the investment. we had better places to invest our time and money.

And South Africa was quite a unique case, very nature -- a much bigger market, obviously, but also very mature in logistics and e-commerce and retail. We had a very small business there operating under different systems, different brands, very low synergies. It did not make sense for us to fight to death in this market, and we chose to quietly exit, which helped us refocus on the right markets where we could scale and get to profitability.

And last, but not least, there have been lots of talks in the past of spinning out our payment activities to build the new PayPal of Africa, the new Mercado Pago of Africa or spinning out our delivery activities to build the FedEx of Africa. All that was shelved. It did not make sense anymore. We need to scale the core e-commerce business before we discuss options like this. So we've made clear with the teams that the mission of logistics and payments activities at Jumia were clearly to enable the growth of e-commerce in the most efficient way possible.

And that's massively clarified and made the job of the teams and made everyone's life a lot easier. And yes, one last thing. So of course, this was a bit emotional. You can imagine, right? I mean, exiting countries with hundreds of employees, shutting down big vertical at Jumia Food across 8 countries was quite a shock to most of the teams. But very quickly, quickly everyone understood why we were doing this. And very quickly also everyone saw that it enabled us to deliver in a much more effective way on the core e-commerce business.

And we had to do this not only for focus, but also for cost savings. It enabled us to deliver a much less complex organization and save on overhead and tech at group level. So let's now take a look at what we've done on the cost side. I'll start with fulfillment. So I've told you fulfillment is very close to my heart was probably the most important part to start with because, well, it was quite chaotic back in '22.

But if you want to deliver a business that can scale in a profitable way, fulfillment costs have to be low, no way around. If your fulfillment costs are very close to your gross profit, there's just no way to deliver profitability. So what we found late '22 was the following a slightly chaotic situation with scattered and inefficient warehouse footprints, low productivity, hundreds and hundreds of inefficient loss-making logistics partners, a lot of them delivering pretty bad service, way too much focus at the time on convenience, speed and door delivery that came at the expense of simplicity, reliability and efficiency and some level, I mean, great levels of disconnect between the central teams and the local teams.

So we had to change pretty much everything. And I think the results are quite spectacular. So we started by doing something very interesting. We redefined, redesigned the service level agreement kind of. So the most important example here is that we shifted most of our deliveries from door delivery, which was expected or assumed to be the best option for customers to pickup station delivery. So customers have to walk for 20 minutes and pick up their order at a Jumia pickup point.

And it made a lot of sense because finally, we could deliver a service that customers were willing to pay for. Door delivery is complex to handle for our partners and also a lot more expensive. The unit costs are way higher. You need to pay for fuel, time, some CapEx with the vehicles and so on. And this shift enabled us to massively simplify the work of Jumia, the work of our partners, reduce unit costs, while our customers were actually very happy to save $0.50 on a $1 and have to walk for 30 minutes to the pickup station.

So we adjust the service level to what people are willing to pay for while making sure that we deliver on the absolute basics, reliability and affordability. As I like to put it on our continent, reliability is luxury, and we're happy to deliver it. So the results quite, I mean, very strong results. You see it in the slide here. The fulfillment cost per order reduced by half in 3 years.

So from 3.4 that was totally unsustainable to deliver profit to 1.9 last quarter. I mean, dividing by half fulfillment cost per order is quite a performance in my personal experience. And you see right below how the mix evolves, right? I mean, back in '22, 62% of deliveries were happening in door delivery. And now it's 72% happening through pickup stations, massively simplifying the experience.

And that most importantly, that cost reduction happened while we massively scaled the network to reach hundreds of new cities that are quite remote where you should expect higher costs, but we've been able to do it by reducing the costs. It happened by improving reliability and it happened by improving customer satisfaction. So it's actually possible to operate with much better economics and much better customer satisfaction.

Looking at what we did in marketing now. So back in '22, marketing was almost the biggest expense bucket, very close to logistics, which did not really make sense. Quite a lot of money was wasted on that topic for many years during that phase. What we found late '22 was the following. We were spending very heavy budgets to promote an assortment that was insufficient and poorly priced. So you can imagine that the return on investment was not great.

At the same time, we were completely ignoring -- deliberately ignoring the diversity of our customer base by focusing only on online channels and ignoring all those people who are not fully online and need to be convinced because they don't trust the Internet and they don't trust what's happening online. And all that, mostly on online channels was unfortunately happening with pretty low quality of execution, further deteriorating the efficiency of these budgets.

So first, we had to protect our cash back in late '22. So we started by the obvious flashing the budgets. We massively reduced marketing budget divided by 4 in '24 versus '22. And today, we're still spending 3x less than in '22 in marketing budget in Q3. So we've maintained very, very high efficiency and relatively low level of marketing budget, although we're gradually starting to reinvest. Then we went to rebuild the right channels.

So Marcel will talk about it later in the presentation, but we make sure that our channel mix was also accommodating for the needs of people who are fully offline or don't trust whatever is happening offline because we have huge trust issues in our markets.

And more recently, we started to rebuild the online channel with a priority for free channels like customer relationship management and SEO. And even more recently, we're starting to see very good traction from paid channels that we had fully deprioritized in the past, but now with much better assortment and better execution, we see traction and profitability, spending money on Google, TikTok and Meta. So here, again, very clear impact. So I mean, I mentioned the evolution of total budget.

You see the evolution of the mix. We're much less dependent on price cuts and discounts. And the ratios of marketing spend remain extremely reasonable at 2.6% of our GMV last quarter, which I believe is a fairly low ratio for any e-commerce player on earth. And then fixed costs, which cover G&A and technology, while fixed costs also needed fixing. What we found late '22 was the following: oversized G&A, mostly invested in remote teams, central teams living, I mean, operating far away from Africa, overstaffed teams in technology as well with very low seniority and very low productivity and shifting priorities all the time, which didn't help.

And a lot of the contracts for software infrastructure and, well, software infrastructure, sorry, had been negotiated for the wrong volumes and with the business that had much higher complexity to the cost and the capacity that has been negotiated did not make sense anymore. So we started there with pretty tough restructuring.

We -- I mean, when you look at G&A, we divided the headcount by half from 1,500 people to around 800 today. We did that mostly by starting with the central teams, starting with our Dubai headquarters that we mostly shut down. Back in the days, we had 70 of the top salaries of the company based in Dubai, having a relatively better life than the rest of our employees and not helping in the quality of the decision-making, and we started by shutting down most of it, also sending a clear message to the rest of the organization, positive message, I mean, same in technology, we managed to get a lot of attrition and restructure.

So we have half of the staffing we used to have at the time with much better productivity, leveraging AI and much better tools and also simplifying their priorities. And when it comes to vendor terms for infrastructure and software, we've been able to renegotiate successfully a lot of contracts and reduce the costs. So what you see here is massively reduced cost base on fixed costs, so minus $11 million per quarter on G&A, minus $4 million per quarter on tech versus '22, which is greatly helping for us to deliver breakeven in '27.

But what I want to insist on here is that it did not come at the expense of our ability to grow. We do believe we're convinced that our tech platforms as well as our core central teams and G&A basis can take 2x to 3x the volumes we're running today. And last quarter, for example, we see that tech costs are decreasing 10% year-over-year, but volumes are up 25%. So we can do it. We can actually scale with stable or diminishing fixed costs. So the most important thing here to contribute to our profitability equation, we've built a fixed cost base that is very lean and can scale, and we're proving it.

And now the most important part, rebuilding the value proposition. I mean we cannot -- some people told us you guys cannot cost cut your way out of it. So we also have to be able to make sure we can grow again without hurting the economics, without compromising on economics like it happened in the past. So when it comes to rebuilding the right value proposition, we start with the customers.

Very simple question, who should be our customers? And the answer for us is very simple. Our customers are the lower middle class of Africa. What does that mean? That means anyone in our countries making somewhere between $150 to $400, $500 a month. And that's our middle class in our countries, right? The fantasize middle class of Africa making $2,000 a month and driving their car to work doesn't exist. If you look at the income distribution data on the slides here, 99% of the population in Nigeria makes less than $420 a month. And even in Egypt, it's 86%, whatever we may think of Egypt.

Egypt is in the same income bracket as Kenya, Uganda or Ghana. So that's in that income bracket that we see the biggest potential for consumer demand for purchasing power, and we go all in for those customers. A lot of people ask us, but why do you make your life so much harder? Why don't you focus on richer customers because they don't exist or it's such a small pool that there's no point, you cannot build an e-commerce business with all the fixed costs and the tech and everything to serve only that niche segment.

So it means that we have to sell very affordable products at scale to millions and millions of people, and we're very proud of doing this. We've embraced the challenge. That's the market we have, not the market we dream of, but the market we have, and we're very proud to serve the lower middle class of Africa with the right service. So how did we do it?

Well, let me start with what we found at the time. So back in '22, the value proposition that we're delivering to customers was not the right one. The price points were too high due to too much focus on fancy brands. Usually commercial teams, I mean, people love to focus on Apple and L'Oreal rather than focusing on cheap white label brands from China, that's just the way it is.

But we had to to change that and teams really got it when the sales moving upwards. The choice was insufficient due to low vendor engagement, driven by low vendor satisfaction and bad operations as well. And there was way too much focus on big cities at the expense of millions of potential customers living in secondary cities. So we've changed a lot of things. I will not go into details because it will be covered in the next section here.

But I'd just like to take you through a few KPIs that show what we've done. I was mentioning secondary cities. So back in '22, 44% of our orders were shipped outside of the capital cities. Today, it's 60%, slow but gradual and consistent change, and we're seeing very strong growth outside of the main cities where we're solving very big problem for our consumers. We made a big push on assortment. One simple KPI here. We've been pushing very hard to restore trust and deliver better operations and profitability to our Chinese vendors.

will talk about it later. And we see the impact. So from '23 to '25, the volumes sold by our international vendors, mostly Chinese, have been multiplied by 2. This is having clear impact on the way our customers behave, how they shop and on the satisfaction levels. The repurchase rate to start with 90 days repurchase rate of new customers has significantly increased from 39% to 43% in the past 3 years, while we are massively cutting marketing budgets, vouchers budget, incentive budgets and so on. So quite an achievement here, purely driven by better value proposition and affordability. And satisfaction of our customers has massively increased from 46 of Net Promoter Score in '23 to an all-time high of 64 today.

And this happened while cutting costs, shrinking the teams and saving everywhere we could. So massive change that brought value to Jumia, but also to our customers. And that's pretty much the result of delivering on the basics of affordability, reliability, availability and trust. I will not go into details into everything we did in the value proposition because that will be covered right afterwards. There's just one point I'd like to elaborate on with you right now is what we did to cover more cities, what we call the upcountry expansion.

You probably have heard of it a million times if you're following our quarterly calls, but I'd like to provide more color here. So the context for that is that in our countries, and I've heard it 1,000 times in Abidjan, business leaders have a clear tendency to heavily discount or fully write off purchasing power and demand outside of the big cities. There's some kind of urban aided syndrome that at play in our countries, even within our teams that makes -- so that those markets are completely underestimated. And we had the same at Jumia.

In the previous phase, it was clearly a knowledge that we're not going for smaller cities. All the focus was on big cities because, well, out there, there's nothing. I even got a few years back when we started pushing again, I got a question from an agile journalist who asked me, but why do you go to those cities? The people they have no money and they can't read. Why do you do this?

Well, that was slightly exaggerated, but he meant it. And actually, people that have money because -- I mean, these are mostly agricultural economies. So they have some money. They can read actually, yes. And most importantly, they are totally underserved. In those cities, we're solving massive problems for our customers. They have access to very limited choice and the price points are absolutely crazy.

So delivering the value proposition of Jumia in those cities makes a lot of sense. We just have to adapt the way we do the logistics. So luckily, we've been able to probe into those markets and experiment in one country that was Ivory Coast starting in 2016. It helped a lot. There was a lot of returns from teams as well at the time, but it helped a lot the growth of the country, made Ivory Coast at some point, I mean, still to this day, bigger than Nigeria or the other big countries and was a clear contributor to the success of the country.

Late '22, when you took over, we started replicating exactly the same success across all countries. So a few things you see on this slide here, you see the kind of dense network that we have built in Ivory Coast, fully based on pickup stations, nothing fancy. People come to the pickup station, and that's it, very efficient logistics. And we've just started to build the same network, I mean, 1.5 years ago in Nigeria, and there's still hundreds of cities that were yet to cover in this country.

We're just halfway through, and we'll see some more details later. We're doing it in a very efficient way. You see here some pictures of our pickup stations. As I like to put it to my teams, we're not building Apple stores. Nobody can pay for it, certainly not our customers. So these are super basic. It's r concrete. There's no AC, basic -- there's no security. Some people are surprised when they visit and there's no security because it would kill the economics of the partner running it. Basic, efficient, reliable, our customers actually love it. So I think it's a great example of how we learn from the ground, we experiment. We sometimes make mistakes, but we fully adapt our business model to solving the challenges that our customers are facing across Africa.

With that, I'll leave the floor to Antoine, who will walk you through the results of this transformation phase.

Thank you, Francis. Good afternoon. My name is Antoine. I'm the CFO of Jumia, and I've been working with Jumia since 2016. You can see on this slide the impact on our financials of the plan that Francis just detailed. and that led to much better unit economics and much lower cash burn. Starting with take rate, you'll see peak in '23 and '24, which were mainly driven by corporate sales, which was an opportunistic B2B business we did in Egypt and that stopped being material in Q4 '24.

If now we compare with '22, I'd like to remind you that we've exited some business in '23, late '23, which had higher margin but a full logistics unit economics. The highlight of the plan, as Francis mentioned, is the evolution of fulfillment expense per order. We've decreased by almost half, USD 3.5 in '22, down to USD 2.1 in '25. And this has massively contributed to improve our contribution margin per order.

We were at USD 1.9 in '22, we are now at USD 2.3. I will not comment further on sales and advertising expense, which we have drastically shrunk by USD 15 million. But regarding G&A and tech and content, which we consider as fixed cost, we've been also drastically reducing our costs. We did that mainly through a reduction of staff costs.

And also, as Francis stated, we've renegotiated all contracts. As a result of those improvements, our operating loss has drastically reduced from USD 200 million down to USD 70 million. And accordingly, cash burn went from almost USD 300 million in 2022 down to USD 82 million. At the same time, we've been working on the fundamental of the business. And we are seeing now growth, sorry, on all unit economics across the board.

You'll note in Egypt, a negative GMV evolution, which is related to the corporate sales that I've just mentioned. But you can see looking at orders, the real health of the business with Egypt growing 27% in Q3 2025.

In summary, these results clearly demonstrate that our plan is effective and that we are able to deliver sustainable performance. We believe that we are now ready for the next phase of growth of Jumia.

So with the hindsight, cutting cost is probably the easiest side, the easiest part of it. What was probably the biggest challenge was keeping the team together. So a lot of people ask me, how did you manage to keep your best talent in the team, right? And you'll see later that we've kept our best talent in the team. No worries about that.

But it's been 3 very challenging years with several ways of restructuring seems like it never ended for some of the teams in specific countries where it lasted a bit longer. So we've made sure -- I mean, we've made sure that we could keep our best talent in the team, and we could give clear mission, a clear sense of purpose to everyone in the company and particularly top management. A few things we did to make sure it happened.

First of all, we heavily focused on internal promotions. The whole management team and the people -- the managers you see right after me have been promoted from the ground. These were great operators running commercial logistics or something in one of the countries, and they've been able to step up. So this phase, painful as it was, created very strong personal opportunities for our best performers, and this has really been recognized.

