$JMIA
$JMIA Still working on the CEO/CFO transcript but I have written my corrected view of the quarter:
Preface
Here is a clean preface (before the transcript) that clears up the quarter, and fixes the common misunderstandings.
The result is a slighlty more bullish read on JMIA's Q4 2025.
1. First, Black Friday lasted one month.
It ran in November only. The press release discussed November and December performance, which led some readers (lie me) to assume a two-month promotion window. It was not.
That single clarification removes a surprising amount of anxiety about retention math and seasonality.
2. Second, GMV growth was misunderstood
GMV rose by 31% in Ivory Coast, 33% in Nigeria, 50% in Kenya, and 124% in Ghana: the largest, second, third, and fifth largest markets for Jumia.
The issue was Egypt (Jumia's fourth largest market) at 2%, but that's without accounting for the corporate sales sort of "one-time" rollover.
If we eliminate that corporate sale comp, Egypt physical sales GMV rose by 56% in Q4 2025.
Now we look back at GMV growth and it reads as 31%, 50%, 48%, 56%, and 124% for Jumia's five largest markets. (Jumia sells in eight markets with the removal of Algeria.)
That's hyper growth, on a larger base, not the miss that Wall Street projected.
Jumia decided not to highlight the corporate sales drag (which ended in that quarter) for the first time in several quarters and Wall St. just wasn't prepared for a different reported metric. That's an own goal on Jumia but it's good news rather than bad.
The CEO noted: "But there were still corporate sales in the baseline, and we chose just to get rid of this topic this time."
3. Third, the FX narrative is backward:
Nearly everything Jumia sells is imported and priced in dollars, while a large share of operating costs sits in local currencies.
The right way to read GMV is in dollars. Q4 strength came from execution, not a currency gift.
4. Fourth, the “orders slowed” talking point misses the picture.
Orders rose 32% YoY in Q4 versus 34% in Q3.
That tiny step down came from country specific events, including a temporary airport issue that affected phone imports in Kenya and a VAT rule change in Senegal that hit electronics.
Against those one-offs, the signals that matter improved across the board: revenue up, GMV up, customers up, repurchase up, gross profit up, unit costs down, cash burn down. The flywheel is working.
The repurchase debate needs to flip from concern to strength.
The 46% metric is calculated on the largest new customer cohort in years and improved materially versus last year’s Black Friday period (by 420 basis points on a larger base).
Could Q1 print below Q4 on seasonality? Yes.
The structural direction is still higher because assortment keeps widening, coverage keeps expanding into up country regions, and reliability keeps improving.
Fifth, up country is not a margin drag.
Up country is a margin enhancer thanks to limited competition, paid shipping, pickup stations with mostly fixed costs, and scalable 3PL economics.
Wall Street often assumes the opposite and 61% of total orders in Q4 came from up-country regions, up from 56% in the prior year quarter.
So the quarter should be repositioned as acclerasting GMV growth over 30% in each of the top five markets and above 48% in three of the top five.
That GMV hyper growth came with Jumia's largest quarterly repurchase rate ever on the largest quarterly customer base ever even as cash burn reached its lowest level ever and EBITDA loss was the lowest ever.
Yep, a different read than many (including myself) had.
