Jumia Technologies AG

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Jumia's results conference call for the second quarter of 2020. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. Please note, the conference is being recorded. If you require operator assistance, please press star then zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Safa Damir, Head of Investor Relations for Jumia. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our second quarter 2020 earnings call. With us today are Sacha Poignonek and Jérémy Odara, co-founders and co-CEOs of Jumia, as well as Antoine Maillet-Nezret, CFO. This call is also being webcast on the IR section of our corporate website. We will 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 recent 20F filing. 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 Sachin.

Thank you very much. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. I hope that you are all staying safe and well. We're pleased to share with you today results that I think demonstrate meaningful progress on our path to profitability. And before diving into the details, we would like to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of all our employees, all our logistic partners, all our sellers, restaurants, J-Force agents who have been collaborating together in order to keep serving consumers in these very unique and turbulent times. And we are very thankful and we thank them all for this. Our mission of providing consumers with access to goods and services, helping sellers and SMEs reach consumers and grow, while making a positive impact on the African continent, has never been more relevant. We explained during our Q1 results all the actions that we have been taking to adapt our operating model, of course, including social distancing, contactless delivery, work from home, and many others. as well as all the actions that we have been taking in order to support the communities. For example, introducing price control mechanisms on essential goods, supporting the delivery associates throughout the Junior Heroes program and many others. It goes without saying that we will continue to carry on with all those initiatives as long as the situation remains, and we're very happy to take questions on all this at the end of the call. Now let's talk about the results and I am now on page three of the presentation. We will start today with the bottom line since it's been a big part of our focus lately and also something that we all wanted to see. I think in Q2 we made great progress on our path to profitability. We had set for ourselves a strong objective to deliver a clear trend in reducing our loss in absolute terms. In Q1, we achieved the 10% reduction year over year of the adjusted EBITDA. In Q2, adjusted EBITDA was 33 million, a loss of 33 million. This is the best level in absolute terms of the past six quarters. You may also have noticed in our press release that we have successfully entered into an agreement concerning the settlement of all ongoing class actions, which is also good news. And without the one-off expense related to this, the adjusted EBITDA loss would have been $29 million, meaning a 34% reduction year-over-year. We are very happy about is that this improvement is driven by strong fundamentals. And those fundamentals are growth of the usage of Jumia, orders and consumers, improved unit economics, strong discipline on costs, both on marketing and GNA. One very good way to see this is through the evolution of our unit economics, which you can see on page four. Our strategy to increase the focus on what we call the everyday categories, gradually monetize the marketplace while driving cost savings is really yielding very good results. We are now generating almost one euro per order of gross profit after fulfillment. And in fact, we are almost break even after sales and advertising. With the business mix rebalancing, that we initiated last year, we are shifting more business towards categories like beauty, fashion, or fast moving consumer goods, which have higher commission rates and are less promotionally intensive than categories like phones and electronics. In parallel, our monetization keeps improving as we roll out new revenue streams, our fulfillment efficiency keeps improving as we continuously roll out new projects, new technology features, as we increase the volumes as well. And you can see these dynamics playing in the average order value, which is now €34, and in the gross profit after fulfillment, which, like I said, is now €0.9 per order in Q2. If you continue going down, the marketing efficiency has never been as good during the quarter. On the one hand, we have been very cautious in our investments, given the level of uncertainty, as well as some of the disruptions in the operations that we faced in Nigeria, South Africa, food delivery, and we had mentioned those in Q1. But most importantly, we are able to meaningfully reduce our sales and advertising expense today because we have spent eight years building one of the strongest brands in Africa. A good example of that is Jumia was featured in the top 10 of the 100 most admired brands in Africa in May. according to the ranking of Brand Africa. And that is just one example and something which makes us very confident for the future. Finally, our tech and G&E keeps improving too, thanks to our cost discipline, but also all the restructuring actions that we had initiated last year and are now starting to pay off. So overall, very pleased with the evolution of the unique economics and the adjusted EBDA trajectory. And what makes us very confident about the future is that those improvements are not caused by a sudden surge or a spike in volume during the quarter. Instead, they're really driven by improving the underlying drivers of the P&L. And that, I think, is very important to note. If we turn to page five, we thought it was very important to comment on the measures taken by the governments so far as part of the COVID response in order to understand the behavior of consumers, in particular towards e-commerce. So far, what we've seen is that in most countries of our footprint, they did not implement broad nationwide lockdowns like the ones we have seen in most Western countries. In fact, only four countries imposed nationwide lockdowns. And these countries represent about 24% of our addressable market. Everywhere else, confinement measures consisted in either localized lockdowns or partial movement restrictions like curfews during evening hours. This is very important consideration to keep in mind because localized lockdowns, partial curfews led to less drastic changes in consumer lifestyles and behavior. In other words, in those countries, we have not seen a surge in demand. In terms of supply disruption, certain parts of our business, as you know from our Q1 release, were strongly impacted, mostly Nigeria, South Africa, food delivery, as well as the cross-border marketplace. We've been gradually returning to a relatively normal course of business over the course of the quarter. So once again, As you read the Q2 results, you have to keep this in mind and appreciate that our progress on the path to profitability, in particular, our record gross profit after fulfillment is driven by strong fundamentals rather than a surge in volumes. And it's taking place also despite some significant disruption in some countries. Where we continue to see positive impact is with the sellers and big brands in particular. and how they look at e-commerce if you please turn to page six we have seen both small sellers and large brands turn to e-commerce as a important route to market on the brand side in particular we have been deepening our partnerships with many brands and many brands are now putting in place dedicated commercial and marketing strategies for e-commerce in africa we've had very strong engagement from those as part of our Jumia anniversary. And more than 100 brands across many sectors joined us for the event. We're very encouraged, of course, by this momentum because more sellers means more choice, means better prices for the consumers. And it, of course, validates Jumia as the platform of choice to reach consumers online in Africa. With this, let me now hand over the call to Jeremy, who will give you more details on the Q2 performance.

