Africa’s e-commerce...

According to the stats available on Statista, the African e-commerce industry is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.7 percent between 2017 and 2024.

In 2017, the industry’s annual revenue was just $7.7 billion, but it is now expected to increase to $42.3 billion in 2024. Thus, the yearly income stands to increase by almost 500 percent in seven years.

In the last couple of years, the pandemic has also helped the industry, like everywhere else on the globe. Thus, the report said it can also be expected that the recent surge in growth will slow down in the coming years. In 2021, the African e-commerce industry brought in $28 billion in revenue.

Compared to $21.4 billion in 2020, the 2021 figure represented a 31 percent annual increase. As per the report, the annual growth rate is expected to decline to nine percent by 2025 gradually.

Amid this positive news, opportunity beckons on Nigeria, the continent’s biggest user of smartphones and with the most internet penetration, with 109.2 million internet most active users (MAUs) as of January 2022, and 48.12 mobile penetration, to expand its economic base.

Continent wide, the user base would cross 500 million by 2025, the report said. The growth in the African e-commerce industry is primarily down to the expanding e-commerce user base on the continent. In 2017, only 138.9 million people shopped online in Africa. This figure is expected to grow to 519.8 million in 2024, at a CAGR of 17.9 percent. It is interesting to note that the revenue growth rate is higher than that of the user base.

Furthermore, the e-commerce penetration in the African population in 2024 is expected to be 40 percent. Therefore, there is significant room for further growth in the African e-commerce industry, the report noted.