UPS Partners With Jumia To Grow Its Reach Across Africa

A new partnership between UPS and Jumia will see the former leverage the latter’s network across Africa to increase its reach across the continent. The partnership will see global logistics and package delivery company UPS gain access to Jumia’s last-mile delivery infrastructure.

Essentially, UPS customers can now either drop off or pick up packages at/from Jumia stations in Nigeria, Morocco and Kenya. The plan is to extend this to other countries starting with Ghana and Ivory Coast and eventually capturing the continent.

Jumia’s business saw the growth it’s enjoying now because it wanted to capture customers in remote areas that were by default “abandoned”. The company gave people in remote and overlooked areas the ability to make orders online and get these orders delivered to them. Eventually, the company opened up its logistics marketplace to third parties and this is what UPS is leveraging – Jumia’s wide access.

According to Jumia’s Senior Vice President of Logistics, Apoorva Kumar, “At the beginning of our journey (launch of the e-commerce platform), 10 years ago, logistics infrastructure was one of the most challenging aspects of our operating environment. This challenge was a catalyst for us to build an unparalleled logistics platform in Africa offering our sellers and consumers reliable, convenient and cost-effective delivery services.”

“Today, we are helping other businesses overcome these infrastructure challenges by giving them access to our logistics platform. We are delighted and humbled by the opportunity to partner up with UPS, a global logistics leader, to offer them last mile solutions in Africa. We view this as a validation of the strength of our logistics platform as well as an incentive to double down on our efforts to further enhance our services and build a world-class logistics business in Africa,” he added.

Speaking on the partnership, UPS’ President of Engineering and Operations for Indian subcontinent, Middle East and Africa, Gregory Goba Ble said that “UPS’s asset-light approach, like the Jumia partnership, offers a pathway for businesses to quickly and reliably connect to new customers around the world through our global network, potentially accelerating their revenue growth.

Jumia has about 600 partners enabling its last-mile delivery. It also has about 3,000 pickup stations in its 11 African markets and this is why the partnership is a very strategic one for UPS.