Thank you, Sacha. Hello, everyone. We're now on the page seven. So our focus during the second quarter of 2020 was very much on the financial discipline and on making progress on our path to profitability. The usage on the platform was resilient, with annual active consumers reaching 6.8 million and orders up 8% on a year-over-year basis, while we reduced our sales and advertising expense by more than 50% in parallel on a year-over-year basis. The JumiaPay TPV more than doubled, growing by 106% year-over-year, while the JumiaPay transactions increased by 36%. We also made meaningful progress on the monetization front with our gross profit increasing by 38% year-over-year and the gross profit after the fulfillment expense reaching a record 6 million. On the cost efficiency front, we reduced our adjusted EBITDA loss by 26% year-over-year. Excluding the net settlement expense, we would have reduced our adjusted EBITDA loss by 34%. And we also reduced our operating loss by 44% over the same period, showing the meaningful progress on our past profitability. So overall, we are seeing very good progress across the four pillars of our strategy. And we're now going to look at the dynamics of the usage on page nine. So page nine, what we can see is the fundamental strength of the Trumia brand and the demand it drives made it possible for us to maintain usage with record levels of marketing efficiency. with 51% lower sales and advertising expense. The GMV was lower by 13% compared to Q2 2019. Here, I'd like to point out that the effects of the business mix rebalancing initiated at the end of 2019 continue to play out during Q2 2020 affecting the GMV trajectory. To support our path to profitability and the long-term usage on our platform, we have deliberately reduced the emphasis on lower consumer lifetime value business while driving the growth of the everyday product categories. These categories typically yield lower basket size than the purchase of high ticket items like mobile phone or electronic device. And you know, this proved to be a very good move given the focus of consumers on those categories as a result of the COVID situation. Turning to the annual active consumers, we increased the annual active consumer by 40% on a year-over-year basis reaching 6.8 million of consumers at the end of Q2 2020, while reducing the annual sales and advertising expense per annual active consumer by 38%. The orders increased by 8% year over year, while we spent 1.1 euro of sales and advertising per order, which is 55% less than Q2 2019. Throughout the second quarter of 2020, we have been continuously adjusting our sales and advertising expense as we experienced a resilient demand in phase three of the reducing marketing expense. I will also point out that we faced meaningful disruptions in Nigeria, South Africa, and in our food delivery business, which was also affected by restaurant shutdown for part of Q2 2020. All three businesses gradually went back to normal levels through Q2, but did not contribute, of course, to their normal shares overall. Turning to page 10, In the early days of Jumia, the mobile phone and the electronics used to be the main e-commerce entry point for consumers. These categories and products are typically highly price-sensitive and purchase that drive consumers to do extensive product research and price benchmark, which naturally takes them online. As we increased the breadth of product categories and the assortment on our platform, we're able to serve consumers across a broader spectrum of their needs. This is evident by the evolution of our category mix, with phone and electronics decreasing from 59% of our GMV in Q2 2019 to 43% in Q2 2020. This is a natural evolution of consumer behavior that we have supported and accelerated to a certain extent as we are able to extract better unit economics out of these categories. While everyday products tend to be lower average value items, leading to 20% reduction in the average order value on a year-over-year basis, they also tend to be more profitable. The gross profit after fulfillment expense per order reached $0.90 compared to a $0.10 loss in Q2 2019. And as Sacha mentioned earlier, we are also very close to breakeven on a per-order basis after fulfillment and sales and advertising expense. This rebalancing, which was in the making for a few years, further increased our relevance in light of the COVID-19 situation. Over the past few months, demand was particularly strong across essential and everyday product categories. Our fastest growing category with triple-digit growth rate in both GMV and volume terms was the beauty and personal care category, supported by the sale of hygiene products. FMCG also experienced strong momentum as consumers turned to Jumia for the purchase of essential products. We are pleased to see that Jumia is today a household name with strong relevance as part of the everyday life of consumers in Africa. To conclude on the usage dynamics, we are driving usage at record levels of marketing efficiency thanks to the strength of the Jumia brand as well as the relevance of our offering. Our aim is to anticipate and meet the evolving needs of our consumers in a way that makes economic sense for us. That's what led to the increased focus on everyday products, which are driving a meaningful step up in our unit economics. Let's now move to another key focus area for us, which is JumiaPay page 12. We are very pleased with the continuous adoption and the momentum of JumiaPay on our platform. The TPV accelerated by 106% from €26 million in Q2 2019, to an all-time high of 53.6 million euros in Q2 2020, surpassing the record set during the fourth quarter of 2019 of 45.6 million. On-platform penetration of JumiaPay as a percentage of GMB increased to 23.5% in the second quarter of 2020, 2.4 times the level of penetration in the second quarter of 2019 of 9.9%. On page 13, JumiaPay transactions increased by 36%, from 1.8 million in Q2 2019 to 2.4 million in Q2 2020. We are pleased to see people starting to use JumiaPay beyond microtransactions, such as airtime and utility bill payments, and more and more prepayments taking place on our physical goods and JumiaFood on-demand platforms. Transactions of an average value above €10 including prepaid purchases on the Jumia physical goods marketplace and Jumia food platform are enjoying triple digit growth of transactions. Overall, 35.6% of orders placed on Jumia in Q2 2020 were paid for using Jumia Pay compared to 28.3% in Q2 2019. With that, I will now hand over to Antoine who will walk you through our financial performance update starting on page 15.

