A-post; your digital logistic solution

A-Post is a technology-enabled logistics platform, enabling ecommerce companies, financial institutions and Healthcare businesses to ship items directly to consumers across Nigeria, with plans to expand across Africa. Co founders, Tunde Kehinde and Ercin Eksin are brilliant and intellectual young men with impressive CVs’ who are full of innovative ideas.

Tunde Kehinde is the Co-Founder and Co-Managing Director of A-Post. He was one of the Co-Founder and former Managing Director of Jumia.com; Nigeria’s Number Online Retail Store which he helped grow from five employees to about 1,000 employees serving customers all over Nigeria.  Prior to Jumia, Tunde co-founded Bandeka.com, an online dating platform identified by Forbes as one of the hottest tech start-ups in Africa.  Tunde has prior experience as a business development executive with Diageo in London and as an Investment Banking professional with Wachovia Securities in North Carolina and New York City; he holds a degree in Finance from Howard University and an MBA Harvard Business School 

Ercin Eksin is the Co-Founder and Co-Managing Director of A-Post. Ercin was the former Co-CEO of Jumia Nigeria and Chief Operating Officer of Jumia Africa where he managed operations for Jumia across 6 African countries; Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco and Ivory Coast.  Ercin has prior experience at Rocket Internet where he served as a director of Global Operations working with over 20 companies across 20 countries to achieve operational excellence but before Rocket Internet, Ercin worked for Toyota specializing in advanced research in Electronics in Belgium. He has an MBA from the University of Chicago-Booth.

The company

A-post stands for Africa Post. A Pan African technology enabled logistics business that helps e-commerce companies, banks, health care business and other consumers deliver items from point A to B. We are live in Abuja, Lagos, Port Harcourt and we currently deliver for a variety of clients all around. At A-post our main differentiator is that we focus on finding individual customers to receive the package versus just finding the location of the customer. Difference being that, in case you are travelling or in a meeting, our technology allows us to find where you are so you can receive the package you have ordered from your e-commerce platform or your bankcard or health care items. At Jumia where we previously worked, we delivered items all across the country ranging from a fridge to a lipstick. And so with our system in A-post we have in place a technology that enables all our clients to track and trace all packages, we also have a lot of detailed reporting so that we can know how many items were dispatched from A-post; the number delivered, cancelled or rescheduled, and so far we deliver almost a hundred percent of all items that our customers require.

Objective

While working at Jumia and we were delivering like 1,500 packages daily at that point in time, mid last year and then what was happening was that we were always continuing to struggle to reach the end customers because in terms of logistic platform, there was a huge gap in the market, to be able to effectively reach the end customers; the reason being that Nigeria has many peculiarities that makes it even more challenging than to do it in a developed country. What I mean is that, here, most of the deliveries are postpaid therefore we have to find the customer to get the money and finalize the transaction while you are handing over the goods. The second factor is that the largest denomination in Nigeria is the N1, 000 notes, which means if you are delivering a package like an Iphone which cost N120, 000, you have to hand me 120 bills which you do not carry yourself, and you have to prepare the customer. The third factor is that basically most people do not have access to the internet at home so when the customers make their order they are at work and that creates another challenge because then you have to meet them at the office and when people are at work, they are basically in meetings or they are out of the office; therefore we have to be able to find the person at the right place and at the right time to make the delivery.  So the combination of these factors creates a lot of challenges. The way that the market was, it was like large players already in the market and they were only accepting at that point in time pre-paid orders rather than post-paid orders which is like 90 percent of the customers were not serviced. And then, they were like small businesses that are like mom and pop style companies; they did not have the right infrastructure or management or IT structure to manage their businesses, they were struggling to bring transparency and be able to track those packages across the country. It was a need, therefore we decided to fill the vacuum by creating a platform which any ecommerce company can access and use to get items to their end customers. We tried to be the catalyst for the eco-system and that is how we started but very soon after that we realized that it is not just in the ecommerce that such service is needed, but in other industries like the financial companies; why don’t you have your cheque book or bankcard delivered to your doorstep as you have it in lots of other countries of the world. Like in healthcare where replenishment is a challenge especially outside Lagos, like distribution of medicine during an epidemic.

