Jumia Lays Off 900 Workers

Africa’s e-commerce comapany, Jumia, has slashed 20% of its workforce in a layoff exercise that saw the exit of 900 people from the company.

The company disclosed this on Thursday in its Q4 2022 financial results.

“We expect these headcount reductions to allow us to save over 30% in monthly staff costs starting from March 2023, as compared to the October 2022 staff cost baseline.

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“The implementation of these organizational changes resulted in $3.7 million in one-off restructuring costs booked in the fourth quarter of 2022,” the company said, adding that the headcount reductions were done in Q4 2022.

The e-commerce firm also announced that it has streamlined its organizational structure and put in place more effective teams fully committed to the execution of its strategy.

“As part of that, we are working on optimizing the returns on our paid online marketing investments by rationalizing marketing channels.

“We are also allocating a higher share of investment to local offline channels that help us build brand awareness and consideration in a cost-effective manner.

“We are also working on a comprehensive plan to drive fulfillment cost efficiencies. This includes a number of actions such as optimizing our footprint and logistics routes, improving warehousing staff management and productivity, reducing packaging costs, and many more.

“We have seen early signs of success of this strategy in our e-commerce physical goods business where the freight & shipping cost per package decreased by 23% year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2022,” the company stated.