Thank you, Jeremy. Hello, everyone. We are pleased with the progress on monetization in Q2 2020, as this is an essential component of our financial strategy and path to profitability. In the context of an 8% year-over-year growth in orders, both marketplace revenue and gross profit posted 38% growth over the same period. As we grow the usage of Jumia, we seek to gradually monetize this usage through diversified revenue streams that absorb a growing share of our cost base. Taking a closer look at our various marketplace revenue streams on slide 16, Commissions increased by 68% year-over-year despite the decrease in GMV as a result of an increased proportion in the mix of higher commission rate categories such as beauty, FMCG, et cetera. Marketing and advertising continues to experience robust momentum, posting 50% growth as advertisers shift an increasing share of their spend from offline to online, favoring direct response formats. Fulfillment, which comprises delivery fees charged to consumers, increased by 34% on a year-over-year basis, far outpacing orders growth. This was partly attributable to the continuous optimization of our shipping metrics that allows for a more efficient pass-through of our fulfillment expense to both consumers and sellers. Value-added services posted 6% year-over-year growth, largely in line with orders growth. In Q2 2020, value-added services was negatively impacted by a decline in cross-border volumes, driven by cargo disruption, which led to lower international logistics revenue received from overseas sellers. Moving on to cost efficiencies, page 18. One of the key highlights of the quarter was the gross profit after fulfillment expense, reaching a record level of 6 million euros compared to a loss of 0.7 million in Q2 2019, demonstrating continued progress on our path to profitability. The growth in gross profit, alongside a reduction in the absolute amount of fulfillment expense, drove this performance. Fulfillment expense decreased by 2% in Q2 2020 on a year-over-year basis, while orders increased by 8% over the same period. A number of operational improvements drove fulfillment expense efficiencies, including a change in the volume pricing model from a cost per successfully delivered package to a cost per successfully stopped. our third-party logistics partners are now paid per successful stop at customer address, regardless of the number of packages included in the delivery. If we are able to generate such efficiencies today, it is partly because we have spent many years building a NASA-applied and scalable logistics platform that allows us to constantly adjust and improve our pricing models as we gain scale. Another contributing factor to the fulfillment expense reduction in Q2 2020 was a change in our mix of packages with reduced proportion of cross-border packages and packages shipped outside primary cities. Moving on to sales and advertising expense and now on slide 19. Sales and advertising expense decreased by 51% from 14.9 million euros in Q2 2019 to 7.2 million in Q2 2020, its lowest level in more than three years. We are driving record levels of marketing efficiency across all relevant metrics. Sales and advertising expense per order decreased by 55% from 2.4 euro in Q2 2019 to 1.1 in Q2 2020. Annual sales and advertising expense per annual active consumer reduced by 38% from 10.8 euros per annual active consumer to 6.7. And sales and advertising as a percentage of GMV decreased by 249 basis points from 5.7% to 3.2%. These efficiencies are made possible by the strength of our brand and resilience of demand on our platforms. We also continue to make enhancements to our performance marketing strategy across search and social media channels, notably through more granular segmentation of our target market with differentiated campaigns and content for each segment. Finally, our third major cost area is technology and GA&A. And now on slide 20. Our technology and content expense increased by 5% compared to Q2 2019 as we continue to invest in our tech infrastructure. G&A expense excluding share-based compensation and the settlement expense from the class actions settlement reached 24 million euros, down 2% both on a year-over-year basis compared to Q2 2019 and on a sequential basis compared to Q1 2020. The decrease was mostly attributable to the cost rationalization initiatives undertaken starting from the end of 2019. Moving on to page 21 on balance sheet, our path to profitability is further supported by our asset-like business model. CAPEX in Q2 2020 was less than half a million euros as we operate Jumia Logistics as a platform with very limited CAPEX requirements. Net change in working capital resulted in an inflow of 13 million euros. We consider a positive working capital effect of this scale to be one-off in nature. While we have meaningfully improved working capital management over the years, the unusually large working capital inflow was supported by a longer payable cycle and reduced suppliers' prepayments. As a result, cash utilization reached 16.8 million euros taking our cash position at the end of June 30, 2020 to 174 million euros. Assuming a neutral working capital effect, cash utilization from the quarter would have been around 30 million euros, which is still a very good performance if we compare it to the quarterly cash utilization of the past 18 months. It is a saving of more than 10 million euros. The 3.6 Million euros net settlement expense for the class actions will likely be disbursed early Q4 2020. You may have noticed that we made a shelf filing on July 22nd, which went effective on July 30th, allowing us to issue up to 18 million ADS over the course of the next three years. This is a matter of good corporate housekeeping to allow us to take advantage of opportunities in the market to raise capital in the future. With that, I end the call back over to Sacha.

