Jumia’s third-quarter results today revealed a company undergoing a radical strategic shift. While headline numbers showed strong revenue and GMV growth, the real story is a near-total collapse in its standalone JumiaPay app business — a move Jumia frames as a deliberate pivot to save costs and focus on its core, and more profitable, e-commerce marketplace.
The “Amazon of Africa” reported a 99% year-over-year crash in orders from its JumiaPay app, which fell from 1.6 million in Q3 2024 to virtually zero in Q3 2025.
Consequently, total JumiaPay Transactions on the platform fell by 47%, dropping from 3.0 million to 1.6 million over the same period.
This collapse isn’t an accident; it’s a strategy. Jumia management explained the move was “in line with our strategic focus on scaling physical goods” and a “reduced emphasis on digital products sold through our JumiaPay App, that contribute high order volumes with limited revenue impact.”
In short, Jumia has effectively shuttered its high-volume, low-margin business of selling items like mobile airtime and bill payments, which previously padded its transaction volumes but did little for the bottom line.
The Core E-commerce Pivot
With its standalone fintech ambitions sidelined, Jumia is refocusing all its energy on its original physical goods marketplace. Here, the news was far more positive.
Excluding markets it exited in late 2024 (South Africa and Tunisia), Jumia’s core business metrics showed robust health:
- Physical Goods Orders: Grew 34% year-over-year to 5.6 million.
- Quarterly Active Customers: Increased 23% year-over-year to 2.4 million.
- GMV (Physical Goods): Grew 26% year-over-year.
The company’s performance in its largest market, Nigeria, was a standout, with GMV growing 43% and orders up 30% year-over-year.
This pivot suggests Jumia has learned a hard lesson: trying to be a “super app” was a costly distraction. The new focus is singular: sell more physical products and get them to customers efficiently.
The Payment Paradox: A New Role for JumiaPay
While the JumiaPay app is defunct, the JumiaPay payment service is not. This is the key nuance in Jumia’s new strategy.
Instead of being a standalone competitor to other fintechs, JumiaPay is being repurposed as an embedded payment rail for its own e-commerce platform — much like Shopify Payments or Amazon Pay.
Evidence for this lies in the Total Payment Volume (TPV), which measures the value of all transactions processed through JumiaPay.
- TPV actually grew 25% year-over-year to $56.3 million.
- TPV as a percentage of GMV held steady, ticking up slightly from 28% in Q3 2024 to 29% in Q3 2025.
This shows that as the core e-commerce business grows, so does the use of its native payment solution. Jumia is no longer chasing millions of low-value fintech transactions; it’s focused on capturing the payment flow from its own, higher-value e-commerce orders.
The Path to Profitability
This entire strategic shift is aimed at one thing: survival. Jumia is racing to reach profitability before its cash runs out.
The Q3 2025 results show clear progress on this front, driven by deep cost-cutting and the shedding of unprofitable business lines.
- Operating Loss: Reduced by 13% to $17.4 million.
- Adjusted EBITDA Loss: Shrank by 17% to $14.0 million.
- Net Cash Used in Operating Activities: More than halved to $12.4 million (down from $26.8 million in Q3 2024).
The company’s liquidity position now stands at $82.5 million. At its current burn rate, this gives Jumia a runway of approximately five to six quarters.
CEO Francis Dufay projected confidence, stating the company has “reached an inflection point.” Jumia is now guiding that it will reach breakeven on a Loss before Income tax basis in the fourth quarter of 2026 and achieve full-year profitability in 2027.
For Jumia, the speculative “super app” dream is over. The hard-knuckled fight for profitable e-commerce logistics and embedded payments is the new reality.