JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – The retail price of petrol in South Africa will increase by nearly 1 percent from May 4, while the price of wholesale diesel will largely remain steady, the energy department said on Monday.
The price of petrol will increase by 12 cents to 12.74 rand per litre in the commercial hub of Gauteng province, while diesel will go down by 1 cents to 10.52 rand per litre, the department said in a statement.
(Reporting by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo; Editing by Alison Williams)
Afroplan is a new online and mobile platform that connects users in Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal and Togo with grocery store chains to learn about discounts and promotions in real-time.
Big-box grocery stores are still a relatively new phenomenon in developing countries. Until just a few years ago, the vast majority of citizens living in even the metropolitan areas of such countries did their grocery shopping in locally-run markets filled with locally or regionally sourced foods. With the increase in chain grocery stores around the world, shoppers are adapting to the “one-stop-shop” mentality, including the concept of discounts and promotions.
Afroplan is a new mobile and online platform created by Cletus Razakou, a young Ivorian-Togolese digital expert and app developer. Afroplan bridges the gap between retailers and consumers by allowing users to input their personal data, such as location and material interests, and alerting them when a near-by retailer has a discount on a relevant item. While currently present only in three West African nations, a region home to 37 or 13% of Africa’s commercial centers, Afroplan is available on all smartphone platforms.
Users are able to input all varieties of material interests, from specific food items to the latest tablet, and are able to make informed choices about the right time to buy. Razakou was frustrated by the lack of communication between retailers and consumers regarding promotions, and realized that if a platform were created where retailers and consumers could alert one another about promotions, more Africans would benefit from these bargains.
This not only benefits consumers, but benefits retailers: many stores experience financial losses due to the expiry of food-products or to the fast turnover of tastes and preferences in material goods. Stores are now able to inform a broader range of consumers about potential savings while ridding themselves of soon-to-be-obsolete stock.
The platform works through a two-pronged approach: the first is that supermarkets and other retailers are charged a flat fee to post individual promotions. The second is that sellers can purchase specialized advertising space to reach a broader range of consumers, including those who have not specifically listed a product as one of their interests. This is not only beneficial for the app as a money-making scheme, but is beneficial to retailers: the more specialized advertising they purchase, the more people see their products, and the more people will be interested in purchasing a discounted item, even if they had not listed it as a preferred item. In this way, retailers are able to expand their consumer base by creating a culture of desire while preventing losses incurred from expired and unsold products.
Of course, users benefit as well: they are now able to make informed choices about how to best-spend their hard-earned money. Consumers are able to choose from eight categories of goods: fashion, home decor, electronics, beauty, telephones, infant/baby, food, and overstock items.
Creating an app for an emerging industry is not without its challenges. Razakou said that the main challenges during this process were financial. It was challenging, Razakou said, to publicize the platform to potential clients (stores) and users in an efficient manner in all three countries, because they had not yet received investments from clients. Fortunately, Afroplan’s initial success indicates that financial barriers may no longer be prohibitive for expansion.
Afroplan is an interesting, innovative approach to discount consumption. Connecting users in real-time to see the latest discounts is a new way to encourage consumption in West Africa, and, for those living in areas with supermarkets that opt to work with Afroplan, could lead to substantial savings on big ticket items. Unlike shopping at a local African market, buyers are not generally able to bargain in a supermarket, which takes the power away from the consumer. Afroplan gives shoppers some modicum of power when supermarkets are growing in popularity and number. No longer do citizens of Senegal, Togo and Cote d’Ivoire have to choose between the convenience of a one-stop-shop and the potentially low prices of shopping at good-specific markets.
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa’s trade balance swung to a 2.92 billion rand ($206.10 million) surplus in March from a revised 1.27 billion rand deficit in February, the national revenue agency said on Friday.
Exports were up by 6.3 percent to 96.13 billion rand on a month-on-month basis, while imports rose by 1.6 percent to 93.22 billion rand on a month-on-month basis, the South African Revenue Service said in a statement.
($1 = 14.1678 rand)
(Reporting by Mfuneko Toyana; Editing by James Macharia)
TUNIS (Reuters) – Tunisia’s central bank kept its key interest rate unchanged at 4.25 percent, the spokesman of bank said on Friday.
The bank last cut its main interest rate in October, from 4.75 percent, in a bid to boost economic growth as inflation fell. Inflation was 4.9 percent in 2015, down from 5.5 percent in 2014.
