Jiji, a Lagos-headquartered online marketplace, has acquired Bikroy, Bangladesh’s largest online marketplace platform, 13 months after entering the country as Bikroy’s direct competitor. The deal value was not disclosed.
Jiji’s notorious strategy: The company’s market entry has a pattern where it enters a new market, competes with the dominant local platform, tries to understand the terrain, and then acquires the competitor to scale.
In 2022, Jiji acquired Tonaton, formerly owned by Saltside Technologies, in Ghana after years of competing directly against it. Before then, it had acquired OLX Africa’s operations in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania after years of intense competition.
Jiji is not shy about it: CEO Anton Volianskyi said the Bangladesh move was a deliberate, phased plan to first test the market, before launching a full-scale expansion.
High-scale e-commerce plays thrive in markets where the Internet, smartphones, and a little bit of customer willingness to trust online listings exist. Jiji, after testing the Bangladeshi market 13 months ago, thinks it has all three.
What happens now? The acquired Bikroy will continue to operate independently of Jiji, but a few changes will happen. The parent company will fold Bikroy under its tech stack.
Jiji, after acquiring another asset from former competitor Saltside Technologies, has said that it did not target its businesses. It was simply business as usual, with both sides likely finding incentives to consolidate.
Saltside now exits Bangladesh, but continues to run another e-commerce startup, Ikran, in Sri Lanka. After acquiring Bikroy, Jiji has become a major player in Bangladesh’s $6 billion e-commerce market, where major players, like Alibaba-owned Daraz, also exist.