There's been amazing upward mobility in the company. Also, we've been able to empower local teams a lot more, creating more accountability as well, but also by shrinking and massively reducing the amount of work that we were being told to do by people sitting very far away from the market, we've been able to give them more freedom, more responsibility, more empowerment.

We've also clearly aligned the incentives for all those people who were crazy enough to follow us in this phase. We've made sure that they would get real upside with stock options. So I believe we've been distributing the pool of stock options in a very fair way over the past couple of years. You can ask the rest of the team if they confirm on that, so that everyone would get a clear upside when we make it.

And last one, we've made sure that -- I mean, our actions clearly align with what we said and with the mission. So we walk the talk. The most obvious example here was us exiting the Dubai office, where we had the top salaries, sent a very clear message when we told the teams we need better operations and less cost.

Well, the teams in Uganda or in Ghana, they got it. They get it that it was time for them to deliver. It was their responsibility and their accountability. So we are now blessed with, I believe, a very strong team of very strong operators who clearly understand their customers, their partners, their markets. And this is really the right team to deliver the next phase of growth and take us to profitability.

Thank you very much. With that, I leave the floor to Hisham, our CCO, to start explaining our whole new business model.

Thank you, Francis. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for being with us today. I'm Hisham El Gabry. I'm the Group Chief Commercial Officer. I joined Jumia initially 4 years ago as the CCO for Egypt, which is my home country, and then I managed the country as Head of Operations or CEO in the interim period during the early period of the restructuring before moving on to lead the commercial function over the last 2 years.

Before we start discussing what my team actually does, and it's mostly about the supply side of things, managing our relationship with the sellers, the local sourcing, the global sourcing, pricing structure, before we go deeper into this, I would like to take one step back and look at what builds for a successful marketplace. So if you look at this, it's pretty standard.

A marketplace is about somewhere where sellers would list the products, then you need a component for customers to pay for those products, a payment mechanism. And then you need a logistics mechanism for you to deliver those products, very standard, but if you pull the hood, it looks very different in an African context because we have to heavily and heavily customize it. And you will see that as a running theme as we talk today, this customization thing, it looks normal at face value, but then it needs to be heavily reworked.

With that, we were able to build a resilient marketplace that is talking to a potential 600 million customers across our 9 geographies or 9 markets. Let's give a few examples on this customization. On the supply, the name of the game is that we have to be looking over our shoulders all the time. Things are changing. There is not very strong or not very well-developed local manufacturing ability. Global supply chain is challenging.

Regulations are very fluid, so difficult. And we have to customize for all of this. We will explain that in detail through the course of my presentation. Marketing as well. So marketing, it needs to be personable, needs to be on the ground, needs to help bridge the chasm between the offline and the online. Again, a recurring theme that we will discuss a lot today. How do I take people through this first step from moving to an offline world into an online world.

Logistics, I think Francis covered this in detail, and Renaud will do as well. It needs to be heavily customized without a lot of door delivery and more of efficient pickup station operations. And finally, for the paints, we'd love to have everyone in credit cards, but the adoption is on single digits in most of our countries. So it makes it a bit difficult, and then we have to be innovative. But at the same time, localized. It's not going to be the same exact same solution for each and every country.

We localize as well within our African customization. So let's take a jump into what constitutes the supply. I said we have patchy local manufacturing, global supply chain is not great. So that means we need to diversify. We need to be hedging all the time. We built the strategy of quad sourcing across 4 pillars with 2 main wings that we fly on or you could say this is the resilient base of the pyramid, which is our vast network of local sellers and international sellers, 70,000 of them.

This is the resilient base. Then on top of that, we are having specific bets and selective bets with some top local players and international players. And together with all of this, we're creating a diverse supply. We're hedged against anything that goes wrong, and we can do a system of balances and checks on what we want to grow and how we build our categories. So to give one example that I always love to use, if you think about something like beauty, the first thing that comes to mind when you're talking about the beauty category is like skin care stuff, face care stuff, and it's more chemically driven product.

Now for example, in such a category, we don't take half measures. We play with the top-tier players, NIVEA, L'Oreal, et cetera. But then there are other stuff that you should be sourcing from local players, curlers, some simple accessories and so on. And then there are stuff that you should be getting from China because it's very efficient in terms of supply chain and it's cheap and there is a huge diversity like

We sell a lot of W. It's not the thing that would naturally come to people as this is a big thing in the beauty category. In our case, it is, and we sell a lot of them. And collectively, this is one live example of how we play our different pillars to have a comprehensive offer end-to-end. And again, the most important thing, it's hedged. It's balanced because if something goes wrong, you can always rely on one of the other arms. So we're going to talk a lot about these 2 components, the local and the Chinese sellers.

Let me give a few examples on the selective bets I'm referring to. So locally, let's play again. How many brands do you know from that? It would be the bottom left box. Can you raise your hand if you know more than one brand? I should be making money from this. All right. Expected. So you don't know any of this because these -- despite these being our our Apples, our Volkswagen in Africa, you know none of them. So these are established brands locally.

Some of them were either big and then we partnered with them. And some of them, we grew together. But the part I like a lot is in many cases of those, we help them go abroad. We help them build a pan-African presence. If you take Dice, for example, that's an Egyptian homeware brand, now active in Morocco. If you take smart technology, that's an Ivoryan consumer electronics brand, now active in Senegal and so on and so forth, tornado as well, another Egyptian brand. The suit I'm wearing is Egyptian, 100%.

So we walk the talk. We help those sellers grow even in our offices. By the way, all the screens and the dashboards that we monitor are coming from people like or smart technology or So these are top players, products that we use. We're not talking about stuff that doesn't work. It's all functional. It's nice, but it's built for our markets. Then if we talk about the international players, and you'll see here familiar names.

But even for those, you don't take it for granted that they will be familiar products. So if you take Samsung, for example, we're not selling a lot of S-Series. We're not selling a lot of notes. It's more in the A-Series. It's more in the mass market, but it still enables us to sell millions upon millions of dollars of Samsung phones, but just built for us.

You take Starlink, one of our most important partnerships. We started in one country in Nigeria 2 years ago. And today, we're operating in almost 4 countries. The fourth one is coming very soon. And we're together with Starlink, we're building in the upcountry connectivity. So there is a mission that we're also driving in our very own use case. It's not about speed. It's more about connectivity in rural areas. And so on and so forth. Even for Adidas, we have our own production lines, right?

There are specific product lines that are working in Africa that you might not be very familiar with. So let's take a deeper dive on China. And here, I want to bust a few misconceptions or a few miss. You go to China because it's cheap, not totally false, but it's not the whole story. They're less profitable, working with Chinese sellers, absolutely false. And it's unreliable supply, again, absolutely false. Now let's break this down. Are products from China competitive?

Yes, of course, they are competitive. But the main thing for us is the entrepreneurial mindset that we can scale fast, try things very like very efficiently and very fast together. I'll give you one example. in Nigeria, a couple of years ago, there was this massive devaluation and there was a fuel crisis. So the prices tripled overnight in a few weeks. And then we were thinking generators is a big deal in Nigeria because, unfortunately, in many cities, they are off the grid, of the electricity grid for many hours a day.

And the generators are very big business for us. But they were mostly diesel and fuel-operated generators. And then we said there is an opportunity here. I mean it's becoming very expensive for people. We can have a green impact, and we can substitute all of this with solar-powered generators. So they operate with the sun for those who are not familiar with the sun here. So yes, that was nasty. So yes, we shifted to the solar generators.

And you had to try fast multiple variants and multiple iterations with many of our partners to get to the right balance. What is the size, what's the price, what is the capacity and so on. We couldn't have done this without having someone sitting on an established manufacturing capability and willing to try with you a lot. And we do that by working with the Dolphins and not the waves. So if you're working with the very big Chinese players, probably you're not going to be at the top of their attention at this moment of time.

So we play with more like the level below, which are agile enough, fast enough and they test these things with us. Then you do a couple of iterations within 3, 4 months, we've established a new category. For example, in this case, the 1 kilowatt solar generator and of you got one of our top sellers today. So we continue to do this all the time. Don't get me wrong. We're not fortune tellers. We don't get it right from the first time. We iterate. We had a case also with some tablets that we were doing for the education sector.

It wasn't working fine initially, and then we had to continue trying. But this gives us assurance also that we have the right control measures to know which products are coming in and if they're not good enough to push them back. So entrepreneurial mindset is number one. Second thing is on the profitability. Actually, from our seller base, sellers coming from China are the most profitable for a simple reason, efficient sourcing, that's number one. Number two, they're technically adept. So they're more likely to use value-add services, advertising, monetization, et cetera, and it makes them significantly more profitable for us. However, I cannot go all in and say, I'll put all my business there because it's more profitable. That doesn't make sense, of course.

And then number three, on reliability of supply because we have built such a significant team in China, so 60-plus team that controls the end-to-end chain. So we're not just having some sales officers sitting in China. We have a 60-plus team that is self-reliant, that is big enough to tackle the commercial side of things, negotiate with the freighters, have the vendor support.

We have all of this as a self-reliant team in China. And because of that, we can keep our supply coming in. It's a very clean supply chain in millions and millions of units today. And the warehouse, we have 2.2 million units sitting in our warehouse today from Chinese sellers. The growth is 55% year-over-year and accelerating. and this is not even uncovering all the opportunity. So one example I'd like to use is we're mostly operating in the region south of China today, Shenzhen. There is a region called Huadong East of China, which is the big manufacturing hub, a large semi circle to the west of Shanghai. And there, we've started making some inroads maybe 18 months ago. The penetration of the sellers from this region is in the single digits for us now, whereas this region is doing 35% of the consumer products output of China.

It's just one tiny hint of opportunity of things that we're still going into. So even with this rate of growth, early stages, still a lot to unlock. We come to our local sellers or as I call them the backbone. So we have 45,000 sellers plus in our markets. that are very unique in nature, very engaged, passionate, but they need help on entering the digital world. I was talking to some of you and I was saying, you might build very nice seller tools. I mean, today, you can code with 3 prompts and build a very nice looking seller tool that allows people to sell online.

It looks very nice theoretically, has nothing to do with reality. You need to help sellers first cross the first barrier to getting from the offline world into the online world. And this is what we're really good at. We have that recipe. So for example, we have something called the acquisition agents. And by the way, one of the management people here started as an acquisition agent on Jumia a few years ago. you start with acquisition agents. We actually go to the sellers, knock the doors, sit with them, show them how to use digital tools, how to take photos for an e-commerce website, how to create your content.

And then amazing, they take them through this journey until they are live on June. One week later, they forget everything. So you need to have a team that is following up and we call it the incubation teams and then they are calling the sellers, telling them, okay, you should do this, you should do that. By the way, you received your first order.

This is how you handle it and so on. And then you take them to the next stage where they reach the self-serve stage and they're fully self-reliant. And for that, we are improving our tools every day. Every day, we're adding new features, and I mean every day as an every day. We're adding new features to our self-service tools. So our vendor center, for example, which we're improving every day so that when the sellers come to that level of their journey, they're good.

But you cannot ignore the first part, the omni part that you need to help them cross that step. And you will see the result in front of you. The glide path is very clear. The graph is for sellers who are actually doing a sale. It's not just the sellers we have in the base. There are the sellers who are actually doing a gross sale, and we're adding 120 of them every week, and the trend is accelerating. So this is the result of all the hard work that has been put in the past years.

I'm not going to tell a story on this one. I will let you listen to a video yourselves from one of our sellers, in Nigeria. I love it for 2 reasons. First, you cannot not get inspired by this guy, energetic, passionate, you will see for yourself. The second thing is he mentions a very important and radical mindset change. We were just saying that a few years ago, people would not touch e-commerce with a stick. It's too difficult. It's -- we don't understand it. We don't trust it. You will see what Lobby will say is that now he's actually drawing his legitimacy, his credibility from Jumia. I'll let you with the video.

[Presentation]

Okay. So again, for me, this is a rewarding moment. This is what we've been building towards. Obviously, is based in Vegas, which is an area that we're heavily penetrated. The moment that we have sellers from every corner and look in our African countries that is saying the same is the moment we have made it. And this is what we're all driving to. As a recap, building supply is about diversity, about being prepared for unwanted events all the time and you are building that resilience in your platform.

And at the end, the combination and one thing at the end, how many products do we have for your customers at a good price. And here, we have some very telling examples. And yes, they are all products that work. Yes, there are TVs at $60 and fans at $12. And you can see those as products or we can see them as telling real stories. So you could see the TVs as a family buying their own, their first TV or you could see it as a young person opening a sports bar for less than $1,000 in equipment.

You could look at the fans for making people sleep better. It's as simple and as factual as that rather than just the product. And this is the impact that we are trying to drive every day. You could argue that in the globalized world we live in today, you can get access to those products from somewhere else. You can open a website in China and order a shoe for $5. True, true. But if you look at it from a customer journey, first question is, am I going to get this product? We don't know.

Am I going to pay the same price tag that I saw eventually? Or are there duties and hidden cost? We don't know. Is it going to be the same product exactly as I ordered? I don't know. Can I return it if something goes wrong? Definitely not. And if you look at the same 4 points, the answer will be exactly the opposite for Jumia. You know the price you're going to pay, you know you're going to get it. There is someone to talk to to return it. So even if that same product is available somewhere, getting it from Jumia is a different story. It's about the end-to-end customer experience.

Thank you so much for your time. With that, I hand over to Marcelle, my colleague.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here today. I am Marcelle Siayojie. My journey at Jumia started 11 years ago as an acquisition agent. Yes, I'm the one that Hisham was talking about.

So I started 11 years ago back in Cameroon as an acquisition agent. So basically, we used to go and in 2014, where internal penetration was really, really low. We had to go to the market, convince the merchant to come online. So convincing them was not the only thing we did. We needed to do education. We needed to show to them to build truth and show to them that e-commerce can actually be a great boost to their business.

Then I later on moved to Senegal as the Chief Commercial Officer and then to Kenya, where I heard the same position working with And then I am honored today to be leading Jumia Senegal as the CEO. So it has been a great journey filled with a lot of learnings, growth and transformation. So speaking of transformation, now we have built the right assortment. That's what Hisham just showed.

So we need to find a way to market it to reach our consumers in a way that they really understand and most importantly, do it in a cost-effective way. In our markets, we have very diverse consumers' behavior. Some are fully online or partially. So these are mainly the ones living in main cities that are comfortable with digital. And then we have orders that are still very okay buying offline. And that is most of the people living in secondary city. So in addition to the shopping behaviors, the truth being said, trust in e-commerce is still to be built in most of our markets.

So we still meet people that needs to be reassured that if they order a product on Jumia, they will actually receive it. It may sound surprising to people in more developed markets, but this is our reality. So that is why we could not just copy paste a global playbook. We had to build our own, one that is truly made for Africa. Of course, we use all the normal online channels that every e-commerce business needs to master.

So we use own channel, CRM, customer relationship management tool, where we recently invested in a powerful tool that enable us to reach consumers directly with personalized messages through push notification and e-mail link. And this help us drive repeat purchases at almost 0 additional costs. So we also leverage on social media, working mostly with local influencers that are really known on socials like TikTok and all the like. And then we do organic and paid channel also.

We are seeing a recent upside on paid marketing with good return on investment. I think Francis mentioned that because we have improved our execution. And on the other side, we are a little bit locker because in most of our market, online competition is still very, very limited. And most importantly, our product offering is now more competitive and relevant.

