Jumia Technologies AG (JMIA) 2019 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good day and welcome to Jumia's March quarter 2019 results conference call.

(Operator Instructions).

Please note this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Safae Damir, Head of Investor Relations for Jumia.

Please go ahead.

Thank you.

Good morning, everyone.

Thank you for joining us today for our first earnings release, post-IPO.

With us today are Sacha Poignonnec, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Jumia; and Antoine Maillet-Mezeray, CFO.

This call is also being webcast on the IR section of our corporate website.

We will start by covering the Safe Harbor.

We would like to remind you that our discussions today will include forward-looking statements.

Actual results may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements.

In addition, these forward-looking statements may speak only to our expectations as of today.

We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise these statements.

For a discussion of some of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from the forward-looking statements expressed today, please see the risk factors section of our final prospectus filed in connection with our initial public offering on April [15], 2019.

In addition, on this call, we will refer to certain financial measures not reported in accordance with IFRS.

You can find reconciliations of these non-IFRS financial measures to the corresponding IFRS financial measures in our earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website.

With that, I'll hand over to Sacha.

Hello, everyone.

It's a pleasure to speak with you today and tell you more about Jumia and our first-quarter results.

We reached a major milestone for our Company in Africa on April 12, when we began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

We know that this is the beginning of the journey, and we look forward to many more earning reports with you over the coming years.

We are of course aware of a recent opinion piece that was published.

We would like to say, up front, that we completely stand by our prospectus, our audited financials, and the risk factors.

We are very excited about the future and our prospects.

We will not be distracted from executing on our strategy and carrying out our mission by those who seek to create doubt to profit at our expense and that of our long-term stakeholders.

If there are any follow-up questions, we are always available.

Before getting into our great Q1 results, we'd like to take this opportunity to remind you of our mission, who we are today, and how we plan to build on the success of Jumia.

If you'd like to turn your attention to page 5, please, I will start with our market: Africa.

We created Jumia with a passion for Africa, a deep conviction in the strong potential of this market, and that technology could have a very strong and positive impact.

Africa is a huge continent with a large commerce market of 1.2 billion people; 450 million Internet users, which is more than half of China; 17 million SMEs and merchants, together spending $4 trillion; and almost entirely off-line.

Moving on to page 6. In Africa, distribution of goods and services is very challenging in the off-line world.

Therefore, technology and e-commerce can create a lot of value for both sellers and consumers.

For sellers, e-commerce offers unparalleled leverage to reach consumers effectively and gather insights.

For consumers, e-commerce represents an opportunity to gain access to a very large selection of goods, shop at good prices, and often save a lot of time.

We are convinced that in Africa, e-commerce and technology offer a great solution for sellers and e-commerce to connect and transact very effectively.

This is why we have chosen this mission to help the consumers access goods and services in an effective way, help sellers distribute their goods and services in a more effective way, and create positives and sustainable impact across the continent.

Turning to page 7. To make this mission possible, we built Jumia, which is the most comprehensive e-commerce platform in Africa.

Our platform consists of our marketplace, where the sellers and the consumers can connect and transact; our logistics, which enable the goods to be delivered from the sellers to the consumers; and JumiaPay, which facilitates payment between the participants on our platform.

Consumers use Jumia to buy products across many different categories like phones, fashion, grocery.

And they also use Jumia to access a number of services like, for example, food delivery.

They also use Jumia to pay a number of services, like data top-up, air time recharge, or utility payments.

We like to say that consumers use Jumia to save time and save money.

We have achieved significant scale already.

We had 4 million active consumers last year transacting with 81,000 sellers, 90% of the business on marketplace, generating around $1 billion GMV.

Our logistics handled 13 million packages.

And in our two largest markets, Nigeria and Egypt, more than half of our transactions were processed by JumiaPay in Q4 2018.

We are the leading pan-African e-commerce platform and we see significant long-term opportunity to drive the adoption of e-commerce and the shift of the spend from off-line to online.

