Jumia Technologies AG

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Jumia's results conference call for the third 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. And I'd like to turn the call over to Saifat Damir, Head of Investor Relations for Jumia. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our third quarter 2020 earnings call. With us today are Sacha Pranonek, co-founder and co-CEO of Junia, and Antoine Maillé-Mébré, 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 20S filings. 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 Sacha.

Thank you very much. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. I hope that you are all staying safe and well. About a year ago, we took several decisive actions in order to accelerate our path to profitability and strengthen our foundation for long-term success. Those were not easy decisions to take and to implement, but they are now starting to pay off. And this, despite the very volatile environment in Africa where COVID-19 has rather been a headwind for us so far. Today, we bring results which show that we are very well positioned and that our path to profitability is becoming clearer and clearer. I want to thank all our teams, all our partners for their discipline, their dedication and hard work. We are immensely grateful for their continued support. Together, we are on a great mission to make e-commerce successful in Africa, as was the case elsewhere in the world. and drive positive impact in the process. Let's turn to page three. We have been very consistent in the strategy outlined to the market. Now, I appreciate this may sound a little bit repetitive to some of you, but I think it's very important to reiterate that the strategy remains unchanged. It's a balance of four pillars, growing the usage of our platform, driving the penetration and development of JumiaPay, gradual monetization, and cost efficiency. Obviously, those four pillars are linked to each other and to some extent conflicting with each other. And we manage this equation on a dynamic basis, placing more or less emphasis on each pillar as we progress. Everything we do is geared towards building a very strong platform with a very strong foundation to create long-term value. If we take a look at some of the key actions, and I'm now on page four, some of the key actions that we took about a year ago and how they position us for the years ahead. First, we have initiated in late 2019 a business mix rebalancing. In order to place more focus on everyday product category, drive higher consumer lifetime value, and to support margins. The result of this action is we have increased the diversity of our product mix category. We have reduced reliance on phones and electronics, which went from 56% to 43% of GMV in Q3. And we have gained more than 500 basis points of gross profit. Our gross profit was 7.3% of GMV in Q3 last year. Now it's 12.4%. Secondly, we have made significant progress in terms of operational efficiency and we have generated very substantial cost savings. We reduced fulfillment expense by 20% year over year. We reduced sales and advertising expense by 55% year over year as we drove improvement in terms of programmatic marketing and we leveraged the strength of the Jumia brand. And last, One of the key initiatives that we undertook last year was the portfolio optimization initiative where we wanted to enhance our business focus and capital allocation. We took the decision to exit three geographies. We took the decision to exit the flight and hotel booking vertical. We streamlined our organizational structure. We implemented overhead rationalization. And this is now paying off as our G&A are down 24% year-over-year in Q3. Combined, these initiatives, we think, have really enhanced the fundamentals of the business and setting strong foundations for the long-term and for the long-term profitable growth of Jumia. If we turn to page 5, we've been repeating also in the past that the path to profitability is including milestones. And whenever we reach one of those milestones, we bring it forward. And today, we are very pleased to share with you a new milestone. In Q3 2020, for the very first time ever, we reached breakeven before GNA cost at group level. And I will add that the majority of countries of our portfolio were breakeven at this level in the third quarter of 2020. Now, this is Obviously, good news. And as you know, and I will detail that, this is not driven by a surge in volume. This improvement is driven by improving our unit economics and working on the fundamental drivers of the P&L. Those drivers and the fundamentals of the unit economics, you can see them on page 6. We are now making, this is the third line before last, we are now making 10 cents of profit before GNA on a per-order basis. A year ago, we were losing 2.2 euros per order. On average, each order costed us 53% less sales and advertising to generate, drove 29% more gross profit, and was 15% cheaper to fulfill. if we compare the two quarters, and all this without any surge of volume, all driven by underlying improvements of fundamentals and efficiency. I think this positions us very well for the future. A year ago, our losses were getting wider as we were growing, and today, the more we grow, the more profitable we become. And not only do we expect these unit economics to continue to improve as we drive effective monetization, cost efficiencies, but we now know that growth means profitability. And the result of all those improvements on page seven is our path to profitability. A year ago, once again, we said very clearly that our objective was to reduce our loss in absolute terms. And I think it's very clear that we are delivering strongly against that objective. We reduced our adjusted EBITDA loss by 10% in Q1 year-over-year, 26% in Q2, and by 50% in Q3. All this achieved thanks to structural enhancements to our business rather than support from external factors. As you know from the previous release, COVID-19... provided limited to no tailwind to the business. And in a number of respects, actually, it's rather a headwind from a P&L perspective. You have on page eight an update on the COVID to remind you that across most countries of our footprint, governments opted for partial movement restrictions or localized lockdowns rather than nationwide or all-encompassing lockdowns. And this did not lead to any drastic changes in consumer behavior on our platform or any meaningful acceleration in consumer adoption of e-commerce at Pan-African level. Instead, COVID rather drove localized supply chain and logistics disruptions And there was still significant disruption with restaurants in the third quarter of 2020. Obviously, we don't know the future development of the virus and its impact in the future, but we expect it to drive continued uncertainty on our operating environment. We also expect the macro challenges it has created to weigh on consumer sentiments. We believe that all the actions that we took a year ago and that I just detailed and the current strategy have actually enhanced our resilience and positioned us very well for long-term whatever happens. Let's now deep dive in more details on the Q3 performance, and we will start with the trends on usage. We are now on page 10. As we have just said, look at the usage dynamics in the context of efficiency and monetization. One of the major drivers of usage is, of course, the marketing investment. We have built over the last eight years one of the strongest brands in Africa, and this now makes it possible for us to drive usage with record level of marketing efficiency. We reduced sales and advertising expense by 55% year-over-year. A year ago, we were spending about 2 euros of sales and advertising to drive each order. Now, we spent 0.9 euro. That's an improvement