Jumia Technologies AG Q2 FY2021 Earnings Call

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Jumia’s Results Conference Call for the Second Quarter of 2021. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management’s prepared remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the call 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 second quarter 2021 earnings call. With us today are Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Jumia; as well as 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. Moreover, 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 Annual Report on Form 20-F as published on March 12, 2021. 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. I also would like to cover two housekeeping points. All our numbers will be presented in U.S. dollars going forward as a result of functional and presentation currency changes from the Euro to the U.S. dollar effective April 1, 2021. For convenience purposes, Q2 2021 results highlighted in Euro have been provided in the appendix of this presentation. I also would like to point out that all our growth rates we will mention in this presentation are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. With that, I’ll hand over to Sacha.

Thank you, Safae. Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. Our results for Q2 reflect what we have announced during our last call, increased investments in our platform to support our objectives of driving accelerated usage growth as well as JumiaPay. Jeremy will walk you through in a moment the detailed results, but I can already say that we have started to increase our investments in sales and advertising as well as technology expense to support our long-term growth. We’ve had the fastest growth of transactions in the last five quarters. This is early momentum that we want to build on to accelerate even more. And we have a great milestone on JumiaPay that allows us to process third-party payments. This focus on usage growth in JumiaPay is now possible because our fundamentals are very strong to support our long-term growth and also ensure that as the business scales, it turns profitable. I would like to remind how much the business has changed over the last years on Page 3. First, our marketplace has never been more diverse and relevant for our consumers. The share of GMV from everyday product categories is now 63%. It was 41% three years ago. This diversification has been in the making for many years as we’ve been working on the supply side of our marketplace, developing partnerships with brands and sellers, which puts us in a position to make significant inroads in those categories. Secondly, we have transformed our unit economics. Gross profit margin stands at 12% of GMV, almost doubling over the past two years. We’ve been generating positive gross profit after fulfillment for now seven quarters in a row. This is very important because we have now set unit economics at a level that gives us the flexibility to invest much more behind growth. And finally, we have significantly strengthened our balance sheet, raising over $570 million of cash over the past nine months, and this gives us the firepower to fund our growth investments. All this, as we’ve discussed in the past, was achieved with no particular tailwind from COVID. So our focus going forward is very clear, scale the platform and develop JumiaPay. On Page 4, here’s how we are executing across all areas of the business to serve these two objectives. We are ramping up marketing investments to drive even more brand awareness and support consumer education with a view to, of course, accelerate consumer acquisition and retention. We aim to drive both e-commerce and payment adoption. Our commercial efforts aim to provide the broadest and most relevant range of products and services with a focus on everyday categories. These categories cover physical goods like FMCG, grocery, fashion, beauty, but also lifestyle services, such as food delivery, grocery delivery, and digital services offered on the JumiaPay app. Our logistics operations are focused on constantly reducing delivery times and further increasing the network reach and convenience for consumers. Last but not least, technology is the backbone of all our operations and key to supporting user engagement and conversion rates. We aim to increase our tech headcount by 40% by the end of the year and expand our newly launched tech hub in the City of Cairo in Egypt. It is a very exciting time for us at Jumia with a busy pipeline of projects and innovation that will significantly enhance each step of the consumer journey and allow us to better serve both consumers and sellers. I’ll now hand over to Jeremy, who will walk you through the performance of Q2 in more detail and dive deeper into some of the initiatives I just mentioned.