(Reporting By Tarek Amara; editing by Patrick Markey)
LAGOS (Reuters) – Lafarge Africa is in the middle of a roadshow to market a 60 billion naira ($302 million) bond programme to refinance loans at United Company of Nigeria (UNICEM), which it acquired last year, its finance chief said on Thursday.
“We are in the process of restructuring the UNICEM debt. We are in the middle of a roadshow,” Lafarge Africa Chief Finance Officer Anders Kristiansson told an analysts call.
“We want to refinance the U.S. dollar borrowings that we have in UNICEM.”
($1 = 198.55 naira)
(Reporting by Chijioke Ohuocha; Editing by Alexander Smith)
CAIRO (Reuters) – Egypt’s Commercial International Bank (CIB) approved a two-week extension for an offer by Beltone Financial to acquire its subsidiary CI Capital, CI Capital’s Chief Executive Officer Mahmoud Atalla told Reuters.
The offer was due to expire on Thursday.
“CIB approved Beltone’s request to extend the period of the offer to acquire CI Capital by two weeks, ending on May 12,” Atalla said.
In February, CIB signed a deal to sell investment bank CI Capital to Beltone, a unit of billionaire Naguib Sawiris’ Orascom Telecom OTMT.CA, for 924 million Egyptian pounds ($104 million) but the deal has stalled pending approval from Egyptian regulators.
Sawiris said at the time he planned to merge CI Capital with Beltone Financial, which OTMT bought last year, to create one of Egypt’s largest investment firms, but the deal has faced a series of delays.
The Egyptian Financial Supervisory Authority said this month that the deal was delayed pending the resolution of a court case and other issues, including a violation by Sawiris of pre-existing pledges to the EFSA.
Sawiris’s bid for CI Capital was also challenged in February when a unit of the state-owned National Bank of Egypt made a counter-offer. It later withdrew.
Sawiris later said the deal was being held up by national security concerns and criticised the state for meddling in business, adding that it discouraged investors.
(Reporting by Ehab Farouk; Writing by Asma Alsharif; Editing by Susan Fenton and Ed Osmond)
African Internet Group (AIG) has become the continent’s first ever start-up company to be valued at over $1 billion.
African Internet Group (AIG) has been a trailblazer since the company was launched, in 2012, and it has now become the continent’s first ever “unicorn” startup. A “unicorn” simply refers to any startup company that becomes valued at over $1 billion, of which there are only 151 across the globe.
While such success is an incredible achievement for any business, to attain such status within only 4 years of launching is an astounding feat.
It is not simply the matter of how AIG can provide employment and services in Africa, but how such success inspires others to pursue their ambitions within the continent.
It was expected that AIG would reach its “unicorn” standing by early this year, as turnover from its numerous brands continued to soar. Then, in March, the French insurance group AXA announced that it had purchased an 8% share of the company for $326 million, and AIG finally had a valuation of over $1 billion.
Within weeks of this announcement, the organization had further investment. French mobile phone company Orange declared it had put a further $85 million into AIG, adding still more revenue to the startup’s burgeoning resources.
While Orange’s plans for cross-promotion with AIG are not yet clear, AXA will look to sell insurance packages through AIG’s largest source of income, its Jumia online retail brand.
Jérémy Hodara
Jumia was set-up, alongside AIG, by co-founders Jérémy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec to provide African customers with an online shopping experience that matched the one offered by Amazon to consumers outside of Africa. While primarily focused in Nigeria, Jumia has expanded into a further 10 countries.
As Jumia flourished, AIG bought up and invested in other African companies that tapped into the demand for greater services in retail and leisure. The AIG portfolio includes the likes of Hellofood, an app for food delivery and Easy Taxi, which is essentially an African Uber.
AIG now controls 71 companies across 26 nations in Africa, with 10 of these companies involved in the e-commerce sector. The growth in the e-commerce market has been “double-digit…month after month” according to CEO, Jérémy Hodara.
Whenever a company realizes the level of growth that AIG has experienced, it is pertinent to ask: just what did they do to achieve such huge and rapid success? In the case of AIG, there are a number of factors that have allowed the company to do something unprecedented in Africa, with two in particular standing out.
The first of these was the focus on understanding and meeting the wishes of local markets. In an interview with Forbes magazine, Hodara explained that many African consumers were unsure about online shopping and trust had to be carefully fostered. This was done by offering not only exceptional service but by giving options that would be unusual in a market like America. One example of such options was cash on delivery, as Hodara said, “That way, people have assurance they can pay when the product arrives.”
The second major differential, that marks AIG’s group of e-commerce sites apart, has been their vertical integration. While most retailers in the US or Europe would outsource delivery to an existing company, this would simply not provide the level of customer service AIG wanted in Africa. Therefore, they use their own fleet of drivers, which Hodara explains is “larger than UPS, Fedex and DHL in Nigeria.”