of 53%. If we take the 12-month perspective, we spent 5.6 euro per active consumers. A year ago, this number was almost 10 euros. So, that's an improvement of 43%. Now, in terms of usage metrics at group level, TMV was down 28%. down 5%, and active consumers grew by 23%. Those evolutions obviously have to be put in perspective with the actions we are taking, and in particular, the business mix rebalancing. Let's turn to page 11 to review those usage dynamics in a bit more detail. First, we are making significant progress on the rate of cancellations, failed deliveries, and return, the ratio that we call If you look at this ratio as a percentage of GMV, it decreased from 31% to 23% in Q3 2020. If you look at it on an older basis, it came from 23% to 14%. And typically, this ratio tends to be lower for olders as the higher average item value tend to show higher cancellation rates or CFDR rates. There can be always quarterly fluctuations obviously in this ratio, but as we drive more operational efficiency, as we drive more penetration of JumiaPay, we are able to drive improvements in this ratio. And it's a very good news for us because it means that a higher proportion of the usage that we generate on the platform can be monetized and that our marketing investment is more efficient on a net basis. Then secondly, When you look at the trends of GMV and orders after CFDR by category, you can see very strong resilience, particularly in key focus areas. Food delivery is growing by 37% in value, 48% in volume. And this, despite in Q3, still a lot of headwinds from night curfews, which have impacted dinner deliveries. I think we would have grown even faster without those disruptions. Digital services growing by 14% in value as we continue to see faster growth in higher tickets on the JumiaPay app. And holders contracted by 20% as a result of a concentrated decline in airtime reach-out transactions. And these airtime reach-out transactions were reduced as a result of reduced consumer incentives from us within this category because this category tends to be more promotionally intensive. And this is a good example of our disciplined approach regarding consumer lifetime value. Physical goods, which is a big part of our core business. Outside phone and electronics, we were flat in value and growing 15% in volume terms as categories like beauty, fashion, home and living continue to support the volume growth. Phones and electronics, declined by 41% in value and by 8% in volume as the effects of the business mix rebalancing continue to play out over the quarter. So overall, we drive usage as a balancing act between, of course, the marketing efficiency, the profitability gains on the one hand, and the long-term platform relevance and growth on the other hand, as we lean into categories and business that supports consumer lifetime value. We are pleased with the diversity achieved on the marketplace and the meaningful step up in unit economics that you can see on page 12. And here I will go fast because we have to some extent already talked about those numbers. You can see the evolution of the reliance on phones electronics, which has gone from 56 to 45%. And you can see that with that, our average order value has decreased by 24% as the everyday product categories have been gaining share. And you can see our holders are now much more profitable. In Q3 2020, after GNA and sales and advertising, we are now positive, whereas a year ago we were losing more than €2. So again, we're very pleased to achieve this milestone, especially knowing that the trend is quite consistent across our portfolio with the majority of the countries breaking even at that level. The diversification of our mix and assortment always goes hand in hand with the meaningful improvement made on the supply side of the marketplace. And on page 13, you can see how we are reinforcing Jumia's positioning as the destination of choice for brands in Africa. In the Q3 2020 alone, we onboarded over 60 brands on the platform. We hosted the Jumia Brand Festival, over a full week in September, with more than 200 participating brands offering promotions, special promotions, free shipping across product categories. And we had many great brands participating, including L'Oréal, Nivea, Johnson & Johnson, Reckitt, Nestle, Pernod Ricard, Pepsi, Nike, and many more, and participated, of course, across multiple geographies. And to give you a sense of the success and the impact in Egypt during that week, orders grew by more than 70% compared to the prior six-week average with fashion, beauty, and FMCG categories accounting more than 80% of the items sold. So for us, it was a very big success and a lot of brands experiencing triple-digit volumes uplift during the event. This partnership with brands, but also with SME sellers, as well as our cross-border sellers are extremely valuable to us. And as a marketplace, we want to create value, of course, for the consumers, but also for the sellers. And we strive to give to our sellers the best possible experience and to give them a platform to grow and to reach consumers effectively in Africa. and to also provide to those brands an expanding range of services to drive their performance. Our second objective is JumiaPay. On page 15, you can see that the TPV, the total payment volume of JumiaPay increased by 50% and that the on-platform penetration reached 26%. We have doubled our penetration of JumiaPay versus a year ago. On the next slide, page 16, you can see that the transactions of JumiaPay have increased by 6%. And when you look at the growth of the transactions which are above €10 and the growth of the transaction below €10, you can see what I was mentioning before, that we have 90% growth of the transactions above €10 and that the decline is is very concentrated across certain transactions which are concentrated in airtime. You can see also that the penetration on the per-order basis is now at 34% and compared to about 31% a year ago. Jumiate, as a reminder, is live in eight markets, Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Kenya, Tunisia, and Uganda. And Our goal for Jumia Pay is to drive a very gradual expansion across geographies at this stage, but rather to enrich the value proposition of Jumia Pay and deepen its offering. On page 17, you have some more details on that. As you know, Jumia Pay goes beyond digital payment and the checkout function it serves on our platform. It has a dedicated digital services app which is called JumiaPay, and it functions as a marketplace for financial services. On the digital service app, on the JumiaPay app, we offer a broad range of everyday services like bill payments, airtime recharge, ticketing, entertainment, and many more. In Q3, we launched the pilot of JumiaGames on the app across five countries. This is a partnership. And with Mondial, which is a marketing and digital content distribution company, And Jumia Games is a subscription-based service offering unlimited access to over 500 games, including in-app purchase. And this initiative aims at providing consumers with a varied range of digital services, engaging experiences while creating more payment use case for Jumia Pay. On the fintech side, we offer consumers and sellers an expanding range of financial services, Provided by third-party financial institutions, in Q3, we launched the pilot of a prepaid physical and virtual card in Egypt in partnership with MasterCard and Adib, which is a leading bank in the Middle East and North Africa region. Our financial services marketplace helps us drive more financial inclusion, allowing consumers and SMEs to access basic financial service in a convenient and safe manner. I'll now hand over to Antoine, who will walk you through our financial performance, starting on page 19, please. Thank you, Sacha.

