Nigeria’s largest consumer goods purveyors have inked an agreement with eCommerce platform Omnibiz designed to increase sales and cut costs after the COVID lockdowns and smartphone use triggered an eCommerce boom.
As Bloomberg reported Friday (April 8), the Lagos-based FinTech has signed more than 12 companies doing business in Nigeria — Coca-Cola, Nestle, Unilever and Procter & Gamble among them — who will use Omnibiz’s platform, which tracks sales from distributors to retailers.
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In an interview with Bloomberg, Omnibiz CEO Deepankar Rustagi said transactions on the company’s Mplify product have reached $360 million, with the goal to increase that number to $600 million by next year.
With this deal, Omnibiz has the opportunity to digitize its new clients’ local yearly revenue, which comes to $1.2 billion and makes up about 3% of Nigeria’s total fresh produce and packaged foods market, according to data from KPMG.
Bloomberg notes that in Nigeria — the largest country population-wise in Africa and its largest economy — most products are moved through informal or traditional channels such as warehouses, markets, malls and kiosks. When COVID happened, it caused a shift in how products were distributed and how people shopped, in this case, by going online.
“The manufacturers are making more revenue because they are able to see the movement of their goods and can increase the supply at a lower cost,” said Rustagi. “We are in the business of making retail simple.”
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Last year, Omnibiz has raised $3 million for its B2B supply chain management technology, and
launched two new features for retailers: a buy now, pay later (BNPL) option as well as a bookkeeping app called MyStore.
‘’With the introduction of MyStore App, retailers can now replace the traditional paper-based bookkeeping with the automated bookkeeping app,” Rustagi said at the launch.
Meanwhile, the BNPL option is designed to help retailers scale their operations, as they’ll gain the chance to buy more goods and pay for them after making a sale.