Thank you, Sacha. Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the review of the usage trends during the quarter. We’re on Page 6. As Sacha mentioned, we are very focused on accelerating the usage growth. In this context, Q2 of this year was really a transition quarter where we ramped up our sales and advertising expense after six quarters of reduced marketing spend. Now what has changed versus last year is that we have built sufficient strength in our unit economics to allow us to invest more into growth. First, we are seeing early signs of acceleration in the business with the orders reaching $7.6 million, increasing by 13% year-over-year, which was the fastest volume growth of the past five quarters. When we look at the details of volume growth by product category, we see areas of strong momentum emerging very clearly. Food delivery was the fastest-growing category on our platform in volume terms, posting the highest ever number of quarterly orders up almost 60% and accounting for 22% of total orders on our platform during the quarter. Food delivery is the first area where we deployed our growth acceleration efforts late last year to reignite user growth after disruptions from the pandemic. The annual active consumers reached 7 million, up 3% as we continue to acquire new consumers and engage existing ones. GMV was $223.5 million, down 11% on a currency adjusted basis. In terms of trends by product category, we continue to see diversification of GMV in favor of everyday categories. On Page 7, you can see that phone and electronics went from accounting for 43% of the GMV in Q2 last year to 33% of the GMV in Q2 this year. Phone and electronics categories continue to see GMV decline during the quarter due to multiple factors, including supply disruption with global chipset shortages alongside muted consumer demand due to the high ticket size and discretionary nature of this item. In contrast, everyday categories and lifestyle services, particularly, are experiencing very strong momentum. Under the lifestyle services umbrella, we include both food delivery and digital services offered in the JumiaPay app. These categories are accounting for an increased share of GMV, contributing 14% in Q2 this year compared to 9% in Q2 last year. The fastest-growing category in GMV was the financial and digital services offered in JumiaPay. This category posted its largest ever quarterly GMV in Q2 this year, up more than 60% compared to last year, marking a strong quarter, up 56% compared to Q2 two years ago. On the physical goods front, the fastest-growing category in GMV terms was fashion, which continues to be the largest category volume-wise on our platform. I would also like to highlight the grocery and consumable category, which is among the focus categories for us. Here, we are leveraging both our on-demand and e-commerce platforms to meet a variety of consumer needs. Our e-commerce platform caters to larger grocery basket sizes for planned purchases. We have accelerated the pace of our brand onboarding in this category. In Q2 this year alone, we onboarded over 780 FMCG brands and sellers, increasing product listings in this category from approximately 65,000 at the end of June last year to almost 100,000 at the end of June this year. Through our on-demand platform, Jumia Food, consumers can make add-on purchases of grocery and FMCG items from convenience outlets and supermarkets for delivery within one hour. We are also piloting the use of dark stores or micro-fulfillment centers located in high population density areas for grocery orders. This is a strategic category for us because it drives user engagement and stickiness. While we’re encouraged to see early signs of acceleration in the business and multiple pockets of strong momentum, we have a significant opportunity to meaningfully accelerate today’s growth on our platform. I’d like to give you more color on what we are doing on the marketing and technology front to drive this usage acceleration. These initiatives are informed by consumer insights as well as multiple pilots in the past few months. On Page 8, starting with marketing, we are ramping up our marketing investments across below and above the line to drive consumer acquisition and retention. We have highlighted here selected initiatives we are implementing across these channels. Our below-the-line activities are focused on online performance channels such as Google and Facebook and cover all phases of our consumer journey, starting from brand awareness, customer targeting, app installs, as well as retargeting returning consumers. We are increasing the overall amount of marketing spend on these channels in 2021 compared to 2020, leveraging the efficiency learnings from last year. We intend to implement a full-funnel approach, particularly on Facebook that goes beyond direct response ads and includes more brand awareness campaigns with more engaging video content targeted towards relevant audiences. Lastly, we plan to further scale our social media influencer channel on the back of the success of this channel as a consumer education and acquisition tool in certain countries, such as Egypt. On the above-the-line channels, we are increasing our overall investment in offline marketing channels to drive even more brand visibility and consumer education with always-on above-the-line campaigns. We are also leveraging geo-targeting tools to identify underpenetrated areas and launched targeted out-of-home advertising campaigns. Lastly, we are deploying more targeted consumer incentives enhancing our consumer engagement strategy with the rollout of our new CRM growth tool. We have developed and piloted the CRM tool based on machine learning algorithms that allows us for more refined audience targeting and more tailored push notification content, allowing us to both reduce opt-out and drive usage uplift. There is no single silver bullet with respect to marketing. It all comes down to granular and disciplined execution across each and every step of the consumer journey. That’s really the spirit of our approach. Moving on to technology on Page 9. Tech is the backbone of our platform, and we are increasing our investment in this area to build more products and features to enhance user experience and engagement. We are planning to increase our tech headcount by 40% by the end of the year, focusing on our newly launched tech hub in Cairo, Egypt. Our Cairo hub will host over 100 tech professionals and will include dedicated teams for front-end projects. We highlighted a few examples of such projects on this slide. We plan to increase the personalization of our site content, including homepage product widgets, search, etc. Our customers are responding very well to gamified content. We plan to enhance our daily and weekly animations with dedicated teams for gamification content creation, flash sales, and branding campaigns. Lastly, we plan to start developing selected social commerce features such as user-generated content, including video picture uploading, reviews, and more content features for sellers and influencers. These investments are long-term in nature, and we expect them to pay off over time as we execute our acceleration strategy. Let’s now turn to JumiaPay on Page 11, which forms an integral part of our acceleration strategy. We have been consistent in our vision for JumiaPay, which is to first develop our payment and fintech solutions within the Jumia platform and ultimately offer them off-platform to third parties. We are pleased to announce a major step toward off-platform payment development in Egypt. The National Bank of Egypt, the largest state-owned bank in Egypt, obtained an approval in principle from the Central Bank of Egypt to offer certain services in partnership with the payment service provider. This will allow us to process payments off-platform on behalf of third-party merchants in Egypt. This is the very first step in the expansion of our services off-platform, and we’ll keep you updated on the relevant developments on this front as we build out these activities. On the digital and financial services side, we continue to expand the range of relevant services available to consumers on the JumiaPay app, adding 19 new services in Q2 this year. For example, in Morocco, the Jawaz solution is now available to consumers on the JumiaPay app, allowing them to recharge their highway toll fees on the JumiaPay app without the need to stop at physical tolls on their journeys. Moving on to JumiaPay performance in Q2 on Page 12. While TPV decreased by 4% on both the constant currency and currency adjusted basis, in parallel with the decrease in GMV. On-platform penetration of JumiaPay as a percentage of GMV increased to 25.3% in Q2 this year from 23.5% in Q2 last year. We’re pleased to see that multiple countries within our footprint have reached significantly higher penetration rates, with Nigeria and Egypt surpassing 40% of TPV penetration as a percentage of GMV in the first half of 2021. Moving on to volumes on Page 13. JumiaPay transactions increased by 12%, the fastest transaction growth rate of the past four quarters. JumiaPay transaction growth was supported by accelerating volume growth in the business with particularly strong momentum in the food delivery category. Overall, 35.4% of orders placed on the Jumia platform in the second quarter of 2021 were completed using JumiaPay compared to 35.6% in the second quarter of 2020. There is meaningful runway for us to further grow JumiaPay both on and off-platform. Our increased investment in marketing and technology includes a portion for JumiaPay to drive payment adoption and support product development. I now hand over to Antoine, who will walk you through our financial performance in more detail.