As Francis mentioned earlier, we have moved from a premium product mix, so all the premium products to more affordable products that truly meet our consumers' needs. We now sell, and I love to say that when I go to our warehouse in Senegal, a lot of hundreds of kettle, thousands of kettle. We sell a lot of fashion item. We sell affordable fault on the like of Samsung A-Series, like the brands that are really built for Africa. And this means we have moved from spending to be seen everywhere like we did before to invest to convert.

Now I think this is my favorite pile. Beyond the online performance, we had to customize our offline. We have to focus our market -- we had to focus our marketing budget on what really matters in our context. That is offline customized channel. So we use radio to reach consumers that are partially online, and it really works when we do that in local languages.

So for the past 3 years, and even a little bit more, we have been communicating our ads. Our ads radio has mainly been in local languages. That is in Bar or in Senegal, where I live, 80% of people -- sorry, speak In Kenya, where I lead for like 2 years, people speak and in Morocco, So our ads are well received and people really understand the message we are communicating.

And for the offline customized channel, I think this is one of -- this is my favorite actually, offline channel is our print catalogs. They may look very, very simple, but they are very powerful. especially in secondary city, where sometimes connection can be really patchy. They make Jumia real. They drive -- they build trust, they drive sales. And most importantly, they help us to connect with customers that have never been online. So 3 months ago, during Jumia anniversary, I went to M as a small city in Senegal, where I met a lady.

You must know that these catalogs, we don't just dump them somewhere, drop them on the table for clients to pick them. We actually go meet them in the market with our agent. I'll explain that later, where we meet the customers, we talk with them face-to-face. We show them the product. We explain to them how it works. And this actually brings all the human interaction that makes e-commerce real for them.

So I met this lady, and she confessed to me that she has been hearing a lot about buying online, the trend of online. But for her, it has always been as a scam. But seeing us with those catalogs wearing our branded junior, explaining to them that this really works. Meter trust in e-commerce and she actually placed her first order. And that was her first ever smartphone because the price point was interesting.

This is someone that has never had a smartphone. She has been hearing around about online, but she has never really been there. So she was not the only one to give us those feedback and seeing how people are reacting on these catalogs and the field activation made us believe that we are reaching the consumers in the right way in a way that they really, really understand. So we printed 2 million catalogs for our Black Friday. You have some of them on the table. You can actually look at them.

What you see there is that the discount is really visible. the product speaks to our customers and the price make all the difference in a market where most households have very, very limited income. So another very successful offline as our JForce is our on-the-ground sales network called JForce. I say JForce because I'm French speaking. So it's JForce.

So I had mentioned them earlier, these are independent sales agents. They help consumers come online. So those are the people that bridge the gap between offline and online. So they're very important. These are independent sales agents. They are not on payroll, but they gain commission on every sales that they make. And what makes JForce truly special is that anyone can join that it be women or single mods that are using JForce in a way to empower themselves, gain financial independency and build a better future for their family.

It can be students that are trying to get extra income or workers wanting just a side job, so anyone can be. And to show you how it really works, we have a short video of Samsung that is a JForce agent in Nigeria. So please let's have a look. he makes his community discover the benefit of shopping online. So with the G France program, we are creating a framework where people make business in a smart way, a true community of entrepreneur, learning digital skills, earning money and growing together with Jumia, while driving job, inclusion and impact across Africa.

So to conclude, we have adapted our marketing strategy in a way that really speak to diverse, different -- to diverse consumers and unique consumers that we have in Africa. Our growth trajectory, you will see that later, and I think some Francis already showed. Our growth trajectory in 2025 indicates that we are building a very relevant playbook that is unique to Africa.

I will now hand over to my colleague, Vinod, who will take us through how we are also customizing logistics across Africa. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Marcelle. I think a lot of people are probably waiting for the break. We are only 10, 12 minutes away from the break. So just bear with me. And I'm also covering a very important topic going into details of logistics. So ladies and gentlemen, my name is Vinod Goel. I'm the CEO of Jumia East Africa, basically covering Uganda and Kenya.

I also started my journey in Jumia around 5 years back when I joined as Head of Fulfillment Operations. I stayed in that role for around 1.5 years, moved to Uganda as the CEO of Uganda, almost about to settle there for 1.5 years, moved back to Niubi to manage both Uganda and Kenya. So yes, it is true that in Jumia, if you do good, you move around fast, but sometimes it's problematic because you move way too fast.

On the logistics side, so Jumia Logistics is arguably the biggest enabler and probably also our biggest entry -- barrier to entry. Jumia operates currently one of the largest parcel delivery network in all the markets we operate, bigger than any other private third-party logistics company. 349 pickup stations in Kenya means we are catering to not only the Tier 1, Tier 2, but also the Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns where the population is as low as 30,000, 40,000 people.

This is not natural. Just a couple of years back, we were stopping ourselves at 100,000, 200,000, and we thought it is not worth going to the smaller towns. However, we were wrong, and we learned that actually these Tier 4 towns are highly underserved, both in terms of assortment and in prices. And hence, this is why Jumia clicks there, and we are entering smaller and smaller towns and growing our network faster.

Deep dive into this, how actually we are able to do that. Francis told us about that we reduced our fulfillment cost by half, going from $3.5 to $1.9, how did we do it? We are able to do cash on delivery, how we are able to do it, et cetera. So I'm going to go a little bit deeper into this. The first thing is that Jumia has enabled and harnessed around 246 local logistics company.

If we divide it by roughly 9 markets, we are talking about around 25 companies in each country, not too much and not too little. We do not want to be dependent on very big third-party logistics company. We also do not want to be worked with very small hundreds of companies. What do they do not bring, our third-party companies? They do not bring tech. It's counterintuitive, but our companies actually do not bring any tech because we have it. We have to be very prudent that we do not want to have the tech cost double. They also do not bring high G&A cost, overhead cost because if you are tech-driven, we will have the people who understand that tech, who can manage it, who can run it, who can license it, who can integrate it.

And all these costs we have already paid. So we're not going to go to those kind of companies. What our third-party companies bring? What are they? These are the small logistics company who started with a fleet of 2 small trucks, 3 tuk tuks and probably 2 vans, sometimes actually ex-Jumia employees who started these companies.

What do they bring? They actually bring very cost-effective vehicles, low overhead costs and deep local know-how. Let me talk about a little bit about the vehicles. Around 50% of the small items, when we talk about small items, it can be a T-shirt or a face cream, a smartphone. They are delivered in Uganda, for example, through motorbikes.

We can easily switch to -- could continue on the vans and the 5 tenner trucks, but they are way more expensive. They cannot enter all the streets. So we deliver them through bikes. Similarly, the medium-sized items, for example, your microwave, a laptop, a pair of shoes are delivered on tuk tuks. And tuk tuk, actually, it's a mix shift on a local motorbike where they put a box, which can carry around, let's say, 7 microwaves and this is designed on a local motorbike, it's around 35% cheaper than any 1 turner, 2 turner or a van available in the market.

These third-party partners also do a very important thing for us. We have been talking about pickup stations, right? We are going not only door delivery only in big cities, but we are doing pickup stations, who are actually opening these pickup stations, who is running these pickup stations. It is very difficult for Jumia as a company to do all that. So we rely on our third-party companies, and they have kind of a road map for the 1 year that we have to go on this route.

On this route, today, you have 15 pickup stations, but we see a continuous growth, and hence, you have to open 5 more. And they are ready with that plan, and they are ready with the small investment they have to do, and they know that they can grow business.

Lastly, they rely 100% on Jumia's technology. It is a very important piece because they do not have their own tech, -- they rely on our technology. It brings us 100% visibility and almost 100% control on all the operations. This setup works very well. So we get almost exclusive super loyal third-party companies working for us, while we have these small entrepreneurs who are able to grow, scale a very profitable, simplified business without investing too much into vehicles and technology.

This is a very important piece for us to understand is that this is also one of the biggest reasons why we are able to crack cash on delivery in Africa. We will come to that later when we go to the payments part, and I will explain it again. Coming to the balance. So reducing the cost has not always been a sweet topic. So like any other customer, our customers also demand speed, convenience and affordability. In busy routes and big cities, let's take an example of Kenya, Nairobi plus 4 other big cities, yes, we offer door delivery and we offer next-day delivery, right?

We are able to hit all 3, speed convenience and affordability. You can get a smartphone delivered in Nairobi anywhere for $0.85, and you can get a microwave delivered for 250 kilometers for less than $2, doable. However, the moment we step out the urban centers and we go to the smaller towns, we are not able to deliver all 3. We can't be faster. We can't be affordable and convenient. So we do not do a lot of door deliveries in smaller towns. And we also have to choose between the speed and the cost.

You can take a particular route and either we are able to fill a 1-tonner truck daily or we can fill a 4-tonner truck in 3 days. If we go for a 4-tonner truck, the cost is lower, we can pass this as a lower shipping fees and the customers love it. So sometimes we have to be slow, but be able to give the affordable service to our customers. Talking about our pickup stations.

As Francis was mentioning, they are not fancy establishments, very, very basic, but they are well located. They are very well branded. And actually, they are -- they can be sometimes the landscape, the landmark in the town. They are always in the middle of the town in the most popular city. They're not fancy, but they are functional. A content creator, 300 kilometers from Nairobi can easily choose from 300 types of ring lights on Jumia, get it delivered 250 kilometers in a town, which has only 30,000 population, can pick it up in any day of the next 6 days, try it for the 7 days, press a button, return it if they do not like and get the money refunded in the mobile wallet.

This happens only on Jumia in Africa. Lastly, coming to our warehouses, so-called fulfillment centers. All our -- again, we have to operate a very frugal manner. All our warehouses are tech-enabled, nonfancy, very efficient, 100% on standardized SOPs. All our warehouses are located in central -- in the capital cities. They are located closer to the sellers, closer to the buyers, closer to the airports, closer to the ports.

Led by fast growth, we have moved in many countries from smaller scattered warehouses to consolidated fulfillment centers, which is giving us operational efficiency and higher productivity. We also moved actually some of our corporate offices in 5 countries to the fulfillment center. Again, saves us cost and brings us operational efficiency. It will be interesting to see one of the warehouses in the video, and it will give us a glimpse of what is happening there.

But before we move to the video, I would also like to say that even in the warehouses, we have to make frugal trade-offs, right? For example, recently, we had to reduce our packaging material on our products. So if you are trying to buy a 43-inch TV from Jumia, you will not find another layer of the bubble wrap and another branded Jumia plastic on it because it is not required. The customers might fancy about it, but no customer is ready to pay for the fancy packaging.

Lastly, it is not good for the environment, and hence, we decided to cut it out. So yes, let's go for the video for the warehouse, and then we'll move to the next topic.

[Presentation]

Actually, we just showed you our fanciest warehouse, so not all of them are like that, but one day. Moving on to the next topic. Logistics is not only about cost. Logistics is a key driver for Jumia's growth, unlocking new markets for the seller and new merchandise for our customers. In logistics also, we have a flywheel. It's very easy to understand, but let me still go through it. We expand to newer and newer cities, newer and newer towns, which means our sellers are able to sell to the wider network.

They actually started with before Jumia, they're actually selling a 2, 3, 4, 5 kilometer radius. Now with Jumia, they're able to sell to 200 towns and next year to 300 towns. And hence, their business on Jumia is growing. When they have a larger business, they are able to source at a lower cost, passing that cost to Jumia's customers. This effect also comes on logistics. We are able to fill our Turner trucks going to 200-kilometer route on the East faster. So we are able to go move to a bigger truck and hence, our logistics cost per order goes down.

Both these benefits of having the lower cost of the product and the lower cost of the delivery fees and probably way more assortment are passed to the customers, who, in turn, will return faster to us will actually tell the neighbor that this is the best place to shop. And hence, we have this -- the flywheel turning up. It is not a theory. It's happening in real life. I want to share an example where recently around a year back, I was on a field trip on the east side of Nairobi. It's a small town called and I was at pickup station and I had 2 gentlemen picking up the items, one of them picking as a mobile cover and another one is a pair of shoes. Natural question, why do you shop in Jumia?

And here is the interesting list. They said that we have only 2, 3 shops in our town where we can find these products, very important, so the lack of assortment. And then say the prices are very high, around 40% higher. And then we do not know if this product will work or not. It is good quality or not. There is absolutely no way for them to return once the money has been given, forget about it, right? So when we see actually in the background, this is exactly the problems we are solving, right?

You have the assortment, you have the right prices and you can return if you do not like. The only problem they continued was that they actually came to this pickup station from 7 kilometers inroad from another town called hero. And they complain that why do you not have the pickup station there. So we studied the town. It was way too small for us at that time. However, just 2 months back, we opened the pickup station there. It's just thriving.

We are doing around 60, 70 packages a week there and hence, able to access a new town. Probably in the next visit, they will not complain to about that. Looking at the other side, just before Black Friday, we met our vendors. We do a vendor meeting like this, and we discuss things with them. And I met a lady who actually sells who started selling mobile phone covers on Jumia a year back. And she said that she started with Jumia not with a store because she has very little money and she could start only with 20 pieces of mobile phone covers.

The only place she could do is either social media or Jumia, but Jumia gives us a whole variety. It takes care of your marketing, sales, logistics and cash. Today, she runs a business with around 500 SKUs. She sells on Jumia. She sells on 3 social media platforms. She does her own content creation for all the social media. She has a website. When we talked to her, she did not think of this kind of a future.

She never started digital marketing and she never knew what is e-commerce 1 year back. That's the flywheel effect. Moving to payments. After moving the physical goods, there is one important piece we have to move is the money. In the Western markets, this topic is quite easy. A lot of people have the bank accounts. They are integrated -- aggregated by players like Visa and Mastercard, and hence, the topic is sorted.

In Africa, we have the challenges. Around 50% of the transactions still happen with hard cash. Hard cash means the note or the coins. Very complex, full of leakages and hence, the most expensive despite any transactional cost. Second, digital money, which is around 28%. It is growing. It means -- and digital money in Africa largely means mobile money, which means you have the account with a telco and you're able to pay to any companies or to any peers. And last but not the least is the prepayment, which is around 17%, growing very fast.

This is -- this number looks very small as a percentage. However, I do not think there is any consumer company, any online consumer company in the whole continent where 17% consumers trust them by prepaying. Coming back to cash. Cash is complex, and hence, it's a great moat for us. All organizations fare it, many have failed to crack it. How do we do it?

Coming back to our partnership with our third-party companies. So the biggest issue is actually is the delivery agent who is delivering your item has to collect the hard cash. Now sometimes this cash is way too much for this person's choices to be different. And if this person is delivering a phone, which is worth $200, this person can actually decide to just run away and $200 can be easily 4, 5 months of salary. That is a plug we need to crack. And this is where we have spent almost a decade to understand how we could do it. And there are multiple hooks between the delivery agents and the third-party logistics company and Jumia.

And that is why we say that exclusivity, a complete dependence on each other is the role which we play. And hence, we are able to do cash on delivery in almost a no leakage manner. Digital on delivery is a very interesting one. It's growing fast. It is available in almost all of our markets. The way it works is that we have different digital money players in each country. For example, in Kenya, you have M-PESA, which is around 99% of the transactions.

When we go to Morocco, it's still almost cash. When you go to Nigeria, around 80% of the payments happen on delivery, but through the bank transfer. So what we have to do is then in each market, we have to identify the most relevant payment partners, and we integrate with them through JumiaPay. And hence, every single country, we have almost 100% options available for the customers to pay for the goods. Last but not the least, the upside is going forward is that our prepayment ratio is increasing. Our digital on delivery is increasing. And both these things go in our favor because it is going to help us increase the success rate of the deliveries.