Hello, everyone. In parallel with driving usage, we continue to gradually monetize our platform. In the context of a 28% year-over-year GMV contraction in Q3 2020, Marketplace revenue increased by 19% and gross profit by 22% over the same period. As we grow the usage of Junia, 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 20, you'll see that commissions increased by 43% year-over-year due to an increase in the share of higher commission rate categories, including fashion, beauty, or FMTG, as well as lower promotional intensity. Fulfillment revenue increased by 13% as a result of continued shipping fees adjustments, as well as pricing changes within our cross-border logistics. Part of the international shipping fees that were previously charged to sellers were instead passed on to consumers. This change resulted in some of our international logistics revenue to be recorded as fulfillment revenue instead of revenue from value-added services. Value-added services increased by 4% as adjustment to our shipping fees led to an increase in shipping contributions from local sellers. which more than offset the effects of the pricing changes in our cross-border logistics. We managed monetization pressure on our sellers in a very disciplined manner, and during the third quarter of 2020, reduced pressure on the advertising front, leading to a decrease of 2% of this revenue stream, while placing more focus on fulfillment cost pass-through. It is worth noting that we remain in the early stages of our monetization journey. Commissions and fulfillment fees, which are the bread and butter of the marketplace, still account for more than 70% of the marketplace revenue. We intend to further diversify our revenue mix, leveraging multiple monetization avenues, which are largely untapped today. The potential for further monetization is both on the core e-commerce marketplace, but also on the assets that underpin the marketplace, digital payments and logistics in particular. If we look at the core e-commerce marketplace, the first phase of monetization was about enabling transactions, earning commissions, and fulfillment fees in return for facilitating a transaction. We expect to grow these revenue lines as we drive more usage on the platform. But the next phase of e-commerce monetization is about unlocking more growth for our sellers and broader platform participants through value-added services such as training or content creation, through marketing and advertising solutions, and also data analytics for performance analysis and informed business decisions. As we onboard more brands and our base of sellers gains in sophistication, we expect to see growing traction for these services. Payment and logistics have historically been core infrastructure supporting the growth of the marketplace. However, these assets have tremendous growth potential in their own right beyond the scope of the e-commerce marketplace. Jumiaté app digital services and financial services marketplace activities are very much in their early days today. We see tremendous growth potential for commissions earned from these activities, as we grow more usage on the JumiaPay app and broaden our fintech services offering to both sellers and consumers. The core digital payment asset of JumiaPay is not monetized today, as all payments processed today are in relation to Jumia e-commerce transactions. We are working on offering JumiaPay checkout solution to third-party mercants and intent to expand into both digital and offline payments in the future. Last but not least, Junior Logistics supports today's junior e-commerce transactions, and we earn fulfillment per annum essentially to cover our fulfillment expense. We have now launched Logistics as a Service offering, where third-party businesses can access the Junior Logistics platform to help them meet their delivery needs. And I would like to give you more context and color on this initiative. Logistics in Africa are notoriously challenging with multiple hurdles, such as a lack of addresses, a lack of organized and reliable capacity, storage space issues, the predominance of cash on delivery, and so on. With Jumia Logistics, we have built a tech-rich platform uniquely adapted to address these challenges. We leverage a network of over 300 third-party logistics partners that we manage through a proprietary tech stack. Tech allows us to have a full visibility on the journey of the package, manage all fulfillment workflows, and optimize delivery time through volume allocation and smart routing. In parallel, we have an extensive network of elite physical locations including warehousing space in every single country where we operate, and over 1,300 consumer pickup stations and vendor drop-off stations. It is now possible for third-party businesses to access this platform for last-mile delivery services or end-to-end fulfillment services, including warehousing, picking and packing, and last-mile. We are very pleased to offer the services of our logistics platform to solve a major distribution pain point in Africa. We hope this will serve as a catalyst to drive more trade in the countries where we operate, while generating more volumes for the logistics SMEs that form part of our network. Let's now turn to cost on page 24. we have been driving efficiencies across the full cost structure. We are pleased to report yet another quarter this year of record gross profits after fulfillment expense, which reached 6.6 million euros compared to a loss of 1.7 million in Q3 2019. Fulfillment expense, decreased by 20% in Q3 2020 compared to Q3 2019 as a result of operational enhancements across our logistics operations. These included the optimization of our cross-border shipping metrics, staff cost savings in our fulfillment centers, and the change in our delivery pricing model from cost per package to cost per stock. In addition, we are able to pass on an increasing proportion of our fulfillment expense to the combination of consumers and sellers via our fulfillment and value-added services revenue streams, respectively. The pass-through of our fulfillment expense measured at the ratio of fulfillment plus value-added services revenue over fulfillment expense increased for 58% in Q3 2019, up to 79% in Q3 2020. Sales and advertising expense decreased by 55% from 13.8 million in Q3 2019 to 6.2 million in Q3 2020, its lowest level in more than three years. All marketing efficiency metrics are showing strong improvements. Sales and advertising expense per order decreased by 53% from 2 euros in Q3 2019 to 0.9 per order in Q3 2020. Annual sales and advertising expense per annual active consumer decreased by 43% from 9.9 euro per annual active consumer to 5.6. And sales and advertising as a percentage of GMV decreased by almost 200 basis points from 5.3% down to 3.3%. These efficiencies are made possible by the strengths of our brand. They are also attributable to continued enhancements to our performance marketing strategy across search and social media channels, including through more granular segmentation of our target market with differentiated campaigns and contents for each segment. Finally, our third major cost area is technology and DNA. And we are now seeing meaningful improvements here as the rationalization efforts undertaken late last year start paying off. G&A expense, excluding SBC, dropped below 20 million euros for the first time in nine quarters. G&A expense, excluding SBC, reached 19.3 million euros, down 24% year over year. This was partly a result of staff cost reductions and professional fee savings, largely attributable to the portfolio optimization and cost rationalization initiatives undertaken in late 19. Moving on to the balance sheets and cash flow items, our path to profitability is further supported by our asset-like business model. CAPEX in Q3 2020 was less than half a million euros as we operate junior logistics as a platform with very limited CAPEX requirements. Net change in working capital resulted in an inflow of 4 million euros, supported by reduced inventory and shorter receivable cycles. Cash utilization was 27.2 million euros, corresponding to a decrease in cash and cash equivalent of 22.1 million euros, down 52% year-over-year, and a foreign exchange loss of 5.1 million euros on cash held in UAD. The 3.5 million euros net settlement expense for the class actions will likely be disbursed in the course of Q4 2020. You may have noticed that we made a shelf finding earlier this summer, allowing us to issue up to 18 million ADS over the course of the next three years. we are making significant progress towards break-even, which gives us more flexibility in terms of liquidity. That said, we intend to take advantage of opportunities in the market to raise capital in the future, to strengthen our balance sheet, and further increase our flexibility. With that, I end the call back over to Sacha.