Thank you very much. And before we go into Q&A, three remarks to conclude the call. First remark, I think that looking at Q2 results and also if you look at H1 2020 we've made, A lot of important choices last year, and these choices are starting to pay off. The focus on everyday categories is making us very relevant, very efficient with marketing, and also more profitable. We launched Jumia Mall last year. It's proving to be very relevant today for sellers and brands. Exiting countries and categories, I mean, notably the travel business, And if you look at Q2 or H1, despite not seeing any surge overall in demand from COVID, we are delivering very good results across the board, and that makes us very confident for H2 and beyond. Second remark, I want to clarify our priorities for the quarters to come, as well as how we are driving the execution. On the usage of Jumia, our priority is to continue to grow while driving efficiency improvements. We think that we are very well positioned in terms of categories, and we're going to continue to focus on those everyday categories. We're going to continue to drive adoption of Jumia by new users and retention of existing users. Sometimes people tend to oppose growth and profitability. For us, they somehow go together. And we look at the usage of Jumia with multiple lenses, DMV, active consumers and holders. Over time, we want to see all metrics going up, even if in some quarters, one metric or the other is going down or the growth is higher or lower. But over time, we want to see those going up. On JumiaPay, our main priority today is to gradually increase penetration within our platform. You've seen that Jumia Pay transactions accounted for 36% of holders in H1, almost 10 points more than H1 last year. We still see, of course, cash on delivery as a key part of our value proposition going forward, but we aim to drive the on-platform penetration gradually. And we also want, in the months to come, to start expanding our payment and fintech solutions of platforms. On the path to profitability, we will continue to focus on gradual increased monetization as well as cost efficiency. I think the key term here is gradual. When you are a marketplace, we think that it's very important to maintain strong attractiveness to the participants and to drive monetization together with increased volumes and business. As we enter what looks like a severe economic crisis across the world, it will become increasingly important for us to offer the best prices and value to the consumers and the sellers. So we need to be very careful with our pricing. Last but not least, we are starting to monetize our platform with third parties. Some of you have picked up that we are opening up our logistics to third party customers, that we are opening up also a Jumia advertising platform to non-sellers. And we will gradually see more of that in the future. And third and last remark, to conclude the call, we want to reiterate that we are still at the very beginning of e-commerce in Africa. In the recent months, pretty much everywhere in the world, we have seen how relevant e-commerce, payment, technology are to people, businesses, and governments. In Africa, we are still in the early days of this journey. with less than 1% penetration of e-commerce. And we certainly see a huge opportunity ahead of us. We have built a very efficient, very scalable platform for the years and decades to come. We operate an asset-light marketplace, very relevant food delivery service, a unique logistic platform, JumiaPay, which we think has the potential to become the leading payment system on the continent. And we really believe there's a lot of potential ahead for Jumia. and that we are very well positioned. Thank you again for attending the call and your attention, and we are now ready to open up the call for Q&A.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from Mark Mahaffey of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Okay, thanks. If I could throw in three questions, please. Is it a reasonable expectation that gross profit after fulfillment can continue to rise? Do you have enough structural improvements and is the mix shift, do you have enough visibility into the revenue mix shift that that's a probability that gross profit after fulfillment can continue to rise? Secondly, you on that slide six, you list a series of a large number of pretty large brands. Other brands that are missing, I'm sure there are some, but are there a couple of key brands that you would really like to bring in that you think could really move the needle for Jumia? And then finally, Could you talk about if there's been a change in your customer acquisition channel strategy? Are you finding part of that advertising efficiency? Is it driven by the fact that you found more efficient advertising channels than you had discovered in the past, and what are those? Thank you very much.