Thank you. Hello everyone. I’ll start with our monetization metric. In Q2 2021, marketplace revenue was up 1% and gross profit up 4%. Our gross profit margin as a percentage of GMV continued to expand year-over-year from 10.2% in Q2 2020 to 12% in Q2 2021. Let’s unpack this trend by looking at the details of each marketplace revenue stream on Page 16. Having achieved a robust level of unit economics with gross profit after fulfillment at $1 per order, we made the deliberate choice to reinvest some of this profitability back into growth. As part of that, we took targeted actions to support usage growth, increasing consumer price incentives and shipping discounts. These drove a decrease in commissions and fulfillment revenue by 7% and 2% respectively. On the other hand, value-added services revenue increased by 10%, the fastest growth rate of the past six quarters. This was the result of increased volumes on our platform, which led to higher shipping contributions collected from sellers. It was also supported by increased take-up by sellers of our warehousing services, particularly cross-border sellers collaborating on our local storage facilities to reduce delivery times for our consumers. As we reduce monetization intensity on the commissions and fulfillment revenue, we ramp up new monetization streams to give us further flexibility to invest in growth. One of these streams is marketing and advertising, which increased by 18% in Q2 2021, supported by robust growth of our sponsored product solutions. We are constantly enhancing the user experience and relevance of our ad products to drive increased click-through rates, and we do so through better audience segmentation, innovative ad placement, and overall improved ad operations and analytics. Another key monetization stream for us is our logistics offering to third parties on Page 17. This offering was launched in early 2021, and it is experiencing strong momentum with a record 1.3 million packages delivered in Q2 2021, compared to 0.5 million packages in the full year 2020 on behalf of over 300 clients. Our clients span a very broad range of sectors, and we have highlighted a few examples of logistics as a service clients we worked with during the quarter. In Ivory Coast, we collaborated with UNICEF for the delivery of over 16 million Long-Lasting Impregnated Mosquito Nets to households across over 100 remote health districts. In Ghana, we worked with Far East Mercantile Limited, a leading FMCG distribution company, with a portfolio of over 1,500 SKUs across Africa. We collaborated with the group for line haulage services to their customers in Ghana. In Nigeria, we worked with Wema Bank, a fully digital bank, offering them card-product delivery to customers across Nigeria via road and air freight. We are very encouraged by the strong momentum in our logistics as a service offering, and we intend to continue building this business to meet the logistic needs of a broad range of industries in Africa. Whether it’s advertising, logistics as a service, or payment services in the future, we have a compelling suite of assets and services to support the growth of businesses in Africa and their transition to the digital economy. Building these services into sustainable monetization streams provides us with the flexibility and firepower to further enhance the growth of our consumer-facing activities. Moving on to costs on Page 19. Over the past two years, we have transformed our unit economics and the economics of fulfillment in particular. Gross profit after fulfillment expense reached $7.7 million, up 16%. This is our seventh consecutive quarter of positive gross profit after fulfillment expense. Fulfillment expense remained stable in Q2 2021 versus Q2 2020, despite an acceleration in orders, as the increase in freight and shipping costs was offset by staff cost savings and increased efficiency in our fulfillment centers. Additionally, we are able to pass on an increasing proportion of our fulfillment expenses to the combination of consumers and sellers via our fulfillment and value-added services revenue streams, respectively. The pass-through of our fulfillment expense measured as the ratio of the sum of fulfillment and value-added services revenue to our fulfillment expense increased from 73% in Q2 2020 to 75% in Q2 2021. This ratio may fluctuate in the near-term as we intend to use targeted shipping subsidies to support usage growth. Moving on to sales and advertising costs on Page 20. We are also increasing our sales and advertising investments to support usage growth. Sales and advertising expense reached $17 million in Q2 2021, more than double the spend in Q2 2020. However, this is still largely in line with the amount spent in Q2 2020 as we return to more historical levels of marketing investment after a period of significant reduction over the prior six quarters. These marketing investments are deployed across all relevant customer acquisition and retention channels as outlined by Jeremy earlier. Turning to technology and G&A expense on Page 22. Technology is another area of increased investment with technology and content expense reaching $8.4 million, up 8%. General and administrative expense, excluding stock-based compensation, reached $26.6 million, down 15%. This trend was mostly attributable to a decrease in provisions, particularly as the second quarter of 2020 included $5 million of provisions for a class action settlement. Moving on to adjusted EBITDA on Page 22. We have clear objectives of usage growth acceleration and JumiaPay development, and our capital allocation reflects that. Adjusted EBITDA loss increased by 15% as our increase in gross investments, sales and advertising, and technology expenses was larger than the expansion of gross profit after fulfillment expense and the savings generated in G&A expense, excluding stock-based compensation. Let’s now turn to our balance sheet and cash flow. We are increasing our growth investments in an asset-light manner, leveraging specific benefits of our operating model. CapEx in Q2 2021 was $1.5 million as we operate Jumia Logistics as a platform with very limited CapEx requirements. The net change in working capital resulted in an outflow of $12.6 million in Q2 2021, mainly attributable to an increase in payables associated with the Jumia Anniversary campaign, which took place in June 2021. Cash utilization for the quarter, defined as cash used in operations and investing activities, was $27.4 million in Q1 2021. This is significantly lower than the adjusted EBITDA loss of $42 million, thanks to the working capital inflow during the quarter. The cash and cash equivalent position at the end of June 2021 was $637.7 million. This stronger balance sheet position gives us the firepower to increase in a disciplined manner our investments in usage acceleration and JumiaPay development. With that, I’ll hand over to Sacha for concluding remarks.