Thanks very much. And to conclude, I would like to give you some perspective on how we see the achievement to date and where do we go from here. We opened the call by saying our strategy is a balance of four key pillars and that we manage this on a dynamic basis. I think over the past 12 months, we drove the business in those four pillars with a sharp focus on profitability. And we are, in our opinion, delivering very strongly against that objective. If you look on page 26, comparing our business for the first nine months of 2019 with 2020, I think it's very clear that it's working. We have improved everywhere and pretty significantly. Only GMV is down and this is largely by choice. And as you have seen, there are lots of pockets of growth in our business, both in volume and in value. We now have a business mix, the cost structure and fundamentals to support the long-term profitable growth of Jumia. And once again, this has been achieved without any volume surge or any particular tailwind. So it speaks to the quality of the underlying business and it makes us very confident about our path to profitability. Now, you may ask the question about why we are so focused on profitability right now. And we wanted to remind you why we are so focused on profitability. We think that our business model is proven. The success of companies like MercadoLibre, Alibaba, Amazon, I think there's not really any doubt about that. Secondly, the potential of Africa is huge. There are decades of growth ahead of us to drive the adoption of e-commerce and payments. e-commerce is very relevant in a continent where distribution of goods and services is very challenging for all the sellers in the offline world. So I think on that, there's not really any doubt either. Three, I think over the years, we have proven that we can operationally overcome all the challenges and the challenges like payments, logistics, building a scalable marketplace of consumers and sellers. And so having said all this, the real only remaining point is to make sure that as the business scales, it is profitable. And once this question mark is behind us, we are going to be much more comfortable re-accelerating the growth of the usage because we will know that the business is inherently profitable. And this is why we are so focused right now on this objective because this is pretty much the only question mark remaining. And I think As you have seen in the Q3 results, we are getting closer and closer. And so what to expect? You know, until profitability is no longer a question, we are going to continue to follow the exact same strategy. We're going to continue to bring you milestones as we reach them, and you can expect more of the same choices, meaning the balancing of selective growth with efficiencies, driving increased monetization and cost efficiencies and all this while continuing to drive the penetration of JumiaPay. And as soon as we achieve profitability, then we can put more emphasis on acceleration of growth as well as some of the other opportunities which are outside the current focus and that we remind you or we put here on page 29. Once we reach the milestone of profitability, we can confidently start allocating more resources to growing faster our user base, putting more resources behind Jumia Pay to accelerate in payment and FinTech, putting more resources behind Jumia Logistics, perhaps as a standalone company, explore other avenues of growth like gaming, digital content, geographical expansion, and many more. We think that we operate a very relevant business, e-commerce, food delivery, payment, logistics. We have proven that we can do it in Africa. We have built it as a platform able to scale and expand. We operate an asset-light company with significant geographical and category diversification. We are very confident about the future, and I think the recent results are very encouraging to us. So with this in mind, thank you very much for attending the call, and we are now ready to open up for a few questions, please.