Lastly, we are accelerating on buy now, pay later. It is an option where customers will be on the checkout of Jumia. We'll be able to select the product for which they do not have the money. They can pay a small deposit for it, get the instant loan from the fintechs or the banks behind it and get the items which they are aspiring for. It is going to unlock a lot of new market and also going to drive our average order value. Thank you very much for listening patiently to me.

I'll invite Antoine. He's the last man standing between the break and us.

We have discussed several aspects of the business of Jumia. We've discussed about commercial logistics. We even touched about cash reconciliation, which is close to my heart as a CFO. And you now see how we operate in such a large footprint across Africa. To make this work smoothly, we have at the core of operation, our unified tech platform. The core has been built in-house and is being maintained in-house, and it's built around 3 different tool sets: vendor center, customer centered and finance and operations. It provides us with a single entry point for all users, integrated building blocks as well as a layer of data for real-time analytics.

This tech stack is built for Africa. For instance, if you think of mobile app, we need mobile app, which are adapted to low bandwidth availability and high data cost. When you think of our sellers, we also need to have very user-friendly applications to onboard them and keep them engaged with the platform.

Finally, and Vinod talked about that, we are enabling our 3PL vendors with our tech, but we need to control each and every step of the logistics process. Lastly, we are facing a very fragmented payment environment in which there's a lot of cash. And to mitigate this, we are using JumiaPay and the gateway we've built. Data is at the heart of everything we do. With all those systems, we are, I would say, very data-rich, but we are working hard to be data-driven.

Our unified data warehouse draws information from all systems and power real-time analytics that create a lot of value. We are able to better serve our customers. Our vendors can look at and manage their price on a real-time basis. They can monitor their inventory. And very importantly, all Jumia team have access to the same data metrics, which helps us take decision real time with a coordinated view, finance, marketing and commercial.

And I will let the floor either to the pause or to tell me -- I don't know if we pause now or -- it's the break.

[Break]

All right. Welcome back, everyone. So we get to the fun part, right? My name is Temidayo Ojo. I am the CEO for Jumia Nigeria. My journey started with Jumia started about 5.5 years ago. So it's a classic case of what Francis was talking about, about merit-based growth and opportunities for local operators in the business. I joined the Ghana business 5.5 years ago as the Head of Planning and Performance, driving growth and efficiency initiatives in the business. I did that for 1.5 years and subsequently moved on to become the Chief Commercial Officer for Ghana.

And then 2 years after I became the CEO for Ghana. And 5 months ago, I transitioned to the Nigeria business to head the Nigeria business as the CEO for Jumia Nigeria. Tonight, I'll be taking you through how we compete -- how we win versus competition in our markets and why we are confident that we have the right competitive advantages to continue winning in our markets going forward.

So let's have a look of how our competitive landscape is. Today, the competitive landscape for us at Jumia is quite diverse. As you can see, we have a mix of local operators that are either specific to the country or category specific. We also have nonresident players like that are also making market entries into the continent. And then we have countries like Egypt, which is quite peculiar where you have a mix of everything of local competitors, category-specific players as well as Amazon.

However, we believe and we are confident that we have the right competitive strategy to win in that market. Our focus on low -- sorry, our focus on low-cost consumers or the lower middle-class consumers allows us to differentiate ourselves and still take a sizable share of the market. And then I'm sure you've noticed some 2 countries on the chart, that's Senegal and Ivory Coast that generally don't have any large competitive player in the market.

So they just have a couple of smaller local players as well as probably social commerce. But if you look at this, one thing that is clear is that we have an unmatched footprint on the continent. And with that comes clear advantages of learnings as well as operational execution and the ability to adapt to the local context in the markets in which we operate. These are very, very e are very strong things to have.

Let's move on to the next slide, and local players. So we win versus local players, and I'm not going to flesh flog this anymore. It's been touched on by different parts of the presentation already today. Some of the key competitive advantages or strong pillars that we have that we compete against local players today is our tech stack. We're able to build a very robust tech stack because we're able to invest for 9 markets across all our 9 markets.

We have a very superior supply and commercial infrastructure, which Hisham has delved extensively into. This allows us to negotiate at scale with our international brands and suppliers and as well allows us to source very strongly locally. We also have an unmatched infrastructure in terms of our logistics network, which is built on the back of our 3PL partners that are exclusive to us and have deep knowledge of the locations in which they operate.

And also, of course, there's a big one which we've invested a lot on the Jumia side over the years, which is trust. We've done this by building local presence in our markets over the last 10 to 15 years. So we are talking of our 3PL partners who are very local, our pickup stations that are local as well as customer support and vendor support operations that are physically present and available to consumers for issue resolution and all forms of each support with the e-commerce journey. But then let's look at the nonresident players, right?

There's been a lot of buzz around players like and these guys are basically disrupting, they are disrupting the e-commerce playbook globally, not just in Africa, but of course, we get news about what's happening in Canada, in the U.S. and all we are quite confident that we have -- we haven't competed with them for over about 1.5 years.

So came into Nigeria last year and Morocco as well. They also launched in Ghana this year. So we've been competing with for at least 1.5 years now. And I haven't done that, we've learned a lot, but we are also more confident. We are also quite confident that we have the right competitive advantage to actually win against them. So let's look at it, assortment, right?

Number one, in terms of assortment on the 60% of our GM drivers, for example, this is categories like appliances, TVs and the likes. is not able to compete because of the size of the items.

So things like high-value phones and things like large and medium items, they are not able to do drop shipping directly from China in a cost-effective way. Meanwhile, we are able to manage this because we build the local supply, and we're able to ship to customers in good time. And for the rest of the traditional e-commerce or cross-border categories like the home, like the electronic accessories as well as fashion, we've also spent a lot of time building very, very reliable and competitive supply through our relationship with the China hub and actually bringing that supply into the country such that we are able to match on prices and supply and even do better than what they do in terms of the fact that we can actually deliver faster in 24 hours because many of those items are sitting in our fulfillment center warehouses in the countries that we operate.

Now we look at the reach and we've talked a lot about our logistics infrastructure, but this is one of our strongest pillars. We are able to reach the entire country and the most significant breadth of the country in a cost-effective way, something that Tim is unable to do today because of the fact that they're operating and they don't -- from outside the country and they don't have that network that we have. Then you talk about payments. Cash and delivery is super important. We've talked about the trust topic. We've been able to provide payment solutions, both offline and offline that addresses the friction that consumers today face, particularly with regards to payments.

There's a big -- let me speak about Nigeria. There's a big thing about people being scammed online, right? I'm in the U.K. today, I placed an order on Amazon like 2 days ago. And I didn't even think to us before using my card details. But the same me in Nigeria will think to us about providing my card details on the platform. That's the kind of trust issues that we have to deal with on the continent. There's a lot of skepticism and a lot of paranoia about e-commerce online platforms. But today, Jumia has been able to kind of bridge that gap with the physical presence that we have in those countries.

We have -- we are present on radio. We are not hiding. We are present on TV. We have hubs scattered all over the country. We have JForce agents that are local people, local agents that are local to the communities work that can act as ambassadors for Jumia and say this is a legit business. This is a business that you can work with. These are some of the assets that we have that allows us to break that barrier and still something that nonresident players and international players are struggling with today. So as you see, this is just not a theoretical thing. We are seeing that even 1.5 years after has been in Nigeria, we are still seeing that Jumia is maintaining its leadership in the market and still remaining relevant in the market. What we try to do is also check this.

So we run -- we did a test with Ipsos sorry, and on to the next slide. We did a test with Ipsos, surveying about 15 cities of our major cities and about 2,000 consumers kind of understand where we stand 15 months or 18 months after the entrance of Temu. You see that in terms of top-of-mind awareness as well as brand awareness, Jumia still maintains market leadership. And we are often -- and in terms of the key metrics of usage and stickiness, we are still the preferred brand. So if you ask me what we think about competition, I think competition is good for us because it keeps us on our toes, it keeps us sharp. But also we are confident that we have the right tools, we have the right infrastructure, we have the right competitive advantage to fight and to win against competition.

And -- and that said, if we look at -- if we look at the entire industry, if you look at the entire ecosystem, we can see Jumia that we win both locally and we win both internationally because we built a service that truly adapts to the needs and requirements of users in our market. And if you look at the entire e-commerce funnel from awareness or to repurchase, we've built strategies and we've deployed strategies that enables us to continue to effectively capture that market. And I would like to finish by saying we are confident that we can compete and deliver in the market. and deliver on our plan without filling our unit economics.

As you can see, we are not competing by burning cash. And as my colleague will show you in subsequent slides, competition is not taking away the momentum of the growth that we are seeing in the markets that we are operating today. In actual us, we are seeing the opposite. We are seeing growing momentum in all our key markets, including -- and even in some markets, we are seeing acceleration, including in markets where we have Temu and nonresident players operating.

So I believe that we can compete by burning cash and we can build -- what we compete by building the right value proposition, and that's what we have today. And with that, I'm going to hand over to Renault, who is going to take you through the country level lens and show you the performance overview at the different countries. Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. I'm Renaud Glenisson. I've been working with Jumia for 10 years, started as the CFO for Ivory Coast, then CFO for West Africa, CFO for JumiaPay all countries. 3.5 years ago, I was appointed CEO for Ivory Coast, and I'm now regional CEO covering for Ivory Coast, Ghana, Senegal, Algeria and Morocco. I'm based in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. In this section, we are going to cover country information. We've been asked quite a few times in the past to provide more information at country level. In the last 2 quarters, we have started disclosing information on usage. What we are going to do today is give you a little bit more information and more color market by market.

All right. So one of the key important things that we want in the next few quarters is to be profitable. For that, countries had to generate enough cash by increasing their scale and penetration across markets and by having very strong unit economics in order to cover for their lean fixed costs and those of the central cost as well. The fixed cost part was already taken care of by Francis in the previous section. What we are going to focus on today in this section, sorry, is scale and penetration and unit economics.

Let's start with scale and penetration. This slide is very important for you to understand what is the addressable market and what market we currently address. Let's start with the first chart, which is the logistics network coverage. In this chart, you see a very different situation across countries with Ivory Coast and Egypt being the best-in-class markets in terms of population covered and other countries below. This chart represents the percentage of population of the country living in cities where at least one pickup station is operating.

I will talk about the Ivory Coast situation because I live there, and I know it pretty well. Ivory Coast is where we started the -- what we call the playbook with Jumia. We started expanding up country back in 2016 with the first country being San Pedro and then subsequently opening dozens of cities every year. Even this year, in 2025, we opened 20 new cities. One of them is [indiscernible], which is a city close to the border of Liberia, 70,000 people roughly. We were asked by JForce agents to actually open a pickup station there because they thought that there was a market there. And they were actually right within a couple of weeks. We had hundreds of orders in this city, and it's been a very successful launch this year.

Looking at Nigeria, we saw earlier in the presentation that the coverage is -- well, there's less coverage in the country. And currently, the team is working on the ground trying to open the northern part of the country, and we will soon have an increased coverage in this country. I won't detail every single country here. My point here is that we still have a lot of room for growth in terms of coverage of population.

Moving on to the 2 other charts, which measure the penetration as the number of orders in the last 12 months per 1,000 people and the economic relevance as the GMV over GDP. Those 2 charts show that Ivory Coast is the leading country here. And this is, again, because we started the playbook way earlier than in the other countries. The 2 countries that are following are Ghana and Kenya, which were actually the 2 countries that started the turnaround of the business 3 years ago very quickly, while the restructuring took a little bit more time in Nigeria and Egypt.

In this slide, you can therefore see that we have a lot of opportunities to get to a higher level of penetration and economic relevance across the countries. That being said, this is not just what we think we could do. It is actually happening. Growth is already happening, as you saw earlier in the presentation. And I'm going to show you in the next slide and to give you some more color about how we have growth in all countries.

Let's start with Ivory Coast. Ivory Coast is the most penetrated country. We saw that in the slide before, but we still have 20% growth, and we still have room for growth. We are currently having very high growth in some categories like babies, kids and babies, fashion, beauty. And we still are opening pickup stations. So there's room for growth in the country.

Looking at Nigeria. Nigeria has 30% roughly growth in quarterly active customers, the same for orders, a little bit higher in GMV because the country is switching to higher AOV, average order value. The country is massively underpenetrated, and we still have a long work ahead of us. When you think about it, there are more than 230 million in Nigeria, while we have only 30 million people in Ivory Coast. So the country is 7x bigger than Ivory Coast. So there is definitely room for growth in the country. And the team is on the ground working on both the assortment and the pickup station network.

Moving on to Kenya. Kenya has a very good and strong trajectory in terms of growth across the 3 KPIs with a very strong usage as well in orders. Kenya has a strong assortment and is currently diversifying things to local sellers, but as well as Chinese sellers. The pickup station network is still expanding as well. Egypt, the situation looks a bit more complicated when you first have a look at it.

And then -- let me explain on this country, the situation. Egypt has a growth on orders in quarterly active customers, but in GMV, we are degrowing. That being said, this is because of corporate sales, as mentioned earlier by Antoine, corporate sales represented a high amount last year at the same period. So when you remove this impact, there is definitely a growth on GMV, 40% growth. This shows acceleration in Egypt despite the competition that is quite important with Amazon and L. And we believe that we have some space there. Definitely, we have space for 3 factors, and Jumia has room by focusing on low and middle class.

Moving on to Ghana. Ghana's growth rates are very good, I must say, with active customers growing by 60%, orders close to 100% and GMV even higher. Ghana has the same playbook as other countries, but significantly invested in the pickup station expansion very recently. And the local seller and Chinese sellers are working very well. So all in all, we can see a strong reacceleration across markets. And this is done with good unit economics. This is not just like we keep on growing, but at a high cost like we used to do before 2022.

Let's move on to the financial KPIs here. Same here, I'm going to give you some more color market by market. Ivory Coast first. Ivory Coast has a good take rate, a bit higher than the rest of the group. We actually increased the monetization earlier this year with a bit of higher shipping fees, higher commissions. We don't have that much competition there. So we can even continue increasing the monetization.

Fulfillment expense per order is quite higher than the rest of the group. And this is because the mix of products is quite oriented towards large items. When you walk into the warehouse in Abidjan, you would see a lot of fridges like thousands of televisions, big TVs, air conditioning systems everywhere. So a lot of large items, which costs a bit more in terms of fulfillment. And there is also a mix that is more towards the up country. Ivory Coast is one of the highest of the countries where the mix between capital city and up country is more favorable towards the up country.

Marketing expense in Ivory Coast is quite good below the rest of the group, low intense -- low competition online and very strong execution offline. So quite a good marketing expense per order and quite a profitable growth in Ivory Coast. Nigeria. Nigeria is the best-in-class country in terms of take rate and fulfillment expense per order. Take rate is higher because of the category mix that is more favorable towards higher commissions. Fulfillment expense per order is quite low. When you look at it, like it seems really low and it is. This is because the mix of categories more into small and medium items first. And then staff cost is way lower than in Ivory Coast, for instance. And Nigeria still has potential to grow up country.

So the mix is a bit less towards the up country for now. Marketing expense is very similar to Ivory Coast despite online competition. We -- it remains very lower than the rest of the group. Kenya has strong unit economics across the 3 KPIs high take rates, low fulfillment expense per order, same here, less large items than in Ivory Coast and strong marketing expense per order with roughly the same level as Ivory Coast and Nigeria. Egypt. Egypt's take rate is lower than the rest of the group and fulfillment expense per order higher than the rest of the group, while marketing expense as well. So here, the situation is a bit different. We are lacking scale in Egypt.