On page 8, you can see our footprint, which is calibrated to address the opportunity with a very diversified exposure.

There are 54 countries in Africa.

And we have selected 14 countries with a combined population of about 700 million people, 72% of the GDP of Africa, and 77% of the Internet users.

We are very focused on this footprint.

We believe we are currently in the right markets, and we have no short-term plan for geographical expansion.

This pan-African footprint is also a huge asset for us because we are very diversified from a macro perspectives, as we do not rely on one currency or one market; we are very diversified.

It also makes us a destination of choice for the sellers, provides us with economies of scale because we operate a centralized technology and data warehouse.

We learn faster and apply the best practices faster.

And we attract and retain talent very effectively because we can provide mobility opportunities across Africa.

On page 9, we work with three types of sellers: brands and key accounts, local sellers, and cross-border sellers.

Sellers love doing business with Jumia because we create a lot of value for them.

We bring them a gateway to Africa.

They have access to a large and growing consumer base.

And we provide a lot of services beyond that.

A good recent example is our partnership with Xiaomi.

We are opening the Xiaomi official store on our platform, offering, on an exclusive basis, a number of products.

And this is one illustration amongst many examples of the attractiveness of Jumia as a destination of choice for sellers and brands, providing them access to consumers across Africa with one partnership.

Moving on to page 10.

As part of our mission, as you know, we are also very focused on creating a sustainable impact in Africa.

And one important way is by creating jobs and skills.

In March, the BCG published this report that you have some screenshot here, explaining that online marketplaces have the potential to create 3 million new jobs across the continent by 2025.

The report also explained how online our marketplaces can boost the African economies by expanding the supply of goods and services, making assets more productive, and unlocking new demand in remote locations which will boost consumer spending.

We participated in the study by sharing data on sellers and partners with the BCG to help them conduct their [in-depth] analysis.

And, of course, this report is very encouraging because it reinforced our belief about the immense potential of technology and online marketplaces to drive job creation in Africa.

And this is something we take extremely seriously and is a key part of our mission.

We have already created more than 5,000 jobs directly, and even more indirectly with our sellers and partners, and we certainly want to continue.

When we look ahead -- I am now on page 11 -- we see significant opportunity to drive the adoption of e-commerce.

In Africa the penetration of e-commerce is currently less than 1%, in Latin America it's 2.4%, in America it's about 10%, and in China more than 20%.

So this massive e-commerce opportunity is really ahead of us.

And we have built, with Jumia, the platform to successfully drive the opportunity, as well as the engine to build something much bigger.

Amazon, Alibaba, MercadoLibre started with e-commerce and leveraged e-commerce to create value in payment and other businesses.

For us, we already have e-commerce and logistics.

We already added food delivery.

We are now building payment and financial services.

And in the future, there are multiple other segments we could expand to, because we built Jumia as a platform that is capable of doing so much more.

Of course, right now, we are focused on our core operations with the objectives to scale up, generate strong growth while driving monetization, marketing and cost efficiencies, and increase the penetration JumiaPay.

We have very exciting results to talk about for Q1, and let's now review our financial performance.

I will move to page 13.

Our strategy is built around four pillars: to grow our GMV, to increase our monetization, to improve our profitability, and to drive the penetration of JumiaPay.

I can tell you that in Q1, we delivered on this strategy.

We grew our GMV by 58%.

We increased our marketplace revenue by 102%.

We reduced our operating loss by 356 basis points.

And we signed a great partnership with Mastercard, along with a EUR50 million investment into Jumia that will help us increase the penetration of JumiaPay.

Now let me go into more details on the growth and the improvements in each of those pillars.

Let's go to page 14.

Let's start with our GMV growth.

Our GMV grew by 58% on a yearly basis, from 152 million last year to 240 million this year, driven by strong growth of active consumers and spend per active consumer.

Active consumers as of March was 4.3 million versus 3 million a year ago.