We'll begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touch-tone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. First question is from Ralph Shackhart from William Blair. Please go ahead.

Good morning. You made some really good strides in logistics and marketing fulfillment. Expense decreased during the Q3, I think, down by around 20% and 55% or so year-over-year respectively, which is really great progress. Sasha, you talked about, you know, doing this in an environment without a surge in volume. But maybe just kind of taking a step back, assuming there's not a, I guess, near-term or outlet for a surge in volume. Where do you think further progress could go on this front? Do you really need that surge in volume to continue to get these really strong decreases in expenses year-over-year, or just maybe some more color on this? That would be great. Thank you.

Thanks, Ralph, for the question. I think it's a very good question. We've kept repeating over the last two years as we became the process of going public that we were betting not on any surge, but rather on gradual adoption of the e-commerce in Africa and that all things considered, we don't need much to change to take the company to profitability, but we just need to continue doing what we're doing. And I think if I look at where do we go from there, I think from a unique economics improvement, there's a lot that we can still do to continue to increase them, right? And number one, there's a lot of monetization avenues that we have just started to explore and some of them that we have not even started to explore. And those monetization avenues, they include our own ecosystem and even going outside the ecosystem, right? So I think there's a lot we can do to further increase the advertising services that we provide to sellers and to third parties. We have just started to open up Jumia logistics to third parties and this is going to be gradually increasing and contributing over the months to come. We have not even started to monetize Jumia Pay at all. We are not making any money on payment service provider activities and so on. I think there's a lot that we are going to do to increase revenues, even with the same size of the business. Secondly, on the cost side, of course, the cost, to some extent, we need volume to drive meaningful improvement, but there's still a lot that we can do to improve on the cost. So the unit economics will continue to improve regardless of the surge. Now, Without a surge, I think we're going to continue to grow. We have brought you some details and opened the box for you to see where the growth is. We are very confident that there's a lot of growth in the business and that the growth is where we want it to be. We are extremely confident of the relevance of the business model and that we're going to continue to grow, especially where we want it. There's going to be some volatility, but we're going to keep bringing you the the situation. And then if there is a surge, then even better. But we are not betting on it. We're betting on the same trajectory, meaning that we're going to grow where we want in selective areas which are relevant to consumer lifetime value and relevant to our margins. And as we do that and work on the monetization and cost efficiency, I think we have a very good year ahead of us and a very good position to drive the business forward.