As you saw earlier, the penetration is lower, but the reacceleration of growth will help us definitely increase monetization in the next couple of months. And scale will also help us decrease the cost in this country. Now Ghana. Ghana's unit economics are a bit hard to read, if I must say. This is because of the hyperinflationary adjustments that we have in the country, so accounting entries. If you look at local currency take rates, you wouldn't see this kind of low take rate. You would see roughly the same level as Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Kenya.

Fulfillment cost per order and marketing cost per order is -- they are like very good in Ghana, but the same here, like they were impacted like in Nigeria by inflation and difficult macroeconomic situation. So the cost went shrinking for a couple of months in a row. So this is kind of favorable for us. And in Ghana, we definitely have a profitable growth, and it is a very strong acceleration as we speak. All right. So all in all, all countries have good unit economics, whilst Egypt situation is a bit different, but we are working on it with scale and acceleration of the growth. What I want you to remember from this section is that we have room for deeper penetration of the market.

There is definitely room for growth working on the assortment on the logistics network. And we have good unit economics making us -- making it profitable growth. So I hope this couple of slides helps you get more color about the situation by market. I will now hand over to Francis Antoine for the next phase of growth and financial outlook. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Renaud. As we look into Jumia's next phase of growth, we see several key strengths that we have been discussing extensively. First, we operate in massively underpenetrated market. Second, our value proposition is tailored for Africa, and we have a proven playbook. Third, we have developed after 10 years, a unique local expertise. We have an asset-light model in logistics, which is powered by our own tech, ensuring scalability and unit economics control.

Finally, Jumia is a recognizable brand. We are famous. We are appreciated, and this drives customer loyalty and repeat purchase. We believe the turnaround is done. There are still a lot of work, but we've made huge improvements on the top line and the efficiency and then the cost management.

And going forward, we have a very clear objective. First, by 2030, we aim at USD 2.5 billion to USD 3 billion GMV. In parallel to this growth, we expect take rate to grow by 2.5%. The operational leverage resulting from the growth will result in an EBITDA margin over 20%. Most importantly, this plan is a self-funded plan. We have a clear path to reach profitability in 2027 and to be free cash flow positive going forward. We are committed to driving 20% CAGR GMV growth per year. This will come mainly from value proposition enhancement, enhanced coverage, reacceleration on sales and marketing and improved conversion.

Beyond this, we have some long-term optionality, which we will trigger in due time when specific internal KPI will be met. We have extensively discussed about the potential in our countries. Briefly, when we compare the population covered by our pickup station and the active consumer, we see that we have a huge room to grow around 40% in Ivory Coast. How are we going to increase our monetization? It will come mainly from increased monetization, which comes with scale because monetization is a byproduct of scale. We increase as well the contribution from advertising. We are about 1% of our GMV, while our peers are around 2%. We will optimize our retail pricing as well as the mix with international vendor.

As we scale and as we discussed, in line with what was achieved from '22 to '25, we expect unit economics to drastically go down, both on fulfillment and marketing cost per order. Talking about fixed cost, we believe that the current structure, both G&A and tech can operate between 2.5 and 3x the current volumes. So we intend to maintain this structure where it is through continuous renegotiation of our suppliers contract and a very strict and cautious HR policy. When relevant, we will use AI to boost productivity. And as an example, I can tell you that after a first period of ramp-up, about 15% to 20% of our code is today generated by AI.

As a recap, the profitability will come from a combination of GMV growth, increased monetization and keeping the fixed cost stable. Beyond this, we see some optionalities. We believe that Jumia's platform is the best one with our systems, our expertise to address logistics in Africa. And if we open our networks to third parties, we are tapping into a USD 50 billion opportunity by 2030. We have also identified other countries with significant potential, and we might, when ready, go there. We will need to meet some criteria, which will be, for sure, FX stability, strong potential in terms of GDP and population. We need to have the proper network available and sellers ready to accompany us. We will trigger those 2 optionality if and when we reach our internal criteria.

Thank you. I will now let the floor to Francis for closing.

I have amazing news for everyone is the last slide. So thanks all for your attention and patience. I will be very short. I believe we're finally in the right place. The backdrop is that macro trends are obviously favorable for the African consumer market. More specific macroeconomic evolutions and more conjunctural elements are finally slightly playing in our favor, which is a big improvement versus the past few years we've been through in Africa. We operate in markets that are extremely hard to adapt to even if you're willing to learn, which is not the case for everyone, but very hard to adapt to and enter for foreign large players.

We discuss nonresident, but it applies to all -- to everyone coming with deep pockets and a standard rigid business model that has been tested on other bigger continents in terms of demand. And most importantly, at the heart of everything, the team at Jumia has done an amazing job rebuilding the right business. We won't -- I mean, we talked a lot about the past today, but it's really behind us. What matters now is that we have something that makes sense for African consumers and partners. We can generate profits serving this market at scale, and it's showing in the numbers.

We have built some credibility in the past around cost cutting. That's pretty clear, I think. We're showing the recent quarters that there's a clear acceleration in usage across our markets. It's not driven by one country. It's not driven by one category or something exceptionally is happening across the board. This business model that we've built is working, is relevant and is generating value. All that in the context of markets that are massively underpenetrated, where we have created barriers to entry, strong reputation, trust and amazing brand across Africa. I do believe, and we all believe Jumia is the one e-commerce platform that will play the next phase of growth in consumer demand in Africa.

Thank you all for your attention. We will be taking questions in just a minute. We just need to rearrange the stage right. Thank you. All right. Thank you. We are ready to start Q&A. Whoever wants to go first? Yes, please.

There just seems to be lots of opportunities in lots of countries. So how do you decide which countries go first and how you allocate capital to increasing that coverage?

Yes. So first of all, I would say there's not much about capital allocation in this case, right? I mean expansion at country level is happening without much CapEx. When you expand the network within the country, it's funded by 3PLs. We may make some choices in working capital allocation, but it's very minimal. So it's more a cation of time and focus, I would say, from the teams. And over the past few years, so we started from a very large footprint. We shrunk it to fewer countries that makes sense. And today, we're definitely allocating more time, attention and more working cap, a bit more freedom to the countries where there's obviously the biggest potential.

And in the last, we'd have Nigeria first, obviously, given the scale of the untapped potential, Kenya, Egypt, Ivory Coast and somehow Ghana that can actually catch up with Ivory Coast because on paper, it's pretty much the same markets. We have a bunch of smaller markets where -- that are either a bit smaller or with slower traction that would be Senegal, which is structurally smaller, Ugundai, which is a bit smaller as well. Algeria and Morocco, where we had lower -- I mean, slower traction in the past years. So ballpark, that's the idea, but there's very -- I mean, there's not much around capital allocation in our case.

Okay. So you're not constrained in any way in terms of your ambitions in terms of how quickly you can do things?

The only way in which we are constrained by capital would be allocation of working cap at group level, right? We cannot afford to have big swings in working capital. And we know that the most important part for us to -- I mean, the easiest part for us to accelerate fast would be building up inventories, which right now would not be the right thing to do for our business and for our cash flows. So that's somehow constrained. Marketing levels, we can manage with the cash we have. We could do a bit more maybe, but that's the only limitations we have.

And to your point, what I'd like to say, usually, given the type of business we're in and given the profiles of customers we're serving, it's actually good to be under some amount of pressure on the cash side. So we don't get crazy and remain very, very frugal for some time. So we're okay with the current situation.

And just a question on those global brands. Where is the relationship with the global brand managed? Is that managed centrally? Or is that managed at the country level? And how important are you to those brands in terms of exclusivity, that type of thing?

Yes. I'll take this one, [indiscernible]. So first, to come back to the working cap part. If you recall, we showed these 4 buckets of sellers that we work with. The only one where we would need working cap is the part of the global brands. For all the rest, we operate on consignment models, we operate on marketplace models. So it's not cash intensive at all. So we are not limited in accelerating all the other few buckets.

The global brands, we are customized on this. We are mapping what we see from the brands. So take, for example, someone like Starlink, it's a centralized relationship because Starlink is centralized. You take something like Transion, so Tel, Infinix, Xiaomi, they are decentralized on their end, and we map that as well. So we're always mirroring the opportunity so that we have the best flexibility. Typically, with most of those brands, it's a 1P relationship. It's a retail relationship.

And in terms of exclusivity, not as much. We have first entrant opportunity across most of those brands, be it adidas, be it Starlink, et cetera. But I cannot call it an exclusive partnership. It's just a dominant market position.

A couple of questions. So first, maybe explain to everybody the tariff war that's kind of going on globally. How does that impact the business? And we've heard that you mentioned it's actually a tailwind to the business in the past. So if you could explain it to everybody, I think that would be great.

Yes. I'll let Hisham answer again. But I mean, high level, it's favorable for us. Definitely for Chinese manufacturers, it's putting Africa back on the map. I mean, not at the top of the list, but at least back on the radar. So it's overall favorable. It's a net positive for our supply. I'll let you elaborate.

Yes. So I mean, as Francis put it, simply put, less products going to America, more products are being funneled to Africa, if you put it in very simple terms. Psychologically also, our partners internationally, they feel that, okay, there's a market that is being risked.

So let me derisk and diversify my options somewhere else. And again, the nature of the products are different, but the numbers are big. With some sellers we have, they are shipping 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 units per container, and this is coming every couple of weeks. So significant volumes for many of those sellers that they see as, okay, if we shuffle this to Africa, then this is the upcoming opportunity, and I'm hedging against whatever goes wrong in the states. And the supply is there.

Got it. And then...

Just adding to that, in practice, I mean, on the ground, what we see is that our supply pipelines from China are better than ever. I mean we're literally counting the number of consignment orders that are raised by Chinese vendors to our warehouses. This is looking better than ever. We see way too many sellers attending our meetings and our onboarding sessions in Shenzhen. So we have more sellers than shares available sometimes quite recently actually. So we're really seeing some kind of enthusiasm of sellers having to pilot somehow.

And I can add on top that there is a very strong interest even from the authorities on the governance there. So many programs that are sponsored by them. They are putting us on events and so on. They see also holistically the opportunity in Africa, and they are sponsoring that on the ground.

Got it. And then another interesting thing that we saw in the quarter was previously, a lot of the growth have been led by Nigeria, Ivory Coast, but there was a huge acceleration in Ghana, for example. So maybe talk about how some of these -- the smaller countries start to contribute to the overall growth acceleration now going forward.

So I think high level, of course, in the past few years, each country had a different pace of restructuring. So very early actually in '22 -- I mean, '23, already Ivory Coast was contributing to most of the growth or maintaining somehow the pace for the whole company. And then we saw that restructuring was pretty fast in countries like Uganda, credits to Vinod, Ghana, credits to Temi here and a few other countries that were able to catch up some pace, but we were unfortunately unable to make up for the whole loss in bigger countries like Egypt and Nigeria.

Now we're at a stage where all the countries pretty much have done the restructuring. It took longer, a bit longer in Nigeria, much longer in Egypt, but we're seeing now very positive trends. So it took more time. The pace was different, but now we have everyone contributing. The case of Ghana is very interesting. It's no longer a small country actually. It's the same scale as Egypt for us now with a much better pace. So they're going to be much bigger very soon. Ghana is an interesting case, and I will let maybe Temi or Renault elaborate on that because we've been able to deliver very strong growth over the past 2 years, actually in Ghana already.

On the back of a horrible macroeconomic environment, Ghana had the highest inflation across all of Africa in 2024, 50%. And still, we delivered 80-plus percent in GMV growth in dollars, a very strong case that by adapting our value proposition to customers with very low income, we can grow in any kind of environment. If you want to add to that, maybe, Temi?

So I'll just add that Ghana is an example of a case where everything that we put out in the playbook is finally working and coming together. So on the supply side, on the logistics side as well as on the operations side. This is a typical example of what you can -- what can happen when everything in the business is working. Also, it's also a testament to the adaptability that we talk about because we have people that are in the market, and we are used to volatility. We understand the kind of volatility that cause. In fact, although 2024 was really a bad year for us, we also had 2022 to learn from, which was also a very, very bad year for Ghana in terms of currency volatility.

So a lot of changes in the way we source in the kind of coverage we take in the way we operate and the way we manage risk came from the learning of 2022, such that we're in a much better position to manage the volatility that came again in 2024. So this is just basically the local teams on the ground adapting and learning from the changes in the markets that they operate in.

Do you have a breakdown, a GMV country breakdown?

So what we're providing is the GMV breakdown for the top 5 countries and then the bucket of the remaining 4. You can find it on Page 10 or 11 of the quarterly release issued yesterday.

And just in terms of delivery times from the Chinese merchants, how does that work when an order is placed, Chinese brand, delivery times of the PUDs you have? Do they have stock on site, you have fulfillment in your warehouses? Or do they do it themselves? How long does it take?

So most of the business with our Chinese suppliers is done with fulfillment on site. So basically, our thousands of Chinese vendors will ship container loads to our warehouses in Africa under a cons finance model. They will manage transit, customs, everything, and then we sell and we remit the money.

The most simple option for us which means that it can be delivered the next day in the big cities. It can be paid on delivery. It frees up frees us up from a lot of constraints that you would have with cross-border otherwise. On the other hand, it kind of limits the breadth of the assortment, but we're very focused on winning at the top sellers in the 80-20.

Cash flow projections, you have $80 million cash balance and $80 million cash burn. How do you see that evolving next year and '27?

Sounds like a CFO question.

Can you hear me? Can you hear me?

Yes.

So we believe we have enough cash, as I said, to reach profitability and free cash flow in 2027. It's going to be a combination, as we said, of scale and savings with a bit of increase of monetization, but that's our plan, profitable in 2027 and free cash flow unwound.

Okay. Cash burn is going to decline significantly.

Cash burn is going to decline, and you have also to think in terms of seasonality of the different quarters.

This is a question from online. Brad Erickson with RBC. When we think about your ability to achieve the long-term targets, can you give us any guardrails around how sensitive the business is to currency volatility before the targets become less achievable?

Yes. So the way we're sensitive to currency volatility is mostly -- I mean, it's directly tied to the level of disruption caused by currency volatility. We had very extreme cases over the past few years like in Nigeria or Egypt when there is massive volatility with very strong devaluation in the market, the biggest impact is that the supply kind of freezes for like a whole quarter, and we lose a lot of time building up the marketplace. So that's the big impact.

Of course, it impacts reported currency numbers, makes the figures a bit harder to read, but that's almost a secondary here. It's just that large volatility is impacting our ability to source because suppliers will keep the dollars outside of the country. They will not import, they will not risk it to get a lot of naira in Nigeria, for example. Chinese vendors will lose confidence and stop shipping. So that's what we had in '22, '23, '24 in Nigeria. However, a slow decline in currency rates, I mean, some money is slowly losing against the dollar or slowly gaining against the dollar is totally fine.

As long as the moves are controlled and slow, it's fine because suppliers can still plan, international sellers can still plan ahead, ship without losing confidence. So it's all about the magnitude of the volatility. I think -- and then we have a question in the back.

You've obviously done an excellent job in the Ivory Coast about with creating a very profitable business with pickup centers moving country. Is there anything structural in Nigeria, which is clearly the biggest surprise in Africa that would prevent that same model working? Or is this just a simple execution playbook that you need to follow.

