Market access is key for any growing business in a competitive business landscape.
However, for small businesses, expanding market access and growing their customer base can be difficult, especially when there are large clients to be serviced.
The small business sector is a critical part of any country’s successful economy.
However, in South Africa, small businesses tend to struggle with a high failure rate. In fact, South Africa has one of the highest SMME failure rates globally.
A University of Stellenbosch Business School study found that there are multiple reasons for this, including a lack of proper management capacity and training, a lack of proper financial management skills, a lack of access to sustainable financial assistance; an inadequate understanding of the industry in which the business operates; and a lack of entrepreneurial networks to share resources and information.
Furthermore, South African consumers and corporates are not particularly renowned for their support of small businesses when compared with other regions.
There are however many reasons for the high failure rate of small businesses, agrees Catherine Wijnberg, founder and CEO of Fetola.
“In our experience as a business growth agency, the most common reason is that many businesses are simply not yet market-ready. While there is often a desire to onboard a big client, in reality, the business may not be in a position to service that client.
“Other reasons for a small market or ailing to grow its customer base is that its product quality might not be good enough, it could be targeting the wrong customers, using inappropriate marketing channels to reach its intended target market, or making it too difficult for customers to order and buy from them.”
“When it comes to market access, most small businesses have not yet cracked the secret to success. Businesses tend to blame the fact that nobody is buying from them and to be fair, as a country we don’t have a culture of supporting small businesses.
However, more often than not, the reason nobody is buying from these small businesses is that their product or service quality, capacity and value for money does not meet the needs of their customer,” says Wijnberg.
Expanding a business’s customer base to service larger clients can come with its own challenges, she points out.
“For example, does the business have sufficient resources to service larger clients? Small businesses need guidance to understand what clients are looking for from new suppliers. Critically, corporates and multinationals require a pipeline of reliable suppliers. An unreliable supplier is unlikely to receive repeat business.”
Key to the success of any small business, she says, is to know who your target market is and to ensure a suitable product market fit.
“Identify what your niche is and then decide how you can own that niche,” she advises.
“Other questions you should be asking is whether your brand is visible to the right target market; is your product or service of sufficiently high quality and does the quality justify the price you are charging; and can you guarantee reliable and consistent delivery?”
In fact, says Wijnberg, reliability is arguably the most important element of any supplier relationship.
“From a corporate perspective, there is a huge risk in buying from a supplier that is not reliable.”
The challenge, she adds, is that there is often a mismatch between what corporates expect from their small business suppliers and what small businesses understand as their responsibility to provide.
“Corporates and large retailers often miss the fact that they really need to explain and communicate to new small business suppliers in very clear terms what their expectations are.”
To help address the biggest challenges small businesses face – market access and access to growth finance - Fetola are launching a programme in July aimed specifically at youth businesses and focusing on market readiness as a route to market access, and investment readiness as a route to access growth finance.
"When small businesses get it right - with the correct strategy to build solid trade relations and partnerships - the results can be transformative," concludes Wijnberg.
Source: Zawya
Algeria-based super app Yassir, has raised $150 million in Series B funding, led by BOND, with participation from DN Capital, Dorsal Capital, Quiet Capital, Stanford Alumni Ventures (aka Spike Ventures) and Y Combinator, among other investors.
Founded in 2017 by Noureddine Tayebi and El Mahdi Yettou, Yassir is a super app that provides its users with a suite of services, including rideshare, food and grocery delivery and financial services. It now operates in six countries and 45 cities throughout the world.
With this latest round of funding, Yassir plans to expand its reach into the region.
Press release:
Yassir, a multi-sided marketplace offering on-demand services such as ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery, banking and more, announced today that it has raised $150 million in Series B funding from prominent global investors. The investment was led by BOND, with participation from DN Capital, Dorsal Capital, Quiet Capital, Stanford Alumni Ventures (aka Spike Ventures) and Y Combinator, among other strategic investors.
Having raised $193.25 million in the five years since the company’s launch, it is now the most valuable startup in North Africa, and one of the highest-valued companies in Africa and the Middle East. With this latest round of funding, Yassir plans to expand its reach into the region.
“Yassir means ‘easy’ in Arabic, and our mission as a company is to make people’s lives easy,” says Noureddine Tayebi, Founder and CEO of Yassir. “In the markets where we operate, we are already having a considerable impact on how people manage their day-to-day lives. We look forward to expanding our presence into other geographies to become the first super app to achieve mass adoption.”
Founded in 2017, today, the company operates in six countries and 45 cities, where it is used by more than 8 million users. Popular in the Maghreb region (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) and parts of French-speaking Africa, the super app provides three core services – ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery, and financial services. An all-in-one ecosystem, the app provides its customers with a single-point solution for managing all of their day-to-day activities, from travelling to work to ordering groceries and meals. These services generate revenues for more than 100,000 partners, which include drivers, couriers, merchants, and wholesalers, among other gig workers and vendors.
Beyond providing a core suite of services, Yassir offers financial services aimed at serving the full ecosystem, touching every component of the multi-sided marketplace. A 2018 report by McKinsey & Company on growth and innovation in African retail banking, found that more than half (57%) of Africa’s population lack any form of a bank account. Among African banking customers, 40% prefer digital channels for transactions. By providing consumers in Africa with a mobile banking solution, as part of a more comprehensive suite of services, Yassir is meeting an important need in the market, one where 50% of the population already have mobile internet access.
“We believe technology will foundationally rearchitect consumers’ relationship with daily needs – transportation, food, financial services – not just in developed countries, but in every corner of the world,” says Daegwon Chae, general partner at BOND. “This investment is an extension of that belief in an underserved but dynamic, rapidly growing region. Emerging out of North Africa, the app has already become indispensable to users for critical aspects of their lives.”