Thanks for the extra color, Sasha. The next question comes from Mark Mahaney from RBC. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Let me ask two questions, please. First, for the first time, you had a decline in active customers sequentially. I know it's a trailing 12-month metric, but could you talk about that, and is there something you can do to stabilize that? Should we expect customers to come down? Is that part of the rationalization? Are you trying to shed unprofitable customers? Or is that something that you can reverse? I assume that the goal would be to grow active customers over time. So just talk about what happened in the quarter over the last 12 months and in your confidence and your ability to grow that. And then secondly, with 1P revenue, and there's so much focus that you have on the marketplace business for understandable reasons, better economics, Do you think that there's – is it reasonable to assume that you'll just flat-out exit the 1P e-commerce market and just focus on the marketplace business? Thank you very much.

Thanks, Mark. And I think very good questions, too. Before we answer on the Q2 to Q3 active consumers, I think it's important to remind that the active consumers are, as you pointed out, but I want to make sure it's clear for everyone, or on an LTN basis. So those are the last 12 months active consumers. So when we compare Q2 2020 and Q3 2020, we are comparing the last four quarters. So Q2 2019 to Q2 2020 to Q3 2019 to Q3 2020, right? So there are lots of dynamics that can happen in this metric. And I think it's quite important to keep this in mind. Now, of course, I think when we look at Q2 and Q3, we are seeing a trajectory where between Q2 and Q3, we have continued to make a lot of progress on efficiency, right? We have decreased our sales and advertising expense by about 14% between Q2 20 and Q3 20. We have increased our efficiency if you compare the last 12 months to the active consumers, we have increased efficiency by 16% between those two quarters. So I think you need to keep this in mind. To some extent, it's also a result of some of the choices we are making on the CLV. So typically, there would be some of those consumers who we observe that those consumers are only reacting to promotions on airtime and things like that. So Probably some of those consumers have disappeared as part of, you know, our choice to only focus on really, you know, positive consumer lifetime value consumers. So there must be some of that. And then I think we don't expect this trend to continue, right? Over time, we expect that the trend will continue to go up on this metric and we feel very confident about that as well. Then on 1P, I don't think we will I'm not going to say ever, but I don't think we will in the years to come stop doing 1P. I think 1P is a very attractive possibility for us because we operate in a market where the supply can be sometimes volatile and there can be very regular situations for which it's a very good advantage to be able to buy and sell, right? And We do 1P and we engage in 1P when we think that it's necessary or that we can benefit from it to drive the relevance of the marketplace for the consumers or when there is a shortage of supply or something like that. And I can tell you, for example, right now we are running and preparing Black Friday, our commercial event as we speak. And we always like to do a little bit of retail. It helps. and it drives good economics, good margin, and good relevance for the consumer. So certainly we're going to continue to be a majority marketplace, I think, but we will still see some 1P. It's a very good and efficient tool for us.

Okay. Thank you, Sasha.

The next question comes from Aaron Kessler from Raymond James.

Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks, guys.

A couple of questions. Maybe just follow up on the last question. I think also I noticed average order value is down about five euros sequentially. And I think it was about a similar level of electronics to last quarter. So good to get some insights on the average order value. And then maybe on the advertising, how are you thinking about the optimal level of advertising? Do you think you're at that today? Maybe which channels are you more focused on as well going forward here? And finally, just anything Any Q4 trends, quarter-to-date trends you would point out as well. Thanks a lot.

And thanks, Aaron. On the advertising, you mean on the expense, right? Not on the revenue, right?

