Kikuu was founded in 2015. Like Kilimall, it is also an e-commerce platform founded by Chinese. Kikuu mainly targets white-collar workers. The platform sells a wide variety of products, and the best-selling categories include: fashion shoes and clothing, watches and jewelry, children’s toys and other products that young people like to buy.
With two powerful competitors, Jumia and Kilimall, Kikuu’s development has not been smooth sailing. Although there is a successful case of Kilimall, it does not mean that Kikuu can successfully bypass the pitfalls that Kilimall has stepped on. In addition, in order to reflect the differences between itself and other platforms, Kikuu has to find another way and find its own survival plan. To this end, Kikuu’s partners have traveled to more than a dozen countries in Africa, feeling the differences in culture, economy and consumption between different countries, and exploring a development direction that suits them.
In 2018, Kikuu’s annual sales increased from US$200,000 to US$1.2 million, a 600% increase, achieving break-even, and also taking the top spot in the popular apps in Ghana and Tanzania, which is rare in the African market. It can be said that Kikuu is the fastest growing e-commerce company in Africa. Kikuu is committed to becoming the African version of “Alibaba”. The first thing it imitated was Alibaba’s logistics system, and soon launched its own payment system K-Pay. At present, Kikuu has established full logistics distribution centers in 9 countries including Ghana, perfectly solving the dilemma of the “last mile”.