And we also saw an increase this quarter in the spend per active consumer.

Here as a quick reminder: as a common market practice, we present active consumers the same way we present our GMV, gross of cancellations and returns; and we present active sellers, of course, when we presented for the entire period.

We are very pleased with the strong momentum on the platform, the continued expansion and relevance of our product offering which drives the consumer adoption and the engagement.

On page 15 you can see how we are able to monetize this value proposition.

And here, before jumping into the revenues, I would like to make two points.

First, as we explained already in the prospectus, the revenue is affected by the shifts between the mix between the GMV we do on a first-party basis and the GMV done on our marketplace by third-party sellers.

Because of that, we manage our business not on the basis of revenue but on the basis of GMV and gross profit, because this eliminates the changes of mix between GMV, third-party, and first-party.

And maybe allow me here to give you a concrete example.

If we were to significantly increase the proportion of first-party in our business, you would see a very significant increase in revenue, but this is not what we want.

As disclosed in the prospectus, we engage in first-party activity in an opportunistic manner to complement the product assortment usually when we see unmet consumer demand.

Our goal, which we have already achieved in some way, is to have the vast majority of our business to take place on marketplace.

And this is why we also focus so much on marketplace revenue, which you see on this page.

The second point is about monetization.

Not every order turns into revenues because of cancellations, failed deliveries, returns.

And these are normal features of an e-commerce business, and expected to be higher in nascent e-commerce markets where the majority of the business is still cash-on-delivery.

These transactions represent monetization upside for us today as we carry the costs, or we carry costs, without booking the corresponding revenue.

And we are seeing that transactions processed with JumiaPay have a much higher delivery success rate than transaction settled with cash on delivery, which is also why we are actively focusing on the adoption of online payment.

As you can see on this page, our marketplace revenue more than doubled this quarter, growing at 102% on a yearly basis, while our gross profit margin as a percentage of GMV increased by 88 basis points from 5.6% to 6.5%, reflecting the increased monetization rate.

As we grow our GMV, we are demonstrating our ability to further monetize our platform.

Moving on to page 16, you can see how we generate our marketplace revenue from diversified monetization streams, which all grew strongly this quarter.

Commissions which are charged to our sellers grew by 95%.

Fulfillment, which are delivery fees charged to consumers, grew by 116%.

Value-added services, which include services around logistics, packaging, content creation, grew by 86%.

And lastly, marketing and advertising -- which include, for example, performance marketing campaigns, placement of banners -- grew by 201%.

We are very pleased with this diversity, which we think is very healthy.

Moving on to page 17.

During the first quarter of 2019, gross profit exceeded fulfillment expense.

In our prospectus, we indicated that we were profitable at gross profit level after the freight and shipping portion of the fulfillment expense.

And now, in Q1, we have been profitable after the entire fulfillment expense.

On page 18, you can see our marketing costs and how much we are benefiting from our past investments in brand awareness and our hyper-local marketing approach.

I would like to remind you of the results of a survey which was conducted earlier this year and provides very helpful context for our marketing.

Looking at the non-online shoppers, 74% declare knowing Jumia, and 62% declare considering buying on Jumia in the next 6 to 12 months.

So the brand awareness and consideration are very strong.

Looking at the online shoppers, 78% said they had bought on Jumia over the last 12 months, so we are a strong destination for online shoppers.

Having built this strong awareness and level of service, our marketing is now more focused on adoption and creating strong engagement with the consumers through a wide range of local channels.

As a result, we've been able to gain 205 basis points of marketing efficiency in Q1, taking the sales and advertising expense from 7.2% of GMV to 5.1% in Q1 2019.

On page 19 you will see our G&A and tech expense.

Our tech and content expense as a percentage of GMV decreased from 3.3% to 2.4% in Q1.

And our G&A expense, excluding share-based compensation expense, increased to 9.8% of GMV, in part due to non-recurring expenses concomitant with the IPO.

