Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mall for Africa CEO Chris Folayan (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How do you estimate the size of that market currently? How much is the volume of e-commerce that’s happening? Also, what is the volume of cross-boundary e-commerce that’s happening?

Chris Folayan: As far as volume of e-commerce happening across Africa is concerned, it’s well in billions of dollars at this point in time.  It’s only getting stronger because you have the influence of financial dynamics taking place where mobile operators are reducing the cost to get online from their mobile devices. Bandwidth is basically becoming cheaper, so people are using their smartphones to do more transactions and data gathering to make purchases and to just inquire about various things. The trend is definitely an uptick.

I would want to say that it’s somewhat of an elongated hockey stick trend because as the prices come down, people use their bandwidth more and more. People are getting more familiar with the web and how to navigate a site through their mobile phones.

Sramana Mitra: You don’t have any analyst number on the total volume of e-commerce out of Africa?

Chris Folayan: McKinsey estimated e-commerce sales to go up to $75 billion in 2025 for Africa as a whole. For Nigeria alone, PayPal forecasted online purchases this year to hit the $1 billion mark.

Sramana Mitra: Nigeria is your biggest geography?

Chris Folayan: Nigeria is currently our only geography. We are expanding to other African countries. We are expanding into Ghana and Kenya, but Nigeria is the epicenter of finance in Africa. That’s where we started. PayPal has just moved into Nigeria a few weeks ago. There is a huge push towards Nigeria, but I don’t have the numbers for the entire continent.

Sramana Mitra: The next question is where we want to spend the most of our time. Can you talk about what’s happening in the mobile sector in Africa? You can focus on Nigeria if that’s where your focus is primarily. I know there’s a lot of mobile payments adoption. Give us an overview of how the African consumer interacts with the mobile device.

Chris Folayan: I will focus on just Nigeria, but I can speak of some other African countries. The mobile consumer interacts with their device for a few reasons. One is for information gathering. Two would be communication through emails and social media channels. Nigeria uses the most amounts of Facebook feeds than any other country in Africa. You have people utilizing social media on their mobile devices more than anywhere else in Africa. They also use their mobile devices for purchases and e-commerce. There are quite a few companies coming up all across Africa that support the use of the mobile device to make online purchases because that is the trend. As opposed to having a laptop or desktop, most people have mobile devices and they are always connected. So it’s easier for them to just basically flip it out of their pockets and use it for communication as well as transactions.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Mall for Africa CEO Chris Folayan
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