I deeply believe it's all about -- it's 90%, 99% about execution. There's no structural barrier. To me, you contradict me if needed, but there's no structural barrier that prevents us from delivering the same plan, the same quality of execution in Nigeria. There are some subtleties at country level. The road network is not as great in Nigeria as Navory Coast, okay, we can deal with that. Some regions in Nigeria have security issues, but our 3 pills, our partners can deal with it. They can deliver in the north.

Supply is a bit more scattered, but we're managing. On the other hand, we have great teams, great seniority, very high level of excitement and motivation in Nigeria. So there's really no reason for Nigeria not to be able to achieve the same levels we see in Ivory Coast.

No, I completely agree with you. It's the same -- the playbook works as well in Nigeria. As I mentioned, those are just -- there are unique in each country, but the fundamentals of the playbook still applies. You just need to adapt, make minor tweaks to adapt to the specific markets that you're in. But still the fundamentals of what we are doing in Ivory Coast in Ghana as well works in Nigeria.

Bottom line, it's on us. The one difference between those 2 countries is that Ivory Coast has been executing a decent business plan for the past 8 to 10 years, and Nigeria only had 1.5 years of clean execution. That's the big difference.

Just one more question. So I think one thing that is really great for investors is the profitability target. So you've talked about Q4 2026 and full year 2027. Maybe you could just give everybody your overall just confidence level on hitting that profitability. That's not that far away for the company to really turn profitable, and I think it really changes the game.

We're confident. I don't want to go to jail. We're very confident with that. That's why we disclosed the numbers is because it's perfectly achievable.

Yes.

Next question in the back, I think.

You mentioned a significant part of your code is now being written by AI. And I was wondering if you guys are looking at or seizing on any other opportunities for automation, whether it's on the back-end office side or in your logistics operation like the physical warehouse space and easing in levels of automation and planning that can go a long way.

So anyone to take call centers?

We have no robots, and we do not plan to have robots in the warehouse for sure, for many reasons, a matter of price and moisture and some other topics. On AI, I've mentioned the code example because it's the most obvious, but we have developed use cases everywhere. I have my auditors in the room. We are working in gathering information for SOX control with agents, for instance. They will have to audit the code, but we have opportunities to reduce cost and automate really everywhere. The list is very long. As far as the warehouse is concerned, I will let Francis.

Yes. In operations, we have very different use cases. In call centers, it's obvious like everywhere on earth, we're replacing human beings with agents and customers are interacting with AI-enabled chatbots. So we have fewer and fewer people in our call centers each year, although the volumes are growing. That's an obvious one. And then in warehouses, well, a few things here.

On the one hand, staff cost is extremely low, extremely low in most of our countries, especially the biggest ones like Nigeria after massive devaluations. And the business case to add robots or any kind of really strong automation just doesn't fly, doesn't work in our countries. And on the other hand, the ecosystem to provide robots automations and maintain them in those countries hardly exist.

So yes, the highest level of automation, we've just recently reached in Nigeria, we've set up a conveyor belt, gravitational, no engine. So that's as far as it gets. It's definitely not and Amazon warehouse if that's what you have in mind. But the economics work. The ecosystem would not work to support something much more sophisticated anyway.

Very helpful. Additionally, the relationship with Axian, they're now a significant shareholder, and you've added Hassan to the Board. And maybe if you can touch on the synergies that they see or you see together and how that relationship benefits going forward.

Yes, of course. So we're working with them on synergies. Of course, there are some obvious overlaps in the footprint, so we can work on a few things. Maybe, Marcelle, you want to comment on what you're doing in Senegal?

Yes, sure. So -- and Senegal is actually the one country where we have both groups, that is Action and Jumia. And we're doing a lot with them. We have a lot of synergies starting by selling just the products on Jumia, that's the basic part of it. We're also doing a lot of things. We are working on BNPL, buy now, pay later, phone financing. They already have a solution. So it's working for us. We are also working on overdraft with them, like financing a little bit the SMEs that on Jumia.

So there are a couple of things. Adding to that, we have all the connectivity, the Internet in our warehouse and offices. So we are working on a lot of things right now.

The main opportunity would be around the fintech arm what they know how to do consumer finance, vendor finance. So that's -- I mean, we're not ready to disclose anything tangible here, but that's probably the main opportunity.

And lastly, could you touch on why you stopped accepting cash in Kenya and maybe why that's unique to some of your other markets.

Because we could. You want to elaborate?

Sorry, what was the question?

Why did we stop accepting cash in Kenya?

Yes. I think the answer is short is that we could. There is a very high penetration of digital money, mobile money in Kenya. And just a small nudge to the customer that, sorry, we do not accept cash. Actually, we went from probably accepting 15% of cash to 0 cash, and there is no damage. It's actually faster, better for everybody.

It's a great example of what's coming with digitization of payments, right? We -- I mean, in Nigeria, 1, 2 years back, it was 90-plus percent banknotes cash. Well, then a few things happened. They withdrew all the bank notes, which helped us. It was a bit rushed. But I mean, the system of local bank transfers on bank transfers really works. We've integrated it to our JumiaPay platform. And now it's over 80% of deliveries that are paid through JumiaPay through -- sorry, on bank transfers upon delivery in Nigeria. So removing a lot of cash and a lot of complication for partners and for Jumia. It really depends on the local ecosystems and some countries are way more advanced than others.

One more, sorry, I'm hogging. If you could expand into other product categories or service offerings today, is there anything that you're targeting or looking at bringing into the fold or maybe it's market specific, but just on how you enhance the offering profile?

So nothing crazy. We really stick to the basics, right? We have a few core categories. We believe there's still a lot of potential demand to serve in those categories. Then we're still trying to expand. Maybe Renaud, you want to explain the fine-tuning in Ivory Coast, which is our most penetrated market.

Yes. So in Ivory Coast, we started developing the kids and babies category a couple of years back, predominantly because like we were having customers asking for it, right? Many people and many -- especially mothers asking for diapers in the countryside, while there were no delivery available there with the retail market. So we are covering this category.

And we are also expanding on like -- unlike in the Northern African markets where beauty and fashion is very elaborate in Western countries, we still have a lot of opportunities to grow and with local sellers, but also with international brands through China, through Turkey, we are working on several projects as we speak. So we definitely have a lot of growth in these categories.

One more question from me. I remember in the past, there was a big gap between gross GMV and net GMV. With the new delivery strategy, how has that changed?

So we haven't disclosed that for a while. I think you can see the 20-F, correct me if I'm wrong. We -- so fairly stable on that KPI. On the one hand, we're making our deliveries a lot more reliable. On the other hand, we're pushing to more remote cities, targeting customers who have less experience of e-commerce and do -- well, we're finding more surprises with them. So many different factors at play here.

The ratio is overall stable on the e-commerce business. But I mean, what I can say most precisely though, is that this is probably our biggest battle in operations. We know that there's a gap because we're doing payments and delivery, whether it's cash or digital, there's a gap between -- a significant gap between gross and net more than just the returns because customers are not committed and the money may be gone between the moment you order and 3 days later when you get your product, right? So we're working really hard on that.

A few different topics here. We're working to deliver a bit faster as long as it makes sense for our unit costs. We're working to make our partners more professional to provide them incentives or penalties if they can reach certain targets on that. We're working also really hard on kind of communications we're sending to customers through text messages, through WhatsApp, through push notifications.

So it's a very broad range of topics we're trying to cover to gradually improve that metric. That will always be kind of under pressure because payment and delivery is going to stay and is going to be a very important part of the playbook for a long time.

Question from Francis, I think now.

Could I maybe ask the same question that was asked around the playbook working in Nigeria, but for Egypt? I mean, it seems a tougher market around. I appreciate you're maybe further behind in terms of aligning the business model to the changes that you've done elsewhere. But I guess as you think of that market 5, 10 years out, is there any reason to think it could just be more structurally difficult there because of competition or anything else?

Maybe, Hisham, do you want to explain the specificities of the Egyptian market?

Yes. So at face value, it is a more difficult market, okay? So you have big players like Amazon or no, you have a lot of homegrown players, I mean 60 of them, and you have like sometimes per category 7 or 8 players. So it's a market that is more competitive, and that means maybe your marketing cost per order will be higher there. But is there a structural reason for it to fail versus the other markets? No. Simply put, what we mentioned at the start of the presentation, people are coming with a global playbook. It's more focused on the Tier 1 cities. It's more focused on the higher AIV, which is usually what you come with the noncustomized version as we call it.

In Egypt, we have a huge opportunity in the upcountry, which is still not unlocked in the North, in the Delta or in the South. And this is -- it's the same playbook. We're expanding one by one. We're opening pickup stations, and we're delivering to those underserved customers with products in that price reach. So yes, there is more competition. We're not going to deny that, but the playbook is going to work. It's just not going to be in the Tier 1 cities. It's going to be in the up country, which is our strength.

I'm absolutely convinced that the gap in penetration that you see today in Egypt versus other markets is purely -- I mean, it's not due to competition. Competition has been a convenient excuse for a long time. It's, of course, a bit more competitive, but most of the gap is driven by legacy and by quality of execution over a whole decade. And that's why we have like 3 full years of restructuring in Egypt. And now after rebuilding the teams, changing the logistics, rebuilding the supply base, we -- I mean and delivering the same quality of execution that we're delivering in I don't know, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, we're able to grow again quite significantly, as you could see last quarter.

So we deeply believe in this market. It's starting from a more challenging point. It's always harder when you're small in the big ponds when you're in the marketplace. But we believe that scale will help. And there's clearly a market for the lower middle class of Egypt that is not the focus of other big players where we know how to serve. We've learned a lot for this segment of customers, and it definitely applies to Egypt.

Thank you very much for the detailed presentation. Just if we look at the GMV or order mix now in terms of countries, do you largely expect that to remain the same if we think about that $2.5 billion -- I think $2.5 billion to $3 billion GMV figure where would the majority of that growth come from? Or will it be quite broad-based?

For sure, the mix will change, right? You saw the penetration levels across countries. We do expect much faster growth from the most underpenetrated countries where we're already seeing momentum, right? Nigeria is growing faster than the average, is growing faster than the average, Kenya as well. So we do expect those countries to take a larger share of the mix. That would be surprising if Ivory Coast remain the biggest country at Jumia in 1 or 2 years. That would not make sense.

Yes. I guess the -- I mean, the experience from Africa is that all the countries don't operate the same way all of the time, such that some of those -- like one of the countries might be susceptible to increased risks, whether it be competition in Egypt or otherwise. So you see like an element of offset that would -- you'd see better growth in a more advanced market like Ivory Coast because there's a bit like people can afford to transact on the marketplace and maybe the business environment is a bit more stable.

Well, I mean, our forecasts are kind of all things being equal, right? We cannot foresee political events and macroeconomic events and so on. Based on what we see on the ground, we expect those countries with low penetration to catch up very clearly. And then no, I mean, of course, it's harder to operate in some countries for some specific reasons like Nigeria, but we also have lower competition. So there's no specific reason for a country not to be able to reach penetration ratios that we're seeing in other better countries.

Okay. And final question is just on take rates. I think you said 200 to 250 basis point improvement over the 5 years. And you went into some detail about how that would take place. But could you just reexplain that like how much would come from advertising, increasing contribution to GMV and how much would be from terms with your merchants like putting through price to merchants?

Yes. So yes, the range is around 2.5 points in the next 5 years. The way we see it happening. So on advertising revenue, we're generating about 1% of our GMV in revenue from advertising. What we -- when we look around, we believe the right benchmark should be around 2% and it will take a few years to get there. I mean we're working -- we'll have better tools, better execution. Scale will help. More competition on the marketplace will definitely help.

It will take time, but we assume up to 1 point can come from advertising. And then the rest, which would be 1.5 up to 2 points will come from better take rates from the marketplace and from 1P vendors, 1P suppliers, which we're fairly confident with, right? I mean we -- on a yearly basis, we're reviewing the terms. We're reviewing most importantly, the commission rates, and we're doing this in all the countries where we have scaled. We deeply believe that the take rate is a function of scale in those countries.

The more you sell for your vendors, the more you can get from them. That's the balance of power in any marketplace on earth, right? So we've done that in January '25 in all the countries where we had been scaling over the previous years. So that was Kenya,icoast, Senegal, Uganda Ghana, not so much and Nigeria, not so much. We had spared Egypt at the time because they were in a more challenging situation. And in January '26, we will be reviewing the terms again with a view to winning a few -- I mean, a few decimal points of take rates as part of the greater plan to get this 1.5.

And you mentioned 1P. Does that -- I thought that 1P would sort of normally translate into just the whole thing into revenue, but you said there's an element of 1P involved in there as well.

1P is about scaling and getting better terms when you purchase. It's much harder to decide upfront, but we also see it as a function of scale for the future. wanted to add to that?

I think you covered all the key points.

This question is from Tracy Kivunyu with Standard Bank. How many JForce agents do you have at the moment? And any data on how much GMV they provide?

I don't think we've disclosed recent numbers, dozens of thousands of active JForce vendors, but we've not provided the latest figures, and we have not provided the share of the mix. I mean what we usually say it's above 10% of the GMV. It depends on the countries, can be between 10% and 15% across countries with some specificities. And it just shows how significant it is, how important it is to have sales channels that can deal with customers who are fully offline. So it's significant share of the sales.

And one more question. This is from Brad Erickson, RBC. You mentioned some sensitivity to working capital intensity on inventory. But ultimately, what are the gating factors to building supply? And would that carry a relatively one-to-one relationship in translating order and GMV growth?

I'm not sure I get it. Can you...

Yes, sure. So just basically what is asking what is the working capital intensity on inventory? And what are the issues that will stop the building and supply?

So again, let me reiterate on what I said a few minutes ago. It's only one angle of building our supply out of 4. And it's not the major one. As I clearly said, the majority lies with our local sellers who are all on marketplace, many of them on consignment and our international sellers who are also on consignment. The cash heavy part is we're not at liberty to disclose numbers, but it's not the majority at all of what we do.

It's selected bets. We don't -- are there opportunities that we can do more? Obviously, yes. But is that going to be streaming? Is that where we're going to put the majority of our focus? No, it's not. We're scaling with noncash-intensive avenues.

And if you look at the balance sheet, you'll see the inventory numbers, which are not significant. It's around USD 8 million to USD 9 million.

All right. With that, I think we're done with the Q&A. We have a small cocktail upstairs. Is that right? So you're all welcome upstairs for a few drinks. For all of you if you have a of time, we'll be very happy to have a chat. And I'll be very happy if you can spend some time talking with the team. I've been doing a lot of talking over the past few months with investors. I'm happy to leave the floor and let you double check everything I've said.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Jumia's Results Conference Call for the Third Quarter of 2025. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Ignatius Njoku, Head of Investor Relations for Jumia. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our third quarter 2025 earnings call. With us today are Francis Dufay, CEO of Jumia; and Antoine Maillet-Mezeray, Executive Vice President, Finance and Operations. We would like to remind you that our discussions today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Moreover, these forward-looking statements may speak only to our expectations as of today. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise these statements.

For a discussion of some of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from the forward-looking statements expressed today, please see the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 20-F as published on March 7, 2025, as well as our other submissions with the SEC. In addition, on this call, we will refer to certain financial measures not reported in accordance with IFRS. You can find reconciliations of these non-IFRS financial measures to the corresponding IFRS financial measures in our earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website.