Over the same period, the adjusted EBITDA loss as a percentage of GMV improved by 335 basis points, reducing from 19.8% to 16.4%; and our operating loss by 356 basis points, from minus 22.5% to minus 18.9%.

So in summary, we believe that we have delivered strong results this quarter on our four pillars.

We grew our GMV by 58%, our marketplace revenue by 102%.

We continued to deliver on our path to profitability this quarter, in particular on marketing and technology expenses.

We also delivered positive gross profit after fulfillment.

And last but not least, we have a great partnership with Mastercard to continue to drive the strategic penetration of JumiaPay.

So, overall, a lot of great momentum in the business.

On page 20, looking ahead, our near-term focus is to continue scaling up our existing business within our existing markets and take the Company to profitability, leveraging the powerful platform that we have built.

With this in mind for the year 2019, we expect to continue to balance GMV growth in line with historical rates with a healthy monetization and cost efficiency.

Looking ahead, we also see multiple additional opportunities to drive long-term growth and value creation.

We have so many avenues.

In the future, we will expand into new business lines, we will grow into more geographies, and we will maximize value creation from our assets, logistics, payments, marketing.

However, solving for healthy and sustainable growth takes restraint and discipline.

And it's with this discipline and focus that we intend to take Jumia from strength to strength, staying true to our values, carrying out our mission, and creating value for our consumers, partners, teams, and shareholders.

I'd like to thank you very much for attending today, and your attention.

And we are now ready to take your questions.

(Operator Instructions).

Mark Mahaney, RBC.

Could you do two things?

First, any color you can give us on markets, Nigeria and Egypt, your two biggest markets, or other ones where you've seen acceleration in growth or notable deceleration in mark -- could you -- there's notable deceleration in growth?

Any markets where you could talk about trends being materially different than what you're reporting overall?

And then second, could you just address the issue of JForce and fraud in Nigeria as an operating risk?

And how you try to hedge that, how you try to manage that?

Thank you very much.

Thanks very much, Mark, and two very good questions.

On the first one, we are seeing very strong momentum, and we're seeing quite some uniform momentum across the markets, very much; and nothing very different from what we have reported in the past or observed in the past.

So, in this case, we are seeing very good momentum.

On the second question, here I would to like to say, very up front, that the JForce agents -- which are consultants which are part of JForce -- get commissions, of course, on a percentage of their completed transaction, after all cancellations and returns.

And this is of course key and very normal; we do that.

We have even actually introduced penalties as well as extra incentives to drive lower cancellations and returns for the orders which are generated by the JForce consultants.

So, for us, this is a very innovative marketing channel which helps consumers adopt e-commerce.

It's also a very useful channel to gather insights on the consumers in addition to the data we collect online.

And it has been a very successful channel which is particularly adapted to the need of our market.

Okay.

Thank you, Sacha.

Aaron Kessler, Raymond James.

Congrats on the first quarter.

A couple of questions.

Firstly on the Xiaomi deal, can you talk a little bit about -- do you see more deals like this occurring?

More like I guess what we've already seen from Tmall, where you set up stores for companies?

Additionally, if you could talk maybe about opportunities over the maybe near- to intermediate-term to increase commission rates, as well as monetization of the marketing?

And then third, maybe to address some of the recent concerns around maybe delivery rates, failed deliveries, and cancellations, where we're at now on that?

Thank you.

Thanks very much, Aaron.

On the first question, the answer is very much yes.

And we're seeing a lot of appetite from sellers, which include international brands, to start operating and distributing their goods and services in Africa.

And they very much see Jumia as a partner of choice, I would say, to do that.

We see a lot of brands also who have now experienced e-commerce in other regions and are very familiar with the development of e-commerce.

We have, in particular, a lot of discussions with sellers who are already present in Africa, notably in the [sentidee] sector.

And I think you will see more and more of those partnerships in the future.

And I think on the commission and the marketing, I agree with you that, for us, we like to keep commissions competitive.