Noureddine, a Stanford PhD and a native of Algeria spent more than 15 years in Silicon Valley before returning to his homeland to build Yassir. He adds, “Yassir was founded with a threefold mission. First,
we want to create a local tech startup success model which will be emulated by others and more so Yassir team members. Second, we want to empower the local talent and more importantly the technical talent which often leaves the region, mainly to Europe, to pursue further studies or find jobs. We, in fact, hire engineering talent in each country we operate in to expand that mission. And finally, we want to make the lives of our people easy while infusing social values via our products such as trust and mutual help.”
Source: Wamda
The Algerian Confederation of Citizen Employers (CAPC) has launched a support program for innovative projects, based on applied knowledge and creativity, called “Innovate Algeria”.
“Innovate Algeria is a catalyst program for the knowledge-based economy. It aims at the development of entrepreneurial projects that are based on applied knowledge, creative development and autonomy in the design and engineering of new products and services “, the president of the Startups commission at the CAPC, Mr. Bezzitouni Chams-Eddine said. “Through this program, investors under CAPC, but also all interested investors, will embark on venture capital to encourage startups, which are companies generally not eligible for bank loans.”
president of the Startups commission at the CAPC, Mr. Bezzitouni Chams-Eddine
Here Is What You Need To Know
The new initiative of the employers’ confederation will offer promoters of innovative projects support ranging from training to opportunities for fundraising and internationalization, including strategic advice and business development.
The president of the CAPC, Mohamed Sami Agli, noted that the “Innovate Algeria” program included, as a first action, the support of the winners of HackAlgeria.
Thus, winners of HackAlgeria will be able, thanks to this initiative, to promote their projects during important meetings dedicated to innovation such as the Emerging-Valley, in December 2020 and VivaTech during the year 2021, but also at MIT.
These winners will also join, at the beginning of October, the “Innovate Algeria” program, which will support them, until the end of Aprill, 2021 in the realization of their projects, after the end of the fundraising operations, which would start in May. 2021.
source: afrikanheroes
Le secteur des énergies renouvelables dans la région MENA (Moyen-Orient et Afrique du Nord)
18 Sep 2017
Durant la dernière décennie, la région MENA a fait l’expérience d’une croissance économique et démographique considérable, qui devrait continuer dans le futur. La demande d’énergie dans ces diverses régions (composée d'importateurs et d’exportateurs d’énergie) se développe entre 3% et 8% par an. En réalité, la demande d’énergie s’élève si rapidement dans le monde Arabe que même les pays qui ont traditionnellement exporté de l'énergie dans le passé sont confrontés à la perspective de devenir eux-mêmes des importateurs d’énergie. La courbe suivante montre la demande croissante d’électricité dans la région Arabe à travers le temps, plus précisément au sein du Conseil de Coopération du Golfe.
لا بد من إشراك المغتربين لإطلاق الطاقات البشرية غير المستغلة خاصةً وقت الأزمات
اظهرت دراسة لمجموعة البنك الدولي في مطلع العام 2017 حول الدور الذي يمكن أن يلعبه المغتربون في تعزيز التكامل الاقليمي والاقتصادي ونشرت تحت عنوان "حشد جهود المغتربين من منطقة الشرق الأوسط وشمال أفريقيا من أجل تحقيق التكامل الاقتصادي وريادة الأعمال" أن المغتربين من بلدان الشرق الأوسط وشمال أفريقيا يمكنهم القيام بدور بالغ الأهمية في تعزيز التكامل الإقليمي وريادة الأعمال والنمو الاقتصادي في المنطقة، كما يمكنهم مساعدة بلدانهم على أن تصبح من الأطراف الفاعلة الرئيسية في الاقتصاد العالمي.
Over the past decade, the MENA region has experienced considerable economic and population growth, which is only expected to continue in the future. The demand for power in this diverse region (comprised of energy importers and exporters) is expanding between 3% and 8% annually. In fact, the demand for energy is rising so rapidly in the Arab world that even countries which have traditionally exported energy in the past are facing the prospect of becoming energy importers themselves. The following figure shows the increasing demand for electricity overtime in the Arab region, especially in the Gulf Cooperation Council.
ايمن ابو الخير
هل نحن في مرحلة اجتياز الاقتصادي المهيمن القائم على أساس المصانع الكبيرة والشركات متعددة الجنسيات إلى عالم يقوم على حرية الاختيار، الذي سيتمكن فيه الكيانات الصغيرة من المنافسة مع الشركات الكبيرة،وبالتالي ستساهم في تشكيل اقتصاد المستقبل؟ هل نحن فعلا بصدد عبور الاقتصاد "التناظري" الحقيقي الى الاقتصاد الافتراضي، ام ان الانتقال سيكون من الاقتصاد الافتراضي الى الاقتصاد الحقيقي؟
Arab Knowledge Economy & E-commerce: Are we crossing the age of “analogue” to digital economy?
28 Oct 2016By Ayman Abualkhair
Are we in a stage of passing the dominant economic age, based on large factories and multinational companies, to a world predicated on freedom of choice, in which small entities would have the potential to compete with large companies, and hence shape the future economy? Are we crossing the age of a real economy to a virtual one, or is it moreover transitioning from a virtual economy to a real economy?
It's a vision that has long enticed energy planners: solar panels stretching out over vast swaths of the Sahara desert, soaking up sun to generate clean, green power.
Algiers — A Memorandum of Understanding on the investments in the tourist real estate was inked Sunday in Algiers between the National Agency of Tourism Development (ANDT) and Qatari company Diar.