On healthcare

Currently we have not started servicing that industry yet, but we see a huge need in that market as well. One of the challenges is the replenishment; according to our findings, it is maybe happening once a day in Lagos but it is much less outside Lagos. We want to approach that industry by leveraging on technology. What we mean by that is in case of an epidemic, we know which medicine can help to stop it, we know how many people are living there and what will be the demand for that medicine in that region, so we can even give the information to your merchant, to healthcare companies saying “you we need to produce this much medicine because there is this much demand”. And it is even like campaign for a proactive approach instead of a reactive approach because if someone goes to the pharmacy and ask for a certain medicine, they do not have it, they will have to order it pretty much from Lagos but with this approach you basically have access to medicine when you need it and try to shorten the lead time significantly for basically all these healthcare companies.

The way to think of A-post; there is a lack of trust in the market for trusted brand name in logistics delivery. What you find in the market are demands for bigger brands, you can use some other providers who can offer you a better price but do you trust that they can offer me a quality experience and skill? Or you find that businesses be it a bank, newspaper or retailers build their own in-house fleet which is very unique in this part of the world because a lot of retailers, particularly for businesses with direct consumer delivery, they do not have a provider that they can trust. I give you a package and you move it from point A to point B and I can track it. With A-post that is our edge; a platform where any kind of business can hand a package to us, it gets from point A to point B, no questions asked.

Target Clients

Right now we are focused a lot on retail industry so be it an ecommerce player, or offline retailer selling everything from fashion or electronics to accessories etc. We are also targeting banks and financial institutions that have the desire to deliver goods directly to their consumers. Why can’t we be in a society where opposed to my walking directly to my bank branch to pick up my bankcard, why not do it from the comfort of my home or office? Also as we mentioned earlier, offering options to health care companies: anyone that wants items delivered in a secure, controlled, tamper-proof way, those are our targets.

Acceptability

What we are seeing is the first six month of launch we have grown, right now we have signed virtually maybe 75 percent of the big ecommerce players and we are delivering for them in Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja. We are offering services such as ability to track your goods, pay-on-delivery services, and also a detailed reporting so you can see not only “how has A-post performed” but also get feedback from the clients.

Inception

We started Nov 2013 and have expanded to three cities with over 30 clients. We have delivered over 15,000 packages so far and we have forty employees on our payroll.

Projections

The essence of the business is to be the Pan African logistics provider across the entire continent, the idea is to enable commerce in whatever countries we go to because what we are seeing is that as we are expanding around the country, our existing clients can also expand with us. The idea is also to have positive impact in our society; a large majority of our employees are riders and drivers. And not only are we offering them jobs, we are also offering them trainings (like how do you deal with individual customers/merchants, how do you do deliveries using technology) and also offering them career paths and career mobility and they also get insurance and  healthcare for themselves and their family.

Our projections for the next six months is to be in the key commercial centers in the country, our intention is to expand to at least 10 cities by the end of 2014 and to have A-post hub set up in every of them. To expand our client base from offline merchants and ecommerce to banks/financial institutions and health care services.

Delivery

We collect the goods from our merchants in the late afternoon and basically take it to the end location the night before. What I mean by that is that we have presence in almost all the local governments in Lagos. So what we do is that the item to the local government where the end customer resides the night before and the next day it is delivered. Usually in the ecommerce goods, 80percent of the goods are small items, therefore we mainly use motorcycles to optimize our fleet and to as well effectively deliver because motorcycles are smaller, they can cut through the traffic. For larger items we move them the night before to the local government and there is not much traffic, so we do like local government deliveries. Because we are trying to be a next-day-delivery service; we can never keep an item for more than 12 hours. The local government point is just a location to receive the goods, check it and ship out; if it gets cancelled or rejected, then it is sent back there. 

The main reason we created this platform is that we want to do something impactful and meaningful, we want to reduce the barrier from companies; like merchants to have access to the customers and from the customers’ side, we want to remove the barriers so they can access    the goods. Especially outside Lagos being able to access the goods is much harder; therefore we want to build a nationwide bridge.

Payment:

All our riders have the POS machines which they go with when making deliveries, but they collect cash also.

Mabel Dimma