E-commerce platform Jiji acquires Bangladesh’s Bikroy in first deal outside Africa

Jiji, the Lagos-headquartered classifieds marketplace, has acquired Bikroy, Bangladesh’s largest online classifieds platform, thirteen months after entering the South Asian market as Bikroy’s direct competitor, its first market outside Africa. 

Anton Volianskyi,  Jiji’s chief executive officer, declined to comment on the transaction value, but shared that the company used “internal resources and shareholder support” for the deal.

The acquisition is Jiji’s first outside Africa and the second time in four years that the company has bought a marketplace from Sweden-based Saltside Technologies. In 2022, it acquired Saltside’s Ghanaian platform Tonaton after years of competing in the same market.

The Bikroy deal is the third time Jiji has acquired a competitor in six years, and it marks a continuation of Jiji’s compete-then-buy playbook: enter a market, compete with the largest player, then buy it.

In 2019, it acquired OLX Africa’s operations in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania, ending years of head-to-head competition with the Naspers-owned platform. The transaction pushed Jiji’s monthly audience above eight million users and made it the dominant classifieds player on the continent. The second was Tonaton in 2022.

“This is a deliberate strategy, and we are direct about it,” Volianskyi noted in an email to TechCabal. “In each case, the sequence is the same: enter organically to validate the opportunity, build a competitive  position on the ground, and then evaluate whether organic scaling or consolidation gets us to category leadership faster.”

When Jiji launched in Bangladesh in March 2025, the company described the move as a long-term play against incumbents Bikroy, Daraz, and Ajkerdeal, but 13 months later, it had acquired its largest competitor.

“This was a calculated, deliberately phased approach,” Volianskyi said. “We launched jiji-bd.com to test our playbook on the ground in Bangladesh, build operational presence, and put real competitive pressure on the market. Within months, the dynamics had shifted significantly, and consolidation became the most efficient path forward for both sides.”

Volianskyi was careful, however, to distinguish the strategy from any deliberate targeting of Saltside as a counterparty. The Swedish group, which is backed by Kinnevik, Hillhouse Capital, and Brummer & Partners, has raised approximately $65 million across its lifetime and built three operating platforms—Tonaton, Bikroy, and Ikman—in Ghana, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, respectively. Jiji has now acquired two of them.

“They [Saltside] have done remarkable work over many years, building two genuinely strong brands in Tonaton and Bikroy, and establishing leadership positions in markets that are notoriously difficult to operate in,” Volianskyi noted. 

“The fact that two of our transactions involved Saltside assets reflects the reality that they built operations in markets that fit our thesis,” he added. “It is not about targeting a specific counterparty; it is about disciplined market selection that has occasionally aligned with theirs.”

With Bikroy sold to Jiji and Tonaton already divested in 2022, Saltside’s remaining major operating asset is Ikman in Sri Lanka. 

“Beyond our core six African markets, we look at opportunities where the market has the right structural fundamentals and where we believe our operating model can deliver category leadership,” Volianskyi noted. “Bangladesh fits that profile, and Bikroy is the right asset in that market. We are not announcing a broader Asian expansion programme; each market gets evaluated on its own merits.”

At the time of its