Correct. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the AOV first is really not something that we sold for, right? The AOV for us, we see it as an output of the usage of the consumers on our platform and And it's not something that we are necessarily focused on trying to drive higher or lower AOV, right? We are focused on driving relevance. And certainly we have been driving a lot of the everyday categories which have lower items value. So we were very much expecting this drop of AOV and something that we have been planning. But in a way, we observe the AOV more as an output of what people decide to buy and what also items people decide to buy. And the AOV is also a function of the number of items that people put in their basket and the price of this item. So there's just so many factors which go into the AOV that for us, we observe the AOV, we post-rationalize it because, of course, this is something that we look at, but it's not something that we solve for. And we don't have a particular goal Our goal is that our consumers are CLV, Consumer Lifetime Value. Their value is positive. And that when they do orders, those orders take us to profitability, right? So I think the AOV is what it is, and it's moving in the right direction according to us, and it makes a lot of sense. But we don't solve for a particular number, and nor do we – aim at a particular number for the business. And on the advertising, we are primarily driving spend through the online and performance channel. It's the majority of our spend. And here is, of course, a mix of all the existing channels. It's very diversified, I would say, and it's very granular. but it's a mix of performance channels like app installs and then retargeting and affiliates, etc. So it's a lot of, I would say, performance marketing channels, very granular and very programmatic and performance-driven. And then we have the next most significant is the offline commissions that we offer to our J-Force program. people right so remember from previous discussions we have a very attractive j-force program where individual people can sign up and can earn commissions and fees when they recruit new junior users and so we have this program pretty much live in all our geographies and it's very successful so it's also a meaningful part of the advertising expense and we think that it's going to to continue being very granular, being very diversified. We are constantly, you know, looking for ways to optimize and also looking for ways to, um, to, to create new advertising channels, uh, for the users to, uh, to recruit new users. Got it. Okay. Um, yeah.

And last question, just any key for any Q4 trends, uh, I know you're probably not doing an official guidance, but any Q4 trends you would speak of to date?

Yeah, it's a little bit early to talk about that. And we just launched Black Friday. Black Friday for us is actually almost a full month of shopping festival. And so it started last Friday in most of the countries. And it's an event which is based on, of course, there are four Fridays, which have bigger offers and bigger commercial events. events, I would say, but it's something that really builds up, so it's a little bit too early to tell, unfortunately.

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you.

The next question comes from Sarah Simon from Barenburg. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi. I've got three questions, please. First one, on SG&A, what do you think is the right or, let's say, sort of stable quarterly SG&A Because obviously the numbers come down very significantly. Should we expect that keeps coming down, or do you think we've kind of hit the right level? The second question is, if you look at GMV and you've given a helpful split of mobile phones coming down, but actually what that implies is that everything that's not mobile phones and electronics is flat to slightly down too. And I'm wondering if there are categories within that that have been particularly weak versus others that have been strong? Because obviously you've talked about very strong growth in food delivery, and you've talked about FMCG categories as growing strongly in the past. And then the final question, I appreciate you don't want to give any guidance yet on Q4, but obviously you started, well, let's say we started to see in the numbers this significant shift towards selling profitable goods in Q4 last year. So Is it reasonable to think that the rate of decline in raw GMV should moderate in Q4, or do you think there's just still more of this shift away from high-priced goods still to go?

Thanks. Thanks, Sarah. I wish we had a crystal ball in a way that we could, but I think on this one, on the last question, the guidance, it's very hard to tell. I agree with you that the comps should become more favorable with time. And we initiated the business mix rebalancing really about a year ago. And of course, I mean, not everything happened overnight, right? As you can imagine. And it's more like a phase of the business. And there's so much volatility in in the market right now in terms of supply disruption and also to some extent we start to see the first impact of probably the economic crisis and the consumer behavior and so it's very hard to predict. What we can say is that I think there's a lot of growth in the business and it may not always come from the same pockets but that there's a lot of momentum on many aspects of the business. You know, it's hard to tell if we're going to see more of the same or if it's going to start being more favorable on a consolidated basis. It's really hard to tell, unfortunately. But I think, you know, we're going to have to see where this goes. But we will continue to bring you also the breakdown of the business so that you can see where it's going, where it's not, and that we are able to explain it. And that is also speaking to your question number two, The granularity of the growth of the business is, of course, when you de-average the GMB outside phone and electronics, you have a lot of different categories and you have a lot of different dynamics which are taking place by price points, by subcategories. And certainly there you have some subcategories which are growing faster, some which are growing less fast or even shrinking year over year. I think it's also hard always to look at a year over year because one has to then explain the dynamic of such and such category about a year ago and how it's changed, et cetera. So I think we see that there's a general dynamic around lower item value, more profitable orders, more profitable consumers. But it's hard to just categorize, okay, we are going on ABCD category and we are not on ABCD. I think The general trend is that we are growing outside phones and electronics. And on phones and electronics, we are not growing because we're driving the share down. And that's it for now. Then on SG&A, I think to some extent, we need to, if you look at the trajectory of SG&A, you can see that we have managed to really, I would say, protect, almost protect the investment that we bring into technology. And that we have managed despite, you know, cutting a lot of the overheads to really keep investing in our technology because we think it's for the long term and it's very important to drive the future monetization and efficiency ahead of us. And on the rest, certainly the focus for us is going to be on, you know, more of the growth of the usage, growth of the monetization and junior pay rather than further cutting the G&A, right? So there may be some improvements here and there, but I think it's fair to think that for us, the focus is going to be on continuing to grow the gross profit after fulfillment and to do that by continuing to improve the economics and continuing to improve the growth in the selected areas and rather than continuing to cost G&A because I think it's a better ROI to continue to grow the business and increase the unit economics rather than continuing to reduce. So I think maybe some modest reduction, maybe some modest increase, but fairly flat.

