For years, the narrative surrounding Jumia (NYSE: JMIA) was one of sprawling ambition — a bid to be the “Amazon of Africa” by conquering every vertical in every market. The Q4 2025 results released today confirm that the era of expansion-at-all-costs is definitively over. Under CEO Francis Dufay, the company has executed a calculated contraction, trading vanity metrics for unit economics.
The headline figures are robust: Revenue is up 34% year-over-year to $61.4m, and Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) climbed 36%. However, the real story lies in what Jumia has chosen to destroy.
The Great Decoupling
The most significant data point in Jumia’s report is not its growth, but its intentional decline in specific areas. The company has aggressively pruned its digital services arm, JumiaPay.
In Q4 2024, the JumiaPay app processed 1.6 million orders. In Q4 2025, that number dropped to virtually zero. This was a deliberate strategic choice to stop incentivising low-margin digital top-ups that inflated transaction volumes without contributing to the bottom line.
By discarding this “low-quality revenue,” Jumia has purified its GMV. The 31% growth in physical goods orders is organic, driven by consumers buying actual products — electronics, fashion, and home goods — rather than discounted airtime. This shift suggests a stickier, more valuable customer base, evidenced by a reported 422 basis point improvement in repurchase rates.
The Algeria Exit and Geographic Austerity
Continuing the trend of ruthless geographic optimisation, Jumia announced today it will cease operations in Algeria in Q1 2026. This follows the 2024 exits from South Africa and Tunisia.
Algeria accounted for roughly 2% of the group’s GMV. While the exit will incur short-term termination costs (employee severance, lease breaks), it frees the company to redirect capital toward its core markets — specifically Nigeria, which delivered a standout performance with 50% GMV growth despite macroeconomic volatility.
The strategy is clear: defend and grow the markets that offer a path to profitability, and amputate those that drag on working capital.
The “Upcountry” Moat
Jumia’s logistics network is arguably its only defensible moat against potential global entrants. The report highlights that 61% of orders in Q4 2025 came from “upcountry” — secondary cities and rural areas outside the capital hubs.
This is a critical differentiator. While competitors and informal couriers saturate easy-to-reach capital cities, Jumia has built the infrastructure to serve the underserved interior. This distribution network allows them to capture demand where retail infrastructure is weakest, effectively insulating them from competitors who lack the appetite for complex African logistics.
Financial Discipline: The Burn Rate
The company’s cash preservation efforts have yielded their strongest results to date. Liquidity stands at $77.8m. More importantly, the net cash used in operating activities plummeted to just $1.7m in Q4 2025, down from $26.5m in the same period the previous year.
This was aided by a positive working capital contribution of $9.6m — essentially, Jumia is managing its payables and receivables to finance its own operations, a hallmark of a maturing retail business.
The China Connection
One of the less-discussed strategic moves is Jumia’s China expansion. The company opened an office in Yiwu — the world’s largest small commodities wholesale market — in 2025, and gross items sold from international sellers grew 82% year-on-year in Q4. Direct sourcing from Chinese manufacturers gives Jumia a lever that marketplace-only platforms lack: the ability to curate product availability and compress cost for its vendor base. It also creates an alternative to the supply constraints that have historically limited growth in certain product categories.
Marketing and advertising revenue, while still small at $2.9 million, rose 42% year-on-year. At roughly 1% of GMV, Jumia’s advertising yield is materially below what comparable platforms in more developed markets achieve — which the company rightly flags as upside. Scaling sponsored products on top of a growing GMV base is one of the cleanest paths to margin expansion available to it.
The customer engagement signal
Beyond the headline growth numbers, the more meaningful data point may be what is happening at the cohort level. Jumia says 46% of new customers who placed their first order in Q3 2025 made a second purchase within 90 days — up from 42% for the equivalent cohort a year earlier. That four-percentage-point improvement in early-stage retention, combined with a 422 basis-point year-on-year improvement in overall repurchase rates, suggests the company is acquiring stickier users than it was twelve months ago.
Quarterly active customers grew 26% year-on-year to 3 million, adjusted for the exited markets. Physical goods orders reached 7.5 million in the quarter, up 32%. The shift in geographic mix is also worth noting: orders from upcountry (secondary city) regions represented 61% of total orders in Q4, up from 56% a year earlier. Jumia has long argued that urban saturation makes secondary cities the real prize in African e-commerce. It is starting to show in the numbers.
Launch Base Africa’s Views:
The most insightful part of the latest release from Jumia is the Positive Working Capital Contribution of $9.6 million.
While the revenue growth and cost-cutting are positive, the management of working capital is the technical masterstroke of this quarter.
Why it is different:
- Self-Financing: In retail, if you can sell goods and collect cash from customers before you have to pay your suppliers (or pay them slowly), you generate cash float. Jumia achieved a $9.6m positive inflow from this dynamic.
- Survival Mechanism: For a company with a finite cash pile ($77.8m) and a history of high burn, generating cash from operations (rather than raising equity or debt) is critical. They reduced their operating cash burn to a negligible $1.7m primarily because of this working capital efficiency.
- Supplier Power: It signals that Jumia has gained leverage over its suppliers (“improved bargaining power with large third-party accounts,” as noted in the Cash Position section). They are likely negotiating longer payment terms while maintaining or speeding up collection times from customers.
The intentional destruction of JumiaPay volume (1.6m orders to ~0): It takes immense discipline for a public company to voluntarily report a 99% drop in a volume metric (Total Orders for JumiaPay). Most executive teams would fear the negative headline. However, Jumia’s leadership correctly identified that these orders were “empty calories” — high volume, zero margin. Cutting them exposes the true health of the core e-commerce business, which is actually growing.
Francis Dufay has staked his tenure on a specific target: Adjusted EBITDA breakeven in Q4 2026.
With an Adjusted EBITDA loss of $7.3m in the current quarter (halved from $13.7m last year), the trajectory is plausible. However, the path remains fraught with external risks, from currency devaluation in Nigeria to global supply chain shocks.
Jumia is no longer trying to be everything to everyone. It is a smaller, leaner operation focused on moving physical boxes to underserved towns. The hyper-growth story is dead; the profitability story has officially begun.