Thank you, Antoine. Thank you very much. In summary, Q2 was a transition quarter where we ramped up our sales and advertising expense after six quarters of reduced marketing spend. We started to see some early positive signs, and we are confident about the impact of those investments on usage growth acceleration. As we have highlighted, the past two years have been transformational for Jumia and have set strong foundations for us to accelerate execution on our priorities. We’re very excited about the new phase we are entering. We see a vast and untapped market opportunity, both on the e-commerce and fintech fronts, and we believe that we are uniquely equipped to capitalize on this opportunity. The objectives for us going forward are very clear: accelerate usage growth, develop JumiaPay, and deploy more capital, particularly in marketing and technology to achieve these objectives. As we mentioned during the last call, the acceleration will not happen overnight, and we expect it to be gradual. We have already seen some early signs of success in Q2 with accelerating order growth, whether it’s food delivery or the JumiaPay app services. We plan to continue sharing with you milestones of success as we execute our strategy. Many of the investments we are making now, and that Jeremy told you more about earlier, are long-term in nature. We will take no shortcuts in pursuit of quick wins. We are committed to building a successful business in the thriving ecosystem for our consumers and partners for decades to come. While we are currently very focused on growth acceleration, reaching breakeven remains very much on the agenda. Our capital allocation and approach to costs will continue to be disciplined. We may see some fluctuations in unit economics in the near term as we ramp up investments, but we ultimately expect usage growth and the diversification of our monetization streams to support our path to profitability. Thank you very much for your attention, and operator, we are now ready to take questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions. Your first question for today is coming from Aaron Kessler. Please announce your affiliation, then pose your question.