Thanks, Mark. Very good questions, as always. Um, I think on the first one and the gross profit after fulfillment, the answer is yes, definitely. Right. And, um, and here to give you some color, of course, the gross profit after fulfillment is the sum of our revenues minus the fulfillment expense. If you look at our monetization stream and their level of maturity, you can see how much potential we are still you know, seeing ahead of us both for the existing monetization stream as well as new ones. If you look at, for example, marketing and advertising, we've barely started, right? Many marketplaces around the world are very advanced here. And for us, this is something that we started a year ago and we are seeing a lot of good traction and we are just at the very early days of that. We have also been talking in the past about Jumia Express, which we have barely started to monetize and you know many more with our existing sellers then there is all the monetization from the new revenue streams which today we are not doing yet at all and here i'm talking about monetization of jumia pay as a payment platform monetization of jumia logistics as a third-party you know logistic platform and as well as um yeah no i think we can we can cite those two for now and this is not even yet today in our pnl so we see a lot of upside in revenue then in terms of fulfillment expense i think here we have consistently seen you know improvements quarter over quarter based on a number of drivers of course one is the increase of volume because the more volume we have the more partners we are able to to use and the more competition between them and the more scale they get. So it's really a volume gain. And then a lot of operational improvements. In the press release, we gave you two examples of projects that we did during this quarter, but there are many others. For example, one of the projects was around the fact that we changed the cost model with the partners and we were, before the project, paying them per package that we build and now we're paying them per stock. This is one example, but there's a lot of initiatives, both technology driven, but also just scale and efficiency and operational excellence to reduce the fulfillment expense per order. So certainly very confident about that. In terms of brands, not really. There are so many brands that are looking today at Africa and they're looking for ways to enter the continent. In the past, for a brand to enter a new emerging market, the brand needed to think about finding a distributor, establishing local presence, building marketing campaigns, multi-million dollars marketing campaigns to build the brand and build a local presence. Our goal with the cross-border marketplace and with the marketplace in general is to really provide an efficient route to market for all the brands which are not present in Africa to start serving the consumers and building their presence. So, you know, it's not like there's one name that comes to my mind where it would be a game changer because the consumers, you know, they have alternatives for many things, but certainly the more we bring, the better. But there's not like one particular game changer that comes to mind. And in terms of consumer acquisition, it's been, you know, the marketing efficiency has been driven by rather a lot of discipline and improvements across the board, rather than one particular channel which, you know, which showed different efficiency or a surge in efficiency improvement, rather across the board, the hard work of the Jumia teams and the Jumia data and technology to just optimize all our online channels as well as leverage the offline channels that we use like J-Force, telesales and all those. So it's really across the board more general improvement and efficiency than anything else. Yeah, and that also makes us confident because all those improvements, they're not relating to one particular change, but rather, like, across-the-board improvements.