With that, I'll hand it over to Francis.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining Jumia's third quarter 2025 earnings call. This quarter marks a significant acceleration in customer demand and order growth, reflecting a strong execution across our markets and growing consumer trust in the Jumia brand. What's particularly encouraging is the continued acceleration in usage across our platform. Physical goods GMV grew by 26%, adjusting for perimeter effects and by 37% when excluding corporate sales, in line with similar acceleration in physical goods orders and active customers across markets. This momentum is translating into higher order frequency, deeper customer engagement and continued market share gains in our core categories. We believe Jumia has reached an inflection point.

The combination of rising consumer adoption of e-commerce, a compelling value proposition and improving operational discipline is driving durable momentum. We are building a solid foundation for sustainable, profitable growth and the results are becoming increasingly visible. Looking ahead, our focus remains on driving profitable growth through efficiency, disciplined execution and strategic investments in customer acquisition, technology and logistics. These efforts are strengthening our competitive position and creating long-term value for shareholders. And let me reiterate, we remain fully committed to our strategic goal of achieving full year profitability in 2027.

Let me now walk you through some of our key highlights for the quarter. We continue to build momentum in usage trends, driven by solid execution across our markets. Adjusted for perimeter effects, physical goods orders grew 34% year-over-year, driven by strong customer demand, improved product offering, increased marketing efficiency and our expansion into secondary cities. Our core focus remains physical goods, which represented 100% of total orders and nearly all GMV this quarter. The remaining share came from digital products sold through the JumiaPay app, such as airtime and vouchers.

As we scale our core marketplace, we are phasing out these noncore digital transactions to streamline operations and enhance organizational efficiency. Adjusted for perimeter effects, quarterly active customers increased 22% year-over-year, reflecting healthy customer acquisition and retention and marked the highest increase in the past three years. Customer loyalty also strengthened with our NPS score increasing to 64 from 63 in the prior year period. In addition, 43% of new customers from Q2 '25 made a repeat purchase within 90 days, up from 40% in Q2 '24.

Demand remained strong across key categories, including electronics, phones, home and living, fashion and beauty. Adjusted for perimeter effects, physical goods GMV grew by 26% year-over-year in reported currency. And excluding corporate sales, GMV increased 37%, reflecting accelerating momentum in our core consumer business. The average order value for physical goods in Q3 '25 stood at $35, down from $38 in Q3 '24, mainly reflecting reduced corporate sales in Egypt. We expect GMV growth to accelerate over the remainder of the year as underlying demand remains robust, business fundamentals continue to strengthen, and we begin to lap the impact of lower corporate sales.

Revenue reached $45.6 million, up 25% year-over-year, with first-party sales representing 52% of total revenue. In addition to top line growth, we continue to make progress on monetization initiatives that enhance revenue quality and support margin expansion. Importantly, we believe that acceleration in usage is not coming at the expense of monetization. We're driving both growth and improved unit economics simultaneously. Our new retail advertising platform launched in the second quarter of '25 continues to scale across our seller base and represents a strategic high-margin revenue opportunity, supporting our path to profitability.

With advertising revenue at 1% of GMV, Jumia sees substantial upside potential. In addition to our third quarter performance, we are sharing early fourth quarter trends to provide further visibility into the current momentum. In October and adjusting for perimeter effects, physical goods orders and GMV each grew over 30% year-over-year. These results highlight sustained customer demand and strong start of the final quarter of the year, reinforcing our confidence in achieving our full year outlook.

Now let's discuss our progress towards profitability. We remain on track towards our profitability objectives, driven by disciplined execution and continued efficiency gains across the business. Our initiatives in G&A, technology and fulfillment are delivering meaningful and sustainable cost improvements. We continue to streamline the organization. The total headcount declined by 7% since December '24 to just over 2,010 employees on payroll at the end of the third quarter, reflecting a leaner, more agile organization and ongoing efforts to strengthen operating leverage. Fulfillment cost per order decreased 22% year-over-year to $1.86, driven by structural efficiencies across our logistics network. Technology and content expenses decreased by 10% year-over-year, benefiting from automation, platform optimization and improved vendor terms.

As a result, adjusted EBITDA loss improved to $14 million compared to $17 million in the same quarter last year, reflecting both operating leverage and continued cost discipline. Loss before income tax was $17.7 million, a 1% decrease year-over-year or 8% decline on a constant currency basis. Cash used in operating activities declined year-over-year to $12.4 million, underscoring our focus on prudent capital management. We continue to make strong operational progress during the quarter, particularly in 2 strategic areas that are driving growth. First, our upcountry expansion is unlocking meaningful opportunities beyond major urban centers. We're leveraging our logistics and commercial infrastructure to efficiently serve secondary cities and rural regions, which are now driving some of our fastest growth. Orders from upcountry regions represented 60% of total volumes this quarter, up from 54% in the same quarter last year.

Second, we significantly expanded our international seller partnerships, particularly with suppliers from China. In the third quarter, we sourced 3.4 million growth items from international sellers, representing a 52% year-over-year increase, adjusted for perimeter effects. This allows us to offer a broader selection at more competitive prices while maintaining healthy unit economics and strengthening our overall value proposition. Turning to country-level execution. Nigeria delivered strong performance with physical goods orders up 30% year-over-year and physical goods GMV up 43%, reflecting sustained momentum following the macroeconomic and currency challenges of 2024. Our upcountry expansion strategy is driving tangible results, fueling steady growth in our active customer base nationwide.

Performance in the Southwest and Southeast regions remains robust, and we are seeing encouraging traction as we expand into the North, building on a more balanced geographic footprint. Kenya also performed strongly, with physical goods orders up 56% year-over-year and physical goods GMV increasing 38% in reported currency. Growth was driven by our upcountry expansion as secondary cities and smaller towns continue to outpace Nairobi and other major urban centers. Operationally, we reduced logistics costs through better shipment consolidation, volume leverage and route optimization, underscoring our ability to scale efficiently. We also launched a new initiative, Jumia Instant, offering 4-hour delivery in Nairobi, focusing on more convenience-driven customers. Ivory Coast delivered a solid performance with physical goods orders up 23% year-over-year and physical goods GMV increasing 22% in reported currency, both accelerating from the second quarter.

The growth acceleration demonstrates Jumia's ability to win market share even in a major market. We remain focused on deepening engagement, improving monetization and expanding penetration from our clear leadership position. Egypt showed very clear signs of recovery. Physical goods orders increased 27% year-over-year, while physical goods GMV fell 23% in reported currency due to strong corporate sales in Q3 '24. However, excluding corporate sales, physical goods GMV grew 44% year-over-year, marking an important inflection point after several quarters of restructuring. This improvement was driven by 3 factors: a rebuild supply base with broader assortment in both high-value and high-frequency categories, growing adoption of buy now pay later for phones and TV and early momentum from our upcountry expansion, which is driving higher volumes outside major cities. Ghana delivered outstanding performance with physical goods orders up 94% year-over-year and physical goods GMV increasing 157% in reported currency.

This exceptional growth came despite significant currency volatility and was driven by our upcountry expansion and a broader product assortment that includes both local and international. Our other markets portfolio also performed well. Collectively, our remaining markets delivered 18% physical goods GMV growth and a 15% increase in physical goods orders. The competitive environment remained stable during the quarter. We continue to see a pullback from certain global entrants in some markets like Nigeria, while we continue to steadily gain local market share. Our localized operating model built on strong vendor partnerships, cost-efficient logistics and deep market knowledge remains a clear competitive advantage that is proving to be difficult to replicate.

Looking ahead, we are very encouraged by the progress we are making across the business. Our focus remains on consistent execution, strengthening our unit economics and capturing the significant growth opportunities ahead of us. We are building a stronger, more efficient and more trusted Jumia, one that can deliver sustainable, profitable growth and create long-term value for our shareholders, customers and partners across Africa.

With that, I will hand it over to Antoine to walk you through the financial performance in more detail.

Thank you, Francis, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Let me now walk you through our financial results for the third quarter. Starting with our top line performance. Third quarter revenue was USD 45.6 million, up 25% year-over-year or up 22% on a constant currency basis. The increase reflects strong consumer demand and ongoing execution. Marketplace revenue for the third quarter was USD 21.5 million, up 4% year-over-year and up 1% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Third-party sales came in at USD 19 million, up 5% year-over-year or 2% on a constant currency basis.

Growth was driven by strong momentum in our core marketplace business, where we continue to see healthy usage trends and higher take rates. This strength was partially offset by a USD 3.5 million decline in third-party corporate sales, mainly in Egypt. Excluding corporate sales, third-party sales were up 30% year-over-year or 26% on a constant currency basis, reflecting the solid performance of our marketplace platform. Marketing and advertising revenue totaled USD 1.3 million, down 24% year-over-year or 26% on a constant currency basis. The decline reflected lower spending from large sellers as brands reassess their budgets from '25 and '26. This was partially offset by strong momentum in sponsored products, which continue to ramp up following the launch of our new retail advertising platform in the second half of 2025.

With advertising revenue currently representing just 1% of GMV, we see significant upside potential as this revenue stream continues to scale. Value-added services revenue was USD 1.1 million, up 59% year-over-year or up 56% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Growth was driven by higher usage and improved take rates, partially offset by lower commissions from third-party corporate sales in Egypt. Revenue from first-party sales was USD 23.8 million, up 54% year-over-year or up 50% year-over-year on a constant currency basis, driven by strong momentum with key international brands.

Turning now to gross profit. Third quarter gross profit was USD 23.8 million, up 4% year-over-year or up 1% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Gross profit margin as a percentage of GMV for the third quarter was 12% compared to 14% in the third quarter of 2024 and 13% in the second quarter of 2025. The year-over-year margin decline is primarily due to reduced corporate sales in Egypt. The sequential decline is mainly driven by currency depreciation in Ghana, which reduced reported revenue and gross profit quarter-over-quarter.

Turning to expenses. While we continue to see benefits from our cost initiatives, we expect further improvement to materialize over the next few quarters. Let me walk you through the key expense lines. Fulfillment expense for the third quarter was USD 10.4 million, up 1% year-over-year and down 2% in constant currency. Fulfillment expense per order, excluding JumiaPay app orders, was $1.86, down 22% year-over-year or down 25% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. Sales and advertising expense was USD 5.2 million for the third quarter, up 18% year-over-year and up 19% in constant currency. The increase reflects targeted investment in sales and marketing, particularly across high ROI social media channels, allowing us to efficiently scale top line growth. Technology and content expense was USD 8.7 million for the third quarter, representing a decrease of 10% year-over-year and down 11% in constant currency.

The decrease was primarily driven by ongoing headcount optimization and savings from recently renegotiated contracts. Third quarter G&A expense, excluding share-based payment expense was USD 16.2 million, down 8% year-over-year and down 10% on a constant currency basis. The year-over-year decrease was primarily driven by lower tax expenses, partially offset by higher staff costs and professional fees. Staff costs within general and administrative expense, excluding share-based compensation expense, increased by 1% to USD 8 million, mainly reflecting currency translation effects.

Turning to profitability. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was negative USD 14 million or negative $14.1 million on a constant currency basis. Loss before income tax was USD 17.7 million, a 1% decrease year-over-year or 8% decline on a constant currency basis. The loss in the quarter reflects a USD 0.1 million improvement in gross profit alongside $1.8 million lower operating expenses and a $2.6 million reduction in net finance results, driven by lower net foreign exchange gains.

Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the third quarter with a liquidity position of USD 82.5 million, including $81.5 million in cash and cash equivalents and $1 million in term deposits and other financial assets. Overall, Jumia's liquidity position decreased by USD 15.8 million in Q3 2025 compared to an increase of USD 71.8 million in Q3 2024, which included net proceeds from the August 2024 at-the-market offering. Net cash flow used in operating activities was USD 12.4 million in the quarter, including a positive working capital impact of $0.4 million. CapEx in Q3 2025 was USD 1.4 million compared to $0.9 million in the first quarter of 2024, primarily reflecting investment in supply chain equipment ahead of the end of year season.

In summary, we delivered another quarter of solid execution and strong top line growth while continuing to reduce underlying costs. Our progress on structural cost reductions, automation and cash efficiency reinforces our confidence in achieving our near-term targets and advancing toward profitability. Looking ahead, our focus remains on operational discipline, improving margins and maintaining prudent capital allocation. These priorities will position Jumia for sustainable growth and long-term value creation.

I'll now turn the call back over to Francis for a discussion of our updated guidance.

Thanks, Antoine. Based on current business trends, we are refining our 2025 financial guidance as follows: we expect physical goods order growth to be in the 25% to 27% range. GMV is projected to grow between 15% and 17% year-over-year. We anticipate loss before income tax to be approximately negative $55 million to $50 million. For 2026, we are maintaining our target for loss before income tax to be in the range of negative $25 million to $30 million, reflecting continued improvement. We confirm our strategic goal to achieve breakeven on a loss before income tax basis in the fourth quarter of '26 and deliver full year profitability in 2027.

Thank you all for your attention. We are now ready to take questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming from Tracy Kivunyu with SBG Securities.

My first question is on the guidance for PBT. At $55 million at the top end, it is suggesting a very significant drop in costs in the fourth quarter, considering what you've seen in the third quarter already. And I just wanted to get some feedback regarding how you're thinking of the attribution for that. Is it that we're going to see very strong revenue acceleration considering you're going into a high seasonality period? Or do you also see some additional benefits from cost management. I think from my view; I feel like the tech expenses and the G&A expenses did not fall off as much as initially expected. So, will we see a bit more deceleration in costs from that end? Or will we actually see both? My second question would be on fulfillment. How should we think about fulfillment? There was a material deceleration in fulfillment per order in 3Q is quite positive. Is that our new baseline? Or should we expect an uptick considering the sale that we're factoring into 4Q?

Tracy, thanks for your questions. I will comment on those 2 questions, and I will let Antoine add to that on some financial topics. So, your first question about Q4. So, we're definitely expecting a significant acceleration in usage in Q4. There's obviously very strong seasonality in this quarter with the Black Friday that we've already started at the beginning of the month. It actually lasts 4 weeks for Jumia. It's a franchise that we really own in Africa that's driving a lot of traffic and a lot of expectations from customers. And then the Christmas season is usually pretty strong in most of our countries, even in some Muslim countries. So definitely some acceleration in usage that will translate in revenue and monetization. And on the cost side, we are usually confident if you look at the past, that further growth in usage will bring economies of scale on the fulfillment side in particular. So, you can already see some clear progress on the fulfillment side this quarter at $1.86 per order, 20% down versus last year same quarter. This is definitely the new baseline.

So, answering your second question, there's no specific one-off element that comes -- that impacted this figure this quarter. This is really the result of a bit more scale and efficiency across our fulfillment centers and better work with our logistics partners. So, this will play in Q4. I mean we expect this to play in Q4 as well. We expect also continued improvement on the fixed cost base. So, you see that the tech costs are decreasing by about 10% this quarter versus the same quarter last year. We expect to be -- to keep on gaining on some items in the fixed cost basis. Antoine, do you want to add to that?

Not much to add to what you just said. Q4 is indeed a very strong quarter, and we expect better efficiency from scale. And as you mentioned, and we'll see also the continuation of the work we've been doing on cost and efficiency, which led us to this guidance.

And if I could ask one more question on working capital movements for the fourth quarter. How are you thinking about that? And how is that feeding into your liquidity expectations and impact on shareholder equity?

So maybe I can take this one, Francis. On working capital, you see that we showed a small improvement in Q3, which shows that we now are able to ramp up our inventories much faster than in the past. A few years ago, we would have been in a position where we would have started 1 month ahead of a Tier-1 events such as Black Friday to beef up the offer. Today, it's no longer the case. We are able to go much faster. And that's why we were able to prepare a very good supply for this event without impacting drastically the working capital. Going forward, what we always say is that supply is key in the countries where we are operating, and we always capture the opportunity when they present. So, it might happen that we have ups and downs in the working capital, but we do not expect significant modification in the working cap cycle.