Great, thank you. I’m Aaron Kessler, Raymond James. Just quickly, if you can discuss maybe the COVID impact you’re seeing in the quarter, maybe into Q3 as well. Obviously, it’s still a top of mind for a lot of investors. And then second, just on the marketing side. What are some of the key measures that we should be watching to analyze the success there? Is it more focused on user growth near term, GMV? And just kind of what are the key metrics you’re going to be looking at to analyze the success? And should we start to expect the benefit in Q3? Or is this more of a multiyear journey on the marketing side? Thank you.

Thanks for the questions, Aaron. On the COVID impact, as you all know and as you know, we’ve been commenting quite a lot on that. Perhaps it’s been more of a disruption than a tailwind. This has been largely because in Africa, we’ve not seen lockdowns in the same way we have in, for example, Europe or the U.S. People could still shop; they could still go to stores normally during the day. What we have seen, on the contrary, is a lot of restrictions on movement, such as curfews, preventing our delivery partners from doing deliveries at night and preventing restaurants from opening at night, even for delivery. There are still some restrictions happening here and there, but I would call those rather minor. We believe that we are operating more normally right now as we have been over the last few months. So no particular changes in the last few weeks, just some minor adjustments. But again, keep in mind that for us, it has been overall more of a disruption on a net basis than a tailwind. When it comes to marketing, it’s a very good question. There’s obviously some lag between the investments we’re making in sales and advertising and the benefits we are seeing in terms of usage acceleration. What we want to see over time is an increase in three usage metrics: GMV, orders, and active consumers. Given our focus and priorities, clearly, the orders metric tends to grow the fastest because we aim to drive the everyday categories and engage with consumers. Therefore, we think that the orders metric will be the one to watch more than the others. However, over time, we want to grow all usage metrics. The KPIs we want to track to ensure growth acceleration include the year-over-year growth ratio of these metrics and the efficiency of our marketing, both over GMV, the number of orders, and the annual active consumers. The benefits will be gradual. We are starting to see some in Q2, and we are confident that we will see more of them gradually in the next few quarters.