Okay. Thank you very much.

The next question comes from Aaron Kessler of Remington. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks a lot. A couple questions. First, just any further details, maybe GMV growth by category, the electronics versus kind of other split, but just any more details on some of the trends you're seeing there. Also, maybe on the commission rates, it looked like it was mostly maybe a change of mix that drove the higher kind of commission dollars. Was there also any change of commission kind of rates in absolute as well? And maybe just how much room do you think there is to increase kind of commission rates longer term as well? Thank you.

Yeah, very good questions. At this stage, we'll have to – Kind of stick to page 10, where we provided the breakdown by category for Q2 2019 and 20, where you can see that the share of the fashion, beauty and 10CG has grown to 57% from 41%. And certainly those have been the ones growing the fastest, both in volume and value. and and we'll try to provide more color or more breakdown and you know as the quarters keep keep developing in terms of commission it's a very important question and something that we very often discuss a lot also internally and we are in the view of the view that as a marketplace it's very important to be attractive to the sellers And, you know, in our history, every now and then we went on and increased commissions. And most of the time when we did that, the sellers were completely fine with it. But some of those sellers were just re impacting their selling prices, you know, with the commission increase impact and they were accepting completely the increase, but essentially we're changing the price of the product they were selling on Jumia. And that is not really the direction we want to go, especially now with the economic crisis that we think is likely to unfold. We want to make sure that we are able to be very competitive for the sellers so that the sellers can offer very low prices. And part of our monetization strategy is to drive revenue streams, which are both outside commission right so if you remember two years ago we were almost only commissioned and we started to introduce more streams so that we didn't have to raise those commissions but instead we're selling more services to the sellers and secondly also leverage our platform to generate revenues from third parties and as we are able to monetize jumia pay or junior logistics in the future we may decide to actually reduce the commissions And by doing that, we think that our marketplace is gonna be even more competitive. So again, here, it doesn't mean that every now and then we don't increase commission on a given category, we try to find the right balance, but certainly it's not something that we want to drive brutally or in general, we see more value long-term in reducing commission than increasing commission, even though on the face of it, we have the power to do that.

Got it. Great. And just quickly on the Jumia Pay transactions, it looked like that was up nicely year over year, but more flattish sequentially. Is there any type of maybe near-term ceiling on Jumia Pay transactions? Maybe just give more penetration in certain of your markets and you need to open up more to get that penetration higher? Or was that just maybe just not a linear growth there?

