By Alex C
MoboFree.com, a new social marketplace in Nigeria cum Africa, is making significant inroads Nigeria, Africa’s largest online population, with 56 million internet users, targeting Nigerian brands, as it seeks to boost sales and advertising revenues.
The Company, few months ago, reported that Nigerians are selling unused items worth $526m on MoboFree.com, with high expectations that the total volume of items for sale in its marketplace will likely reach $1.5bn by 2015.
Evaldas Brazys, vice president, business development for MoboFree, said, Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy by GDP, is critical to its global business plan.
“Nigeria is the largest market in Africa. The country also has a very high mobile penetration rate. That’s some of the reasons why we decided to expand into the country,” he further said.
The company is also planning to enter other African markets such ae Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe. Launched more than two years ago with head office in Vilnius, Lithuania (Eastern Europe), MoboFree has achieved 2.5 million registered members without any outside investment.
Today, the online company has 3.3 million registered members in total. With more than 3,000 new registered members are joining MoboFree every single day, the company has over 2 million registrations in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.
In terms of competitive advantages, Brazys pointed out that MoboFree is well adopted not only for Personal Computers (PCs) and smartphones but also for old phones with small screens (so called ‘feature’ phones). Available statistics however show that more than 60 percent of African population access internet only via old phones.
The online firms’ technical solution makes buying and selling online available for any African user with any device.
MoboFree is social marketplace that has unique user- centric approach as opposed to the traditional item-centric approach.