The acquisition of Cars45, with its transactional business model, is part of Jiji’s long-term strategy toward transactional marketplaces, according to Vladimir Mnogoletniy, CEO of Genesis. The deal will also strengthen Jiji’s position in all the countries where both companies operate and help mitigate some customers’ safety concerns by improving their car-buying and selling, TechCrunch noted.

About Cars45

• Cars45 is a service for selling and buying cars in Africa that operates in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya. The advantage of the site is that it has a network of inspection centers, where cars are inspected by more than 200 parameters.
• Until 2020, Cars45 was a subsidiary of Germany’s Frontier Car Group, which bought its majority stake for $5 million in 2017.
• In 2020, OLX Group acquired the service through its OLX Autos brand. Thus, the new deal with OLX Group is the second for Jiji.

About Jiji

• Genesis launched Jiji in 2014. In 2019, the platform acquired the online classifieds business OLX in Africa, after which it became the largest marketplace with an audience of 400 million people, as Mnogoletniy said.
• Jiji now operates in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania, with over 400 employees.
• The site contains over 2 million active listings worth more than $10 billion, with 300,000+ sellers trading. The car category is the second most popular, with more than 300,000 active listings.
• In May 2021, Jiji became the first major profitable e-commerce company in the region.
• According to Mnogoletniy, Jiji is the No. 1 brand in the target market.

It is interesting that, according to analysts, today working abroad is unpopular not only among those who have worked in another country and improved their financial situation but also among respondents who are barely making ends meet.

Profile of a labor migrant from Ukraine

In Ukraine, the majority of those who had experience working abroad and do not plan to return are men with families (about 70%) aged 25-34 and 45-54 years.

7 out of 10 employees live in cities.

The level of education is different for everyone: 41% of respondents have a complete higher education and 39% have only secondary education.

Reason for working abroad

Ukrainians leave to work abroad due to low salaries in a home country, lack of jobs. Many of those make their wish to see the world true.

Where did they go?

The main areas of labor migration for people who decided to stay in Ukraine:

• Poland – 33%,
• Russia – 35%,
• Germany – 11%.

How much did they earn?

Almost half of Ukrainians who do not want to return to work abroad for now received less than $1,000. Another 18% received up to $1,200.

Only 11% of those who do not plan to re-employ earned $2,000 per month.

Why don’t they want to return to work abroad?

About half of the employees abroad did not work in their specialty. Almost a quarter of dissatisfied respondents worked abroad in the construction sector. The second most popular industry is transport and logistics, mainly it was the driver’s work – 17%. Top 3 is closed with production – 15%.

Every fifth respondent admitted that he or she was disappointed with the work experience abroad.

The main reason why employees don’t want to return is psychological discomfort associated with moving and remoteness from relatives (42%). Also among the respondents, there are a lot of those who began to make good money in Ukraine upon their return (29%).

Another top reason is the high cost of living and food in other countries (16%). A quarter of the respondents had conflicts with the employer who had a negative attitude towards employees.

The rest were satisfied with the employer-employee relationship.

What is Jiji

Jiji is a portfolio asset of Ukrainian Genesis. This classified ads site that targets mobile users was launched back in 2016. In 2018, the project sidelined OLX from Nigerian market. Subsequently, OLX closed its local office and its traffic was significantly lower than that of its competitor.

The deal

According to the terms of the deal, Nigerian users of OLX will be redirected to Jiji website. In addition, Jiji has acquired the business of OLX in 4 other countries of the region: Kenia, Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania. Their users will also be redirected to the new site. It is expected that the total number of monthly unique users of the project will reach 8 million.

According to Vladimir Mnogoletniy, co-founder of Genesis and head of the board of directors of Jiji, acquisition of OLX facilitates the creation of one of the largest classified ads sites in the region:

We intend to use this deal to create the largest African classified ads business and open new opportunities for the fast-growing countries of the region with the population of 300 million people. We believe that in the next 2-3 years we will become one of the top 10 classified ads projects by traffic.

The company intends to finalize the deal in April after it gets approved by the regulators. After that, the company will launch redirect to Jiji from OLX Nigeria, OLX Ghana, OLX Kenya, OLX Tanzania, and OLX Uganda.

[quotes_variant_one image=”806259″ author=”Anton Volyanskiy, CEO and co-founder of Jiji:” /]

“We have been developing Africa’s markets for 5 years now and during this time we have built the largest classified ads site in Nigeria: Jiji contains over 1 million active ads with over 6 million unique users (most of whom use an app). Over 50k professional sellers sell on Jiji and over 10k of them are paying users. We are developing the largest Shopping app in Nigeria. In the past 5 years we have been competing with Ringier, Saltside and Olx in the niche of horizontal classified ads in Nigeria, and now we are happy that we are the likely front-runner in this race.

This deal lays a solid foundation for building the largest classified ads site in Africa, world’s last addressable market. After the deal is sealed, Jiji will work across 5 markets with population of 300 million people, and we believe that in 2-3 years we will become leaders on each of those markets. We have a chance to build one of the world’s largest classified ads sites and my team works a lot in that direction.

We believe that this is a landmark deal for Ukrainian IT sector. I am not aware of any other significant deal where an export-oriented e-commerce IT company from Ukraine could compete with global behemoths (much less to make acquisitions of such scale). Olx, in our opinion, is the world’s strongest classified ads business and we are very happy about such an outcome of our joint efforts. This speaks volumes about possibilities of companies from Ukraine to compete globally in such capital intensive business models.”

The money

Genesis did not share the details of the cost of the deal. They only note that the financial side of the acquisition has been secured by Digital Spring Ventures fund. Previously, the fund invested in Genesis and Jiji itself.

According to sources of AIN.UA, the cost of the deal might vary from $1.5 mln to $3.4 mln.

According to estimates of AIN.UA, by now Jiji has received up to $10 mln of investments from various investors. In its turn, Genesis attracted $6 mln from Horizon Capital, EEGF III in 2016. The amount of investment made by Digital Spring Ventures into Genesis is unknown, the round was closed in January 2015.

The CEO post was headed by Katerina Onishchenko since October, according to a press release of the company. She joined the company in 2013 as a marketing director for OLX Ukraine and Central Asia. Over 5 years at the position, Onishchenko led the rebranding (Slando became OLX) in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, organized media support for the project in Uzbekistan, promoting the OLX Delivery service. Since April 2018, the development of business verticals has been a part of her responsibilities, with an emphasis on the “Real Estate” and “Work” categories.

In Ukraine, OLX has more than 10 million unique users per month. According to the InAU version, the OLX website ranks fifth in popularity among Ukrainians, reaching 26% of users. According to SimilarWeb, the OLX application is installed on every third mobile smartphone in the country. The site accounts for $1 billion a year.