Ringier just said it’s seeing remarkable success in Africa and it has got off to an excellent start in 2015, with revenue in the first quarter of the new year four times higher than in the last quarter of 2014.
It’s portfolio companies saw a nearly by factor five increase in traffic and its six of the ten platforms are already clear leaders in their respective national markets.
In a statement to TechMoran, Robin Lingg, CEO for Africa and Asia at Ringier, “It’s great to see that our early focus and investment on the African continent is paying off. We are very happy about the recent development on revenue and reach, and the speed with which we are able to showcase serious growth here.”
Ringier Africa says in overall, sales revenue in the first three months of this year was four times higher than in the last quarter of 2014. The firm says iits new classified-advertising site ZoomTanzania.com, achieved the highest growth and its traffic in the first three months of 2015 was 30 percent higher than in the fourth quarter of 2014 while Ady.ng in Nigeria doubled its traffic between the fourth quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of this year and Pigiame.co.ke had a 200 percent growth in organic traffic quarter-on-quarter.
In the beginning of the year Ringier launched its first Real-Estate vertical in Senegal MaMaison.sn, built on the success of market-leading classifieds platform Expat-dakar.com. The firm added that it’s e-commerce platforms, Rupu.co.ke in Kenya and Tisu.com.gh in Ghana, continue to expand at a rapid pace.
Pulse.ng generated 15 million monthly impressions and its success is being duplicated in Ghana with Pulse.com.gh.
Apart from content and classifieds, Ringier also runs Ringier Digital Marketing (RDM), a digital marketing agency with clients such as Jack Daniels and Wal Mart.
“All our platforms were able to improve their market positions and expand their customer bases and reach. We see these trends only accelerating across all markets and are looking forward to the next months,” concluded Lingg.
Zoomtanzania.com, Ady.ng and PigiaMe face intense competition from OLX in all the markets where the Nasper’s backed firm has huge inventory and probably visits. The only advantage Ringier has over OLX is that most of thid platform are generating some revenue even though its minimal. It’s print magazine in Kenya is also another marketing platform for it.
No other player is doing deals at the moment but there’s a likelyhood that Rocket Internet which has roots starting a Groupon clone might unveil a similar platform this year in Africa. Still platforms like Jumia, Kaymu among others plus offline channels are still a competition before Facebook Deals gets out of stealth.