And we, as you know, have multiple revenue streams on Jumia Express and on marketing and advertising.

And working with those brands for us is rather an opportunity to drive more revenues on those stream than necessarily on commission.

We would like to partner with them on marketing and advertising and Jumia Express rather than just increasing commissions.

And our goal is to, of course, grow the commission together with the business and generate revenues from diversified streams and more value-added services and advertising than necessarily the commissions.

Right?

Then on the failed deliveries, these are normal features of an e-commerce business.

And, for us, we have cancellations, failed deliveries, and returns; and those are expected to be higher in nascent e-commerce markets where the majority of the business is still cash on delivery.

And, for us, this actually represent monetization upsides, because today we carry certain costs on those transactions without booking a corresponding revenue.

So, of course, we see the upside there.

Great, thank you.

Ralph Schackart, William Blair.

A couple questions on JumiaPay.

Maybe just sort of frame the opportunity for that service that you provide; a little bit more color, if you could, on the Mastercard investment and how that might further accelerate JumiaPay adoption.

And then just a little bit more broader on it, do you look at JumiaPay as mainly just a Nigerian, West Africa, and Egyptian opportunity?

Or do you eventually think it would be broader across all your geographies?

Thank you.

Thanks very much, Ralph.

Let me just make notes to make sure I don't forget your three questions.

On the first question, we see two huge benefits of JumiaPay.

One is to increase the efficiency of our business, because of course JumiaPay is more efficient from a fulfillment perspective than cash on delivery.

And we are also feeling that it had some great impact on the consumer behavior.

So the number one is for us to make our business better.

Number two is to address two very exciting growth opportunities.

The first one of this growth opportunity is to distribute financial services on our marketplace.

And here this is a very, very natural extension of our existing platform.

We are connecting sellers and consumers with financial institutions to help the financial institutions distribute their products more effectively.

I will give you two examples here.

Number one, we have already in four of our markets a vendor lending marketplace, where we are providing our data to financial institutions, of course on an anonymous basis, to help them increase their scoring algorithm.

And then they are distributing loans directly on the Jumia seller center.

The second example is more recent in nature.

Yes, we introduced a micro loan company which now can distribute their micro loans directly on Jumia.

And those, of course, they are integrated with JumiaPay.

So it creates an opportunity for us to drive a lot of engagement, more GMV, and more exciting products and services for both the sellers and the consumers.

The second growth opportunity is obviously to become a payment platform and to process payments.

And today, JumiaPay only processes payments for Jumia.

And in the future, we intend to enable JumiaPay to be present on third-party platforms, which is of course a very exciting business.

With Mastercard, we've been working with Mastercard for now many years, and we've been partnering very well on the payment, we've been already doing a lot.

And with this new partnership, and I would say also with the investments, we get even closer and we've made bigger plans.

We're going to launch new products, new solutions, both for the sellers and the consumers, with the goal to increase the penetration of online payment and the penetration of JumiaPay.

So here you can expect to see more commercial offers jointly prepared and rolled out between Jumia and Mastercard across Africa.

And on the markets, which was your third question, we started JumiaPay in Nigeria and Egypt, because of course those two are our largest markets.

We recently rolled out JumiaPay in three more markets and we are now driving the adoption in those markets.

It's still too early to comment on that.

And we have given, in the past, some numbers in Nigeria and Egypt.

But certainly we intend to leverage or roll out, I would say, JumiaPay to almost all of our markets.

Okay, great.

Thank you, Sacha.

Sarah Simon, Berenberg.

I've got a couple of questions as well.

First one was on the third-party/first-party split in terms of GMV.

Can you give us any help in understanding how that shifted year on year?

Second one was Jumia Express: have you started monetizing that yet, or is it still just a cost to you?

And the third one was just a question -- and this is a bit more boring, on the numbers -- but the seasonality of working capital, obviously we haven't had quarterly results before.

So can you help us with the kind of phasing of inflows and outflows through the year, please?

Thanks.