Sorry, if I may, just a clarification. Are you saying that most of the working capital requirements for Black Friday have already been factored in, and we do not expect a significant shift in terms of working capital management in the fourth quarter?

Sorry, I'm not sure I heard properly. What I said is that we do not expect any significant changes because we are now able to ramp up our inventory much faster. And what we're going to buy, let's say, for retail in October will be sold before the end of the quarter. So, the movement we'll be seeing probably will be intra-quarter movement. And to your last point, we do not expect any significant changes in the working cap dynamics of this quarter.

Our next question is coming from Brad Erickson with RBC.

I have a few. First off, when you look at the 30% order and GMV growth in October you called out, I guess if we kind of run rate that through the quarter, I think that may bring you up maybe a bit below the low end of the guidance, at least for GMV. And so, I guess just is there an implied acceleration in the latter part of the quarter in there? I certainly could be doing the math wrong, but just any color there would be great.

Yes. Brad, thanks for the question. So, we said above 30% -- so we -- it's kind of a range, if you want to take it this way. We wanted to give some color about the early acceleration of Q4, but we're still in the middle of Q4, so we don't want to create the wrong expectations either. So, it's more an indication of the continued momentum, and we stick to the refined guidance that we've given, so between 15 and 17 points of GMV growth for the whole year.

And then I guess just with the slight adjustment to the guidance, I guess just generally, what changed in your visibility to the end of the year on order growth and GMV? So yes, start there.

Yes. As you mentioned, it's slight adjustments, right, on growth numbers. It means we're going to be on the lower end of the range that we had provided earlier this year. There's no massive change in the dynamics. We're still factoring in quite an acceleration in the last quarter, as you mentioned. We just refined it based on mid-quarter trends just to make sure that we don't go too bullish. I mean we just want to be conservative enough. So, it's not a surprise to anyone. And no massive shift in market dynamics. I mean you can see the trends at country level. I mean all countries are accelerating. We have no cause for concern, if that's the way you -- if that's what you're asking.

And then just curious on supply. You mentioned -- and I think you gave some nice metrics on the acceleration in order growth from China in particular. I just wonder on Q4, are there any puts and takes on access to supply? I know directionally, it's clearly positive, but just curious if there's anything like transitory in the quarter that was occurring where maybe you could have gotten more product and you're not now or something like that?

No, I think that the medium- to long-term trend remains the same that we -- I mean, the same as the one we started to describe last time. So, there are 2 very positive trends at play. On the one hand, currency stability is really helping us. Of course, it's helping on the demand side of the marketplace, but it's most importantly helping us on the supply side because even both local importers and international sellers are more and more willing to commit more inventory to Africa, to commit their hard currency to Africa. And we see that it's really helping to fill the supply pipeline. And it's going -- I mean, it's helping to drive the performance. So, when we say that we see acceleration in October, it's partly driven by better supply.

And then we're also still helped by the gradual shift of Chinese manufacturers towards new markets, including Africa. So, it's really bringing Africa back on the map. We see some very positive momentum in China, onboarding a lot more new sellers. We see our current sellers willing to ship more assortment to Africa in consignment in our warehouses, so kind of taking the risk to commit inventory. So, we only see positive trends, and it will continue in the quarters to come, and it will keep on impacting our numbers in the quarters to come. I mean I would even say that Q3 was a bit early to see the full impact of this trend.

And then when you look at some of the countries where you said your competitors seem to be maybe retreating a little bit. From your perspective, I guess it would just be curious to hear what you think is kind of happening in terms of the competitive environment related to those comments.

Yeah. So that comment is mostly aimed at -- I mean, it's mostly focusing on international nonresident platforms, right, the likes of Shein or Temu. What we see in those markets, I mean, it's easy to track from some public data actually. We see some reduced marketing investment. We see price points increasing in several markets like Nigeria. The way we read it is the following, and that's our opinion. That's -- I don't know exactly how to decide it, but the way we read it is that these markets are pretty hard to operate at scale for these players. The context in Africa is very different from the U.S. or from Europe or some other more mature markets where it's relatively straightforward for nonresident platforms to come in.

For example, there are a number of prerequisites that do not exist in our markets. These platforms need reliable customs, which we mostly don't have in our markets. I mean it can take between 1 week and 2 months to get products through customs in those markets at costs that can be unpredictable. They cannot find a major logistics ecosystem. They cannot find the right partners to distribute their product at scale. The biggest distribution network in most of those markets like Nigeria is actually managed by us, by Jumia, and we will not really help them in the process. So, they're stuck working with smaller 3PLs at much higher costs with a much more limited country coverage. And then then we've adapted much better also, I believe, we adapted our playbook to what customers actually need so we can do payments and delivery, which foreign platforms cannot do. We have customer support on the ground, which in a country like Nigeria is extremely important because there's a lot of suspicion around e-commerce and anything digital. So, you need to be able to talk to someone.

And even on the price side, I mean, we're managing to deliver quite a competitive assortment through our international, mostly Chinese vendors, and we can actually compete against those platforms. So, in many ways, we have the right to compete, and we believe that our leadership position is actually consolidating in a country like Nigeria. And yes, Africa is a challenging market. If you build the right business model, you can serve it in a profitable way. But if your business model is not fully adapted to the unique challenges of the continent, it's difficult to operate. And I think a number of players are realizing this.

That's great color. And then I guess just lastly, from a top line perspective, if we -- I guess if we try and remove maybe the impact from Egypt on the corporate sales that you mentioned several times, would that -- would we kind of arrive at the right mix as you think about that part of the business versus marketplace here going forward? Or any other drivers of mix you'd want to call out?

No, I don't see any -- I mean, excluding the corporate sales of Egypt, as you mentioned, I don't see any major shift in the mix to expect. You mean retail versus marketplace, right? So 1P versus 3P. As explained, right by DNA, we're a marketplace. We always prefer to do 3P, but we're tactical about 1P when we have the right opportunities or when we have to do 1P to be able to play in some categories in some countries. But no reason to foresee any major change in the mix.

And then you mentioned the Jumia Instant product. Talk about how kind of important that can be and particularly talk about the net profit impact from that when we balance kind of the incremental demand, maybe offset by any margin differences versus the core?

Sure. So, Jumia Instant is a pilot that we have started in Nairobi in Kenya a few months back to be able to deliver all of the items that we have in the warehouse, so fulfilled by Jumia within 4 hours to anyone in Nairobi. So that's the project. The goal here is to be able to compete against the quick delivery platforms, quick commerce and to provide more convenience to those customers who are willing to pay for it. So, we clearly know that this is only a fraction of our customer base and that most of our customers are highly value driven, need amazing value for money and will be okay for slower delivery at lower cost. But still, we want to cover that segment as well without completely pivoting our strategy, obviously. So, that's why we've launched this pilot in Kenya with limited resources so that we don't get too distracted during Black Friday.

We're seeing early traction. That's quite interesting. And it's something that could be scaled in other countries if it's successful enough. What we see -- I mean, back to your question in terms of margins, it's quite -- at this stage, it's neutral because we charge more basically. We're not entering the war for quick commerce with free deliveries. We make sure that we charge the additional cost of quick deliveries, which are, of course, less efficient and more costly for us than usual deliveries, scheduled deliveries or pickup station deliveries. So, we make sure that we pass those costs to customers who wish to benefit from greater convenience.

And then on the fulfillment costs, you mentioned the cost per order, I think, down 25% constant currency. Can you talk about the drivers there? You mentioned scale, I think, earlier in the call is the driver. But maybe just give a sense of any of the other important inputs to that kind of output metric and what's there to continue driving the number down.

Yes. So, versus last year, I mean, Q3 last year, we were still in several countries operating across multiple smaller scattered fulfillment centers, which have all been consolidated since then at the end of Q3 last year, actually for the last countries. So, we clearly see the change now in terms of productivity. We have been able to run very -- I mean, very strict cost improvement and productivity improvement programs across countries. So, tracking the productivity of pickers and packers, bringing some level of basic automation, not much at the stage and working pretty hard on the cost centers, in particular, where we've been able to automate a lot of the interactions that we used to manage with human agents. So, consolidation of the main fulfillment centers, automation and productivity across all operations, so being fulfillment centers and call centers and then scale effect that's helping to leverage the fixed cost base much more efficiently.

And then one last one, if I can. When you kind of look at adjusting the range for the pretax loss a bit too versus your prior outlook, is that just a function of the kind of slightly lowered order outlook? Or just any other callouts you'd want to mention that are embedded in that new pretax outlook?

Antoine speaking. It's just a refinement. We have changed the phasing of some costs, notably in G&A, and we want to make sure that we are in the right sense. But there is nothing significant. And this is not linked to the new guidance on the top line.

Maybe one more, if I could. Just as we look longer-term, you kind of reiterated your targets. And as you think about exiting '26 breakeven and profitability in '27, can you remind us just what is the kind of top line algorithm as you think about that, whether it be order volumes or anything like that from where we stand today?

So at this stage, we've not provided top line growth guidance for '26 or '27. What I can say, though, is that what you see in Q3 is a strong starting point, right? I mean, to put it differently, there's no reason for the growth rate of '26 to be very different from the exit rate of '25. I believe we're in a healthy B2C business that's driven by strong fundamentals, much better supply, efficient and reliable delivery, efficient and relevant marketing. And what we see is pure clean, healthy B2C growth with the right unit economics. It doesn't just vanish overnight. We believe that's a long-term trend that we're starting here.

Our next question is coming from Fawne Jiang with the Benchmark Company.

First, I want to dig a little bit deeper on your active customer growth was very solid this quarter. Just wonder what drove the acceleration. And also, any demographic profile you could share on this new user group? And any color on how sustainable this pace of the customer growth might be, that would be very helpful.

Sure, thanks for your question. So yes, we're quite happy with the growth in active customers this quarter. It's the highest point that we've had in several years. We really see that as the output of very fundamental changes that we've brought to the business over the past 3 years. So, I mean that's a combination of much better assortment, much better choice, better price points, being able to reach new markets. So, over the past 1.5 years, we've been opening up hundreds of new cities across our footprint. The biggest push was in Nigeria, which in practice, just increased the addressable market, gave us a bigger pool of potential customers. We've been refining the marketing playbook, so it becomes a lot more relevant to a more diverse group of customers, some people being fully digital natives, who can be targeted with Google Ads, TikTok and other on the app. But on the other hand, a lot of people are fully offline. For them, we're doing great in local language. We're printing catalogs or we are incentivizing sales force on the ground.

So, all that is -- I mean, all that is adding up, and it's just delivering a much better value proposition and is driving customer growth. So, to us, it's very healthy trends. And that's why we always disclose all 3 KPIs at the same time. So GMV growth, active customers growth and orders growth. And you can see that these numbers are starting to align, right? The one factor that's creating some gap is corporate sales in Egypt. But as we're lapping those quarters of strong corporate sales last year, we really expect to get some alignment in the growth of those 3 factors, showing that it's -- well, very healthy trends. It's not like one specific category that's killing it. It's not just one specific market. You can see that it's broad-based across all of our key markets. So, we believe it's fundamental. And for that reason, we believe that there's no reason -- I mean, we don't foresee any reason why it should slow down.

My next one is actually on your upcountry expansion. It seems like you emphasized you're going to continue for second-tier cities expansion in Africa and view that as a key growth driver. I guess, can you provide a bit more details in terms of your expansion plan? I don't know whether there's any key milestones you're looking for potentially tied to the 2026 strategy.

Yes. Good question and tough one. So, as you see, the share of orders we're shipping to outside of the capital cities has increased now to 60%. This is a result of the push we've made to secondary cities over the past 2 to 3 years. It's something that started back in the days, 8 years ago, actually in the Ivory Coast and that we're now replicating across markets. What I can tell you to give you some indication, and I hope we can provide a bit more tomorrow during our Investor Day, we see that in most countries where we operate, we're still covering a fairly low fraction of the population in terms of distribution network. So, there are still a lot of cities that are not reached, not yet covered by our distribution network. And we have a lot of upsides, a lot of potential customers to come and serve that we cannot reach today.

The country where we have the densest network, obviously, the Ivory Coast because they started way earlier back in 2016. And in a country like Nigeria, which is a good example for us because of the potential customer base we can have there. We're actually starting the expansion only 1.5 years ago, more or less. And so, there's still a lot more to be done. We've made a big push into Eastern Nigeria and Western Nigeria, or mostly Eastern Nigeria actually over the past year. We're just pushing now into Northern Nigeria. We've expanded to give you like some tangible examples, a few months back, we opened the route to Sokoto on Northwest and to Maiduguri on Northeast, which are very big cities that were not reached by Jumia in the past. So, this is adding to our addressable market. We have big plans to further expand in countries like, well, Nigeria, obviously, into the North with our local partners. Kenya, Ghana, but also Egypt in the coming year. So sorry, it's hard for me to provide you hard facts and concrete numbers here. But I think the message is just we're just halfway through, right? There's still a lot we can do to cover million more -- many, many millions of additional customers.

Great color. My last question is actually on your advertising opportunities. It seems like your penetration is still very low. Also, I think for the quarter, specifically, if I'm not mistaken, it seems to be on the softer side. So, I know there's probably a quarterly factor, if you can define it. And more importantly, can you help us to think about your advertising monetization opportunity? I don't know like for mid-, long-term without box down to the specific guidance. How should we think about and how you're going to shape your advertising monetization on the strategic side?

Yes, of course. So, on the advertising revenue, so yes, as you mentioned, we're still around 1% of GMV, which is low. I mean, by any standard, it's low for an e-commerce platform. Year-over-year, I mean, the numbers in Q3 are not very strong because Q3 is not a very strong quarter in terms of commercial activity and marketing activity. Typically, brands will focus their investment on Black Friday and the Jumia anniversary that happened in June this year. So, it's not the best quarter usually for advertising. We also see that year-over-year, some brands have been a lot tougher on their budgets. We see that with the bad economic situation in '24, a lot of big spenders have rationalized their budgets in Africa in '25. But I mean, that's to explain the current situation in the past.

But looking ahead, we believe we have quite an important runway for growth here. If we look at other platforms in emerging markets, I think the right benchmark should be around 2% of GMV rather than 1%. So that gives us a target. And we're looking to reach that target with a few priorities. So, the main priority is on retail advertising, so selling basically performance advertising to medium-sized and smaller sellers, the local marketplace as well as our Chinese seller base. We see great upside from our international sellers. So, they -- I mean they're already well-accustomed, well-used to these tools from other platforms that they're using like Amazon, eBay and so on. So, they're usually pretty strong tenders on those sponsored ads. So, we're quite confident that we'll be able to deliver much bigger volumes -- much bigger returns, sorry, on retail advertising.

And we're, of course, working with key African brands and international brands to negotiate better budgets for the year of '26. And in this regard, of course, I mean, for both segments of the advertising spend, the big driver is scale, right? The bigger -- the more scale you get, the bigger you get, the more you're able to get from your vendors on performance advertising because there's more competition in the marketplace, and it's more important for them to show at the top of the page. And it's also making us a lot more relevant for big brands and big importers and enabling us to negotiate a better rate, a better take rate on advertising contributions. So, in short, we're confident that we can scale this revenue line, driven by better tools that we've rolled out recently, strong execution and scale from our core business.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. This will also conclude today's call. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and we thank you for your participation.