Okay, perfect. Thanks.

The next question comes from Brian Nowak from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Hi, this is Madan for Brian. Thanks for taking the question. Is there any material divergence in your largest countries where you're performing better than others? And if so, what differentiates those countries? Thanks.

Yeah. No, the answer is no. So we are, you know, seeing some differences here and there, you know, when you put side by side, of course, the unit economics, the category mix, and et cetera, et cetera. But overall, It's very consistent, I would say, and generally very consistent. And I think that's something that we are happy about also because the good results that we see are not driven by one country. They're really driven by all of them. So in the portfolio, you have some countries which are going a bit more than others or being more profitable than others, etc. But I think it's pretty consistent.

The next question comes from Catherine O'Neil from Citi. Please go ahead.

Hi, I just had a question on the logistics as a service plan. I just want to understand how do you think about the capacity you have for that without impacting the core business? How actively are you marketing the service and how should we think about the size of the opportunity?

Yeah, I think the size of the opportunity is, I think, enormous, right? And I say that because we know when we started that business eight years ago, we were dreaming of finding a Jumia Logistics, right? And we built Jumia Logistics, of course, because in a way, we had to. We had no choice, right? And if they had been a very extremely efficient fulfillment ecosystem where we could have told our sellers, just drop your package and and they'll take care of everything, then we would have leveraged that, right? So we had to create this, and it's been a very, very big investment from us in terms of resources, in terms of technology, in terms of time, and I think now we have it. And now this asset, I think it's a very, very sizable opportunity because we think we have a very unique system. We have a very unique system which provides end-to-end visibility reliability and cost attractiveness to every single SME who needs to move goods from A to B. So I don't know exactly the size, but I think it's extremely sizable. And with that in mind, we are really in the phase where we have successfully piloted the service in multiple countries. When I say piloted, it means that we've had a few hundred consumers who have consistently and regularly shipped packages with us. And we think that we are now ready to scale and that we are going to gradually go out and start pitching the service to consumers, to sellers, to SMEs, and just scale it at the rhythm at which they come to us. So certainly... And we will never compromise the Jumia business in case there is a trade-off to be made and we will limit the capacity if we have to. And we will see how it's coming in the next few months and as we start to market the service. So it's something which for us is a very good addition to the business. And we're, we're not going to market it very aggressively. We're going to go out and we're going to, as we do, as we always do, we prefer to have a few hundred consumers who are regular consumers consistent. And then we continue to scale as we see that the business is creating value for them. And certainly we don't see any issue of capacity for, for, you know, in the near future. I mean, we would have to believe that there's a huge surge in demand to, to do that. And as I said, we, we don't believe in surge. We believe in a, in gradual changes.

Okay, thanks. Can I also just ask, in terms of kind of warehouse capacity, I think there was a slide saying you've got about 110,000 square meters. How do you expect that to evolve over the next sort of two to three years and what kind of investment is required in warehouse capacity? Or is that enough for the next couple of years?

Yeah, it's generally going to increase pretty gradually, right? And the warehouse space does not require much capex because our warehouse space is dedicated to storage and pick and pack and to consolidation of packages And they basically come in and out of packages, right? So in a way, it's pretty simple to scale if we need. So I expect that we're going to increase gradually here and there. but no meaningful change in capex or investment to do it because it's really storage space and shelves. So it's nothing that requires big investment, and we always rent those spaces. So there's no big change here that we expect in the next two years, I would say.

Okay.

The next question comes from Lamont Williams from Stiefel. Please go ahead.

Hi, Sasha. As you bring down your advertising costs, what are you seeing in the customer acquisition costs? Is that coming down as you leverage more of the brand? And then is there anything you can give us in terms of how are you thinking about the timeline to Jumia Pay monetization?

Yeah, very good question. So we see pretty much the same trends on the customer acquisition costs. and then on all the marketing efficiency metrics. So this one is following the same direction. And so we're also happy with that and confident with that. On the JumiaPay monetization, we are almost there to start probably piloting JumiaPay as a payment service provider. So this is something that should take place in the near future. and we expect that we can pilot it in the next few quarters, right? So definitely we want to pilot it next year, and then I don't think it's going to become meaningful in our revenues in the next two, three quarters, but we certainly want to at least pilot it in the next few quarters.

Okay, great. Thank you. There are no more questions in the queue. This concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Sasha for any closing remarks.

Great. Thank you so much, everyone. I think we're over the hour, so really appreciate you joining. Thanks for the support, and as always, we are available if you have any questions, and we wish you the very best. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.

The question, excuse me, the conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.