Yeah. Yeah, I think on this, you know, the penetration of JumiaPay is a function of the penetration of JumiaPay both for the countries where it operates, but also the different platforms. We have JumiaFood for the food delivery and the Jumia e-commerce, and we have the JumiaPay app with the digital transactions. So I think, you know, it's a function of all this. And certainly here, we've been very clear also that It's not our goal to be 100% Jumia Pay in the short term or even in the midterm, right? We think that our success with Jumia Pay and with Jumia in general has been to also recognize that cash on delivery is key and is very important. So we certainly want to maximize the penetration of Jumia Pay, but we, in a way, want to go with the market and drive the adoption efficiently. And, you know, right now we are at 36% overall as a group of transactions, And it's 10 points more than a year ago. You know, there are many countries where we still don't operate Junia Pay and still many consumers who don't want to transact online. And we just want to recognize that. So we're pretty comfortable with the level where we are now. We think it's going to continue. Where will it plateau or where will it be in two years? You know, we'll see. Certainly, it's been going up and up. At some point, we're not solving for 100%, but we know that in Nigeria and Egypt, we're well above 50%, right? And we've published that in the past. So, you know, we feel pretty confident that maybe two-thirds of the transaction, you know, in the midterm would be on Juniapay. I'm talking maybe, you know, 18 months from now or two years from now, because this is what we have seen in Nigeria two years after the launch. So that's how you have to look at it, I think, Aaron.

Got it. Great. Thank you.

The next question comes from Ralph Sheckart of William Blair. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. Two questions, if I could, please. I jumped on the call late, so I apologize if we touched on this, but maybe if you could share some perspective given the dynamics of the pandemic, how the business has trended post-quarter, any color, perhaps on fulfillment expense initiative, you know, further progress there, customer additions. And then you could add, be helpful. Then maybe Sasha, just, you know, kind of taking a step back. I know you called it out in the prepared remarks in the letter about being able to emerge from the crisis stronger. Just curious, you know, your perspective on the business going forward, you know, with the unfortunate events of the pandemic, but, you know, how the business may strengthen going forward as a result. Thank you.

Thanks, Ralph. I think the situation has been – pretty stable from a business perspective in relation to the pandemic for the last two months. We had seen in April a mix of quite strong disruptions in some markets and some parts of the business, right? And we had published that. And some countries, especially those where there was like a real lockdown, were seeing a bit of a surge in volume. And then throughout the quarter, throughout Q2 and also in July, things went back to normal pretty much everywhere, right? When I mean normal, I mean the same level of business that we had before the beginning of the crisis. Of course, there's a lot of question marks around what will the countries do in terms of back to school and so on and so forth. So there's a lot of insolvency about it, but From a Jumia business perspective, things went, we can say, back to normal sometime during Q2. And since then, it's been pretty steady with no significant disruptions and no significant surge. So, you know, I would say normal business. What makes us feel good, and I think I was listening to Jeremy and Antoine, and I was hearing a lot of words, please, please, and, you know, is really that I think if you consider the improvement of the P&L across the board, and you put it in relation with the growth of the business of 8% of the holders, it does mean that the improvement is driven by fundamental actions on the key drivers of the P&L, right? And that for us makes us very confident in a way because it's not, we're not able to deliver this gross profit after fulfillment, which is like by far our record because we had seen like a big surge and, you know, no, it's happening because we're doing the hard work on monetization, cost efficiency, restructuring, sales and advertising and all that. And I think that, you know, We made a lot of choices, like I said last year, and some of them were not easy, closing countries, exiting travel, doing the rebalancing and so on. In a way, we entered the crisis already with all those actions well executed or almost done. And for that, we've been in a way lucky to make those decisions ahead of what has come because no one could have predicted this crisis. And now we are very agile and very nimble. So in a way, it's something that is positive for the development of Junia that we made those decisions back then.

Great. That's helpful. Thank you, Sasser.

Great.

Any more questions? No. This concludes both our question and answer session and Jumia's second quarter 2020 conference call. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Thank you all. Stay safe and take care.

Bye-bye. Once again, the conference has ended. You may disconnect your line. Thank you.