How Africa’s e-commerce giant is fighting off Shein and Temu

Competition has been steep for JumiaiJumiaJumia is the first African e-commerce company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, operating across the continent since its founding in Lagos in 2012.READ MORE, Africa’s largest e-commerce platform, especially from major Chinese companies like Temu and SheiniSheinFounded in China in 2008 and headquartered in Singapore, Shein is a fast fashion brand that grew rapidly through exposure on social media.READ MORE. 

Jumia is now using the same playbook its Chinese rivals have thrived on: adding Chinese merchants to the seller pool to stay competitive. It is also leveraging the U.S.-China trade war as Chinese merchants look to diversify into African markets. 

Dubbed the “Amazon of Africa,” Jumia has been cutting its losses since 2022. The company has exited underperforming businesses such as food delivery across several African markets, and sharpened its focus on physical goods in core markets like Nigeria. In early August, Jumia reported a revenue of $45.6 million — a 25% increase year on year.  

Rest of World spoke to Jumia’s CEO, Francis Dufay, to understand how the company restructured its business to withstand competition from Chinese platforms, while seizing opportunities from the U.S.-China trade war.

The interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

How’s Jumia dealing with Chinese competitors and what strategies is it using to stay ahead?

Over the past three years, we’ve restructured Jumia to serve the African middle class with maximum affordability. Our typical customer earns $200–$500 a month, with about $20–$30 in discretionary income. That means offering $5–$10 shoes, $80 TVs instead of $200 or $1,000 items.

To do that, we reorganized sourcing, brought in suppliers from China, and drastically cut our cost base. We’re leaner, more efficient, and offer better prices and product assortment than before. We’ve also expanded nationwide logistics, lowered delivery fees, and localized marketing channels.

This puts us in a strong position to compete with international platforms like Temu, which entered Nigeria in late 2024. They spent millions on marketing and gave $100 vouchers, but over time, they had to cut back. Their nationwide free delivery is unsustainable — for example, delivering to rural areas like Maiduguri is extremely costly.

We, however, deliver to Maiduguri without running a loss because our volumes and logistics network allow us cost-efficient delivery. We support cash on delivery, unlike Temu’s prepay model, which creates friction. We also have local customer support and on-ground presence building trust in a market where scams are a concern.

Temu focuses on low-cost items like fashion and beauty, but we serve a wider range: fridges, phones, TVs. Our brand remains strong. In Nigeria, Jumia’s GMV is up 36% year over year, despite Temu’s entry. Google Trends also shows Temu’s spike declining, while Jumia remains dominant and growing.

What opportunities do you see in targeting Chinese merchants?

It’s all about providing more quantities of better and cheaper products to our African consumers. Most African markets are still largely underserved, and there’s more demand than supply at the right price point. So my big battle over the past three years has been to gather and secure more supply for African consumers. 

We’ve been doing that with Chinese vendors in the Shenzhen area. We’ve been doing that with local marketplaces, local importers, and so on. But the big battle for us is more supply at the right price because our customers want cheaper products, more affordable products. We’ve found great potential from thousands of Chinese vendors, mostly in the Shenzhen area. We’re kind of the gateway to African markets for a lot of Chinese manufacturers. We’re the middleman, so we’re taking a pretty nice margin in the process. 

How have you convinced Chinese sellers to opt for Jumia instead of e-commerce companies from their own country?

All the Chinese merchants are usually on multiple platforms, and then they prioritize one over the other. We don’t ask them to drop other platforms, but we need to show them better profitability, better sales, less trouble, so that they want to invest their inventories on Jumia.

Also Jumia isn’t new to listing Chinese merchants. But earlier, our business with Chinese vendors was not well executed in many countries. Over the past three years, we have standardized the processes, executed well, and now they are willing and happy to ship more inventory.

Are Chinese merchants diversifying into Africa and using platforms like Jumia due to U.S. tariffs? If so, how would this benefit Jumia’s growth?

Yes, absolutely. We do believe that the U.S. tariffs will be an opportunity for Jumia. Chinese vendors have been very focused on the U.S. as a market over the past couple of years. But the traffic and volumes of Temu have really collapsed over the last couple of months after the increase in tariffs. 

So, we believe that the Chinese manufacturing will have to rebalance its exports, and that they will have to pay more attention to places like Africa. It will not rely as much on the U.S. as it used to, and will be able to capture more supply for Africa. We’re already seeing it. I mean, we see that it’s easier to get supplies from China, easier to convince vendors to ship inventory to our warehouses, and so on. 

Are you seeing any friction with local African sellers since you added foreign sellers to your network?

No. It’s creating a bit of competition, but I think it goes hand in hand, and our local sellers have benefited from the increased traffic, and increased relevance of the marketplace. So it’s been mutually beneficial at this stage. 

Many e-commerce players are introducing AI to their platforms — from managing listings to logistics. Is Jumia planning to use any AI tools?

Absolutely. At this stage, we’re leveraging AI in some obvious fields like call center automation, so we have smaller call centers processing more orders because we’ve been able to automate lots of requests that are now managed by AI-enabled bots. These bots manage simple requests such as order status, and we keep improving them to give them conversational ability. It’s helping us to be a lot more efficient and save money. Our developers are becoming many times more productive by using AI to review, improve, and write their code, all of it.