Nigeria’s current economic climate doesn’t lend itself to
a particularly high-spending Black Friday. The West African country slipped
into recession in August as the effects of the global slump in oil prices,
coupled with militant attacks that have slashed Nigeria’s oil production,
continued to bite.
Since the central bank removed a currency peg in June,
the value of the naira has ballooned against the dollar, amplifying a foreign
exchange shortage in the country. But despite such testing financial
circumstances, Shola Adekoya, the head of Nigerian e-commerce giant Konga.com,
is optimistic that Nigerians will not be tightening their purse strings ahead
of the year’s main shopping event.
“Nigerians deserve a discount, a break from expensive
products,” Adekoya tells Newsweek. “Even
though the economy is going through a tough time, Nigerians still spend. But
the question is what they are going to spend their money on, how to get the
best value for their money.”
A Konga staff member works at the online shopping
company's warehouse, Lagos, Nigeria, September 13, 2013. Konga is hoping to
rake in millions of dollars with two retail festivals based around Black Friday.
Black Friday came relatively late to Nigeria: the
materialistic festival kicked off in the country in 2013, largely due to
campaigning by Konga and another e-commerce juggernaut, Jumia.
But in 2016, the shopping bonanza is coming early for
Nigerians. Konga is running its annual pre-Black Friday event known as Yakata—a
word from Nigeria’s Yoruba language that translates as “when something big
falls in a big way”—between November 18-21, a three-day period of price cuts
across the board. It will also offer further discounts on November 25 itself.
Jumia, meanwhile, commenced a 12-day discount event Monday, with different
deals on different days: men’s clothes and products drop on November 16, for
example, while women’s apparel goes down on November 23.
The concept of a retail discount gala has proven popular
in Nigeria. During Yakata 2015, Konga said that it sold around 100,000 items in
a 24-hour period and was processing 2,700 orders per hour at peak time. This
year, the site—which functions much like Amazon and sells products from more
than 60,000 merchants—is aiming to generate 2.5 billion naira ($8 million) on
November 25.
More than 2.3 million Nigerians visited Jumia during
Black Friday 2015, leading the online marketplace to spread the 2016 event over
the course of 12 days. “This year’s Jumia Black Friday is designed to offer our
customers more days, more deals and more convenience,” said Juliet Anammah,
chief executive of Jumia Nigeria.
Comparatively, Black Friday in Nigeria is still pretty
small fry for global retailers. In the United States, deal-hungry customers
spent a total of $67.6 billion on Black
Friday, the biggest amount in the retail festival’s history. And 136 million customers
snapped up deals across the Black Friday weekend, which also includes the
so-called Cyber Monday—the Monday after Black Friday when tech products, like
laptops and mobile phones, have their prices slashed.
But online retailers like Adekoya will be hoping that
Yakata and Black Friday 2016 can further boost Nigeria’s rising e-commerce
sector. Jumia’s parent company, Africa Internet Group, became Africa’s first
unicorn—a private company valued at more than $1 billion. And Nigeria is ahead
of Kenya and South Africa, its two main economic competitors in sub-Saharan
Africa, with 89 percent of shoppers either buying or planning to buy online in
the near future, according to a 2015
report.
Adekoya is confident that discount festivals—be it Yakata
or Black Friday—will continue to grow in popularity in the country. “Nigerians
follow global trends, they understand what’s happening elsewhere in the world,
and they act like anybody else,” he says.
Courtesy:
Newsweek.
