By Adedapo Adesanya
Nigeria’s retail market has so much potential, but while macroeconomic headwinds and currency volatility have weighed on consumer spending power in recent years, new opportunities for digitalised retail to facilitate the sale of essential goods remain.
To connect all existing parties in the supply chain, Mr Deepankar Rustagi, after spending decades in the country, founded OmniRetail, a subsidiary of OmniBiz.
Applying a different model, the company does not own warehouses, fleets, or products but rather brings distributors and logistics providers all online. Similar to Uber’s platform, OmniRetail brings manufacturers and small retailers together – unheard of in Nigeria, where only 30 per cent of goods are sold directly to consumers.
OmniBiz is an African B2B e-commerce platform for informal retailers and aims to increase retailers’ profitability 4x by helping them with procurement and inventory management and providing them with working capital.
Launched in 2019 as Mplify- a simple SaaS solution for FMCG distributors to manage their inventory and grow their sales, OmniBiz, the e-commerce arm was launched a few months after with the mission to digitize retail distribution in Africa.
One of the many declarations made to Business Post by the company is that it carries out a total transaction volume (TTV) of $1.3 billion yearly.
Mr Rustagi saw major retail companies like Walmart and Shoprite exit the African market and quickly learned that 90 per cent of Nigerian consumers shop at small informal retail stores.
He said, “Technology is solving deeply entrenched problems, and informal retail isn’t an exception. By embracing a technology-driven approach, OmniBiz is digitizing the informal essential goods ecosystem in Africa.
“OmniBiz collaborates with the supply chain stakeholders, from manufacturers to distributors, logistics providers, and retailers. We are building the future of African retail,” he told Business Post.
The OmniBiz CEO realized that if he could bring manufacturers, distributors, and retailers online on a single platform, he could double the size of Nigeria’s $41.7 billion FMCG sector.
The platform, which has over 131,000 Nigerian retailers (75 per cent of which are women-owned), gives rich data to all parties, something he claims that no one in African retail had before.
His opinion was echoed by Mr Adewale Adisa, the company’s Chief Operations Officer (COO), who noted in an interview that the company tapped into something that large retailers didn’t understand.
“We believe that if we can create a positive impact at the national level, it will eliminate many of the challenges faced by retailers. It will help rid Nigeria’s cash-heavy sector of the many problems associated with it and digitise the process.”
He explained that the company’s warehouses help make it deliver to key states in the country, adding that it has a logistics network that it hopes to expand by bringing in more retailers, partners, and players in the future.
Through the integration of its OmniStore (formerly Mystore) app, OmniBiz is able to facilitate the transactions between producers and retailers, a move to which it is adding the necessary value, including seeing how they can insure their goods. The growth engine application provides retailers with end- to- end inventory management solutions.
The company has always positioned itself as a market leader, last year, it moved to tap into the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) wave to help businesses get credit options in a timely fashion to grow their businesses.
Business Post Contributor