AIG also employs its own online marketing and IT teams, which, aside from ensuring quality control, also reduces costs. Hodara says, “We believe we need to control the value chain from A-Z.”
Online retail is an area that Hodara believes will eclipse “bricks and mortar retail” within Africa. With that in mind, it has been a huge boon to AIG to have struck deals with the continent’s largest telecommunications companies, Rocket Internet, Milicom International Cellular and MTN.
Even more tantalizingly, McKinsey Consultants predict that within 9 years’ time, Internet penetration in Africa will have hit 50%. The opportunity for even greater expansion is evidently within AIG’s grasp.
A few years ago, an African “unicorn” might have seemed a proposition almost as unbelievable as its namesake, but AIG has not just become a first, they have potentially changed forever how investors view African startups.
LUANDA (Reuters) – Angola has opened an investigation into the conduct of the management at the local unit of failed Portuguese bank Banco Espirito Santo, Attorney General Joao Maria de Sousa said on Wednesday.
Banco Espirito Santo (BES) collapsed in 2014 under the weight of its founding family’s debts and exposure to bad loans in Angola.
Portugal’s Novo Banco was carved out as the “good bank” from BES, while its Angolan unit Banco Espirito Santo Angola (BESA) was reincarnated as Banco Economico, with new shareholders including state oil company Sonangol.
“We have opened an inquiry on Banco Espirito Santo Angola management. This inquiry was an initiative of the bank shareholders,” de Sousa told reporters.
“I can not talk about the possibility of arrests in this process because I don’t know the facts.”
(Reporting by Herculano Coroado, Writing by Stella Mapenzauswa, Editing by Angus MacSwan)
MAPUTO (Reuters) – Mozambique provided guarantees on loans to state firms Proindicus and Mozambique Asset Management to protect strategic national infrastructure and help maintain naval equipment, a government spokesman said.
The spokesman’s comment, in a statement, followed disclosure by the International Monetary Fund last week that Mozambique had admitted to having more than $1 billion of undisclosed debt and that the two parties were evaluating the implications of the disclosure.
Earlier, a source at the Fund had told Reuters that Proindicus, owned by the interior and defence ministries and the state security services, had been lent $504 million by Credit Suisse and $118 million by Russia’s VTB.
Another loan of $535 million had gone to Mozambique Asset Management, another state company set up to build a shipyard in the northern city of Pemba, that source said.
In his statement dated Tuesday but acquired by Reuters on Wednesday, spokesman Mouzinho Saide said the government had granted a $622 million loan guarantee to Proindicus in 2013, and $535 million to Mozambique Asset Management the following year.
“We faced security threats, such as piracy … illegal immigration, drug trafficking … and illegal fishing,” Saide said after a meeting of Mozambique’s cabinet.
He said the government had also been keen to ensure protection of the assets of oil and gas companies operating in Mozambique’s exclusive economic zone.
The loans are in addition to an $850 million ‘tuna bond’ issued in 2013 and restructured last month because the southeast African nation was struggling to meet repayments.
The IMF source said the extra borrowing had pushed Mozambique’s foreign debt to $9.64 billion, a level “very close to unsustainability”.
(Reporting by Manuel Mucari; Writing by Stella Mapenzauswa; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
ABUJA (Reuters) – The World Bank held talks with the Nigerian president on Wednesday on how it could help Nigeria overcome an economic crisis caused mainly by a sharp fall in crude prices eating into its oil revenues.
On her second day of meetings with Nigerian officials, World Bank Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer Sri Mulyani Indrawati met President Muhammadu Buhari, who plans to stimulate the flagging economy with a record 6 trillion naira ($31 billion) budget.
Nigeria will have to borrow 1.8 trillion naira from abroad and at home to help fund the budget, which has been delayed by several months and wrangling with parliament, if it goes ahead.
Although Nigeria has held talks with the World Bank over a possible loan or credit facility in recent months, Indrawati did not address this when speaking to reporters after the meeting.
“We would like to know how we can help Nigeria to make the very important decisions, whether on micro economic policy and other sectoral policy, that will make this economy move forward to become a strong middle income country,” she said.
Indrawati, who met Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun on Tuesday, said she and Buhari discussed the government’s “commendable goals to improve tax collection and crackdown on corruption.
Nigeria’s economy, the largest in Africa, grew by 2.8 percent last year, its slowest pace since 1999.
(By Felix Onuah. Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