Thank you very much, Sarah.

So third-party and first-party, in Q1 we've seen faster growth of the GMV from marketplace than on first-party, which is good, and this is something that we very much want to see.

Again, here we really use first-party opportunistically, so it may change from quarter to quarter.

And this is, again, why we very much encourage you to look at the GMV and the gross profit as the true barometers of the momentum.

Because by doing that, no matter what -- how much we do on retail and marketplace, the GMV remains the same and the gross profit remains the same.

So those are the real ways to look at our business.

And we are -- in Q1, we've done less first-party than -- or we've grown first-party slower than the marketplace, which has grown faster, which is very good.

On Jumia Express, we are starting to see some good signs and it's coming together.

You can see that we grew the value-added services by 86% year-over-year.

And we are seeing good times.

Again, here on Jumia Express, this is a process, right?

So for us this is really, really about first creating the value for the sellers and then starting to monetize that with time.

So we're seeing good times, and it is starting to come together.

Now on the working capital -- and here, Antoine, please feel free to chip in -- but basically you can -- you have to look at our working capital very much as a couple days of GMV in terms of receivables.

Should be a couple days, because those receivables come from our logistics partner.

Then for the payables, you can see we have about maybe between 20 and 25 days of payables because those are the remittance that we give to the tellers who have done the business on Jumia.

And then there can be some changes sometimes in the inventory.

If you look at the inventory at last Q1, I think we're talking about like three days of GMV or something like that, so it's rather small.

But sometimes it may be that we do some retail in preparation for a commercial event or something like that.

So we will explain whenever we see some changes in inventory.

But as you can see, we're talking about three, four days of GMV; so very, very limited.

And of course as you know we are asset light, so there's very little CapEx here.

I hope that answers your question.

Perfect, thanks.

Yes, that was great.

Thanks.

Brian Nowak, Morgan Stanley.

I have two.

Just the first one, Sacha, you mentioned to sort of expect GMV growth in line with historical rates.

Can you maybe talk to us about how you think about buyer growth over the course of the rest of 2019 and into 2020?

And bigger-picture on buyers, 4.3 million buyers after years of work in such a big TAM, what do you think has to really improve to drive faster buyer growth and a bigger buyer base?

And then the second one on fulfillment.

It looks like fulfillment came in a little bit higher than we expected on a per-package or absolute basis.

Can you just talk about some of the puts and takes that went on in the quarter between fulfillment, expense, and shipping expense that we should think about for the rest of the year?

Thanks.

Sure.

So look, we had 4.3 million consumers over the last 12 months, and this number has grown by, I think, 42% or 43% year on year.

And we grew the GMV by 58%.

Of course, we have to always put that in relationship with the efficiency that we are capturing on the marketing as well as the monetization, right?

So we increased our marketing spend by 12% and we drove the marketing -- or the increase of the consumers by much more than this.

We've also seen increase in the spend per consumer.

So we're seeing very strong dynamic; and we are operating, of course, with always three components in the equation, which is the GMV and the consumers growth, together with the marketing efficiency improvement, as well as the monetization that we are driving.

And those three, they come together.

So for us, when we look ahead -- and I will also address your second question -- we see that we have a lot of consumers who are yet to discover e-commerce.

And we certainly see that based on the survey and based on what the consumers say, the consumer really consider Jumia, and they have a very high level of awareness.

And we are in a phase where they are still learning and they are still getting educated about the benefits of e-commerce.

And in the prospectus, we had published a survey where we were asking the non-online shoppers: why have you never shopped online?

And some of the reasons were very much around mental barriers, or barriers which are not infrastructure-driven.

They were about: I don't know how to shop, or I'm not sure about the quality of the products, or I'm not sure the products are genuine, and those kind of barriers.

So we are really working on the education.

And the marketing investment that we make, as you can see, is very reasonable in the sense that we are growing it much less faster than GMV and active consumers.