Great. Thank you, Sacha.

Your next question is coming from Sarah Simon. Please announce your affiliation then pose your question.

Hi, Sarah from Berenberg. I have got two questions, please. First one was, as you ramped up marketing investment, can you give us sort of color on what you’re seeing in terms of the evolution of customer acquisition costs? The second one is, if we look at Slide 7, and that’s obviously becoming quite familiar in terms of the shift away from Foods & Electronics. So you’ve talked about FMCG build-out. I’m assuming that FMCG is growing faster than overall fashion, you said is the biggest – is growing faster than FMCG. I'm just wondering what category isn't growing or is maybe shrinking? If you can just give us a bit more color there? Thanks.

Yes, of course. Thanks, Sarah. On the customer acquisition cost, it’s tricky because we’re doing a lot of investments in consumer education and bottom-line activities, like billboards and YouTube videos. One has to be careful when determining the allocation between new consumers and returning consumers. Depending on those assumptions, you could have a very different view of customer acquisition costs. We prefer to look at marketing efficiency over a four-quarter period. Considering last 12-month active consumers and the marketing that we invest to engage those consumers. I believe we’ll see this metric continue to trend in the right direction. At the same time, given how much we have reduced our marketing investment over the last six quarters and now brought sales and advertising back to the level of 2019, we might deviate from the last 12-month efficiency. We’ll have to see how the next few quarters shape up, but I believe we'll trend in the right direction as consumers become comfortable with online transactions and e-commerce. Regarding Slide 7, overall, the trend indicates that Fashion, Beauty, and FMCG categories are doing well. Fashion is doing well, and we may have seen significant importance placed on masks and COVID-related items last year, which may influence some changes. However, there isn’t a specific category that’s underperforming; it seems to be more of a general trend.

Okay. And then within digital, I think last quarter, you highlighted that you actually scaled back some digital payments that weren't particularly profitable for you. But in this presentation, you’ve highlighted digital services as a growth category. So have you changed that philosophy? I think services like mobile phone recharge were scaled back in Q1, but have you switched that more back on in Q2?

No, not specifically. The trend for us continues, and we have made decisions based on customer lifetime value with those categories. So that trend continues; we haven’t made significant changes in Q2. I think it's positive that we have more users on the JumiaPay app doing more than just payments. We see a lot of momentum in categories like gaming and financial services, microloans, and so on.

Okay. Sorry, final follow-up on that would be, given that some digital services are less emphasized, if we think about growth in food delivery, separately from digital services. Do you think the growth has been higher than from 9 to 14 would imply? Did digital services maybe stay flat given some of the changes you discussed?

On digital services, usage is increasing in areas that I mentioned while possibly seeing less activity in mobile airtime. As for food delivery, last year in Q2 was significantly disrupted due to the pandemic, so we've seen less disruption this year, resulting in improved growth for food delivery.

Your next question is coming from Lamont Williams. Please announce your affiliation and pose your question.

Hi, Lamont Williams with Stifel. So just a quick question. When we look at marketing expense for the balance of the year, is this level that we saw this quarter kind of the run rate we can expect for investment going forward? Or should we see this ramp even more?

We would hope to gradually ramp up from this level. Part of the marketing is an investment in the brand, and part of it is performance and conversion-driven. So please don’t take it as definitive. The intention would be to gradually increase from this level.

Okay. Great. And as you look – I’m sorry, go ahead.

You should also look at this with a two-year perspective in mind. You can see that in 2019, we spent almost as much as we just did for Q2. If we think about Q3, Q4, we have Black Friday coming, so you need to consider that two-year perspective to appreciate a gradual increase.

Okay, great. Thank you.

There are no more questions in queue.

Great. Well, thank you very much, everyone, and looking forward to updating you in the next few months. And as always, if there’s any feedback or questions, we are available. Thank you so much. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today’s conference call. You may disconnect your phone lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.