And we are targeting all those marketing investments and efforts at how do we engage with the consumers to create the trust and the conditions for them to start buying on Jumia and start using Jumia for them to be part of their daily lives.

Now on fulfillment, I agree with you; and some of this increase is to some extent related to a slight faster increase of our business which is done on a cross-border basis.

And here, this is generating slightly higher fulfillment costs on a unit basis.

But also this is captured, I would say, in some of the revenue increase.

So for example, in the revenues you can see that the fulfillment paid by the consumers is growing quite substantially faster than the GMV, because we've seen a little bit of uptake in this part of the business.

So here we certainly continue to monitor that.

We had some good efficiency.

But of course the mix of the business can influence those expenses, depending on the location of the seller, if the seller is in cross-border or in local country.

Depending also on the mix of categories and the mix of geographies of the consumer.

So in this case, in this particular case for Q1, it's mostly the cross-border which has influenced it.

Okay.

Thanks.

Andrew Howell, Citi.

Three ones from me.

Firstly on the G&A expense, that was, I guess, EUR23.5 million, excluding SBC.

As you mentioned, obviously some IPO-related expenses in there in Q1.

And just wanting to get a sense of how much of that was one-off and if you -- does sort of that normalize for the rest of this year?

And can you give a little sense of how that might settle with respect to GMV?

Second question: you talk about rolling out JumiaPay in some new countries, and are you seeing any impact on this moving from postpay to prepay?

Can you give any color on how fast that evolution is happening, and over what scale you expect that to run over the next few quarters?

And finally just on the opinion piece from last week.

Just curious what your strategy is for responding to something like that.

Do you plan on publishing a rebuttal or a response, which is what some companies have done in similar situations?

Thanks a lot.

Thanks, Andrew.

Appreciate the questions.

I think on the first one, the G&A, some of the expense are lead concomitant with the IPO.

There's about EUR5 million in the G&A that we believe is nonrecurring.

We've not taken it out because we just for the -- we would tell you that on the call.

And certainly, for us, want to keep the G&A as stable as possible.

Obviously there will be some growth of the G&A relating to the growth of the GMV and the growth of the business.

But we still maintain that this is our objective, to continue to drive them in a very disciplined way and operate our platform and the growth with just a limited I would say increase of the G&A.

Now on rolling JumiaPay, obviously now that we have seen the success of JumiaPay in Nigeria and Egypt, everyone at Jumia is very eager to see JumiaPay coming to more markets.

And at the same time, of course, this represents some work, so we have to prioritize.

For now we have launched JumiaPay in a few more markets, I think three markets.

And we are going to launch it into a few more in the next few months, and from there we will be able to let you know how this is going.

For now, it's slightly too early.

And of course we know that JumiaPay being so important for us, it's something we are keen to give you more numbers on in the future.

Now on your third question, of course we think that we can address here any questions that there is about this.

And there's obviously a lot of -- there's -- we live in a free world where a lot of people can say a lot of things, and we are a very transparent company so we can take any questions that there is.

But at the same time, we don't want to feed -- we don't necessarily want to feed those types of organizations or people.

So here I ask you to ask all the questions so we can then have everyone hear the answers, and then we can all move on.

That's clear.

Thanks a lot.

This concludes our question-and-answer session.

I would now like to turn the conference back over to Sacha for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you very much, everyone, for the first earnings release and those good questions.

And once again we believe we have delivered very strong results this quarter: very strong growth of our GMV, very strong growth of our marketplace revenue, progress on the path to profitability, and progress on JumiaPay.

We see a lot of great momentum in the business.

We are very excited about the future and about our prospects and also the positive impact we can create in Africa.

We look forward to reconnecting next quarter with all of you.

And as I just said, we are available any time.

If there are any follow-up questions on any topics, we are very available, so do not hesitate to reach out and we'll take your questions any time.

Now thank you very much for your attention, and take care.

Bye.

This conference has now concluded.

Thank you for attending today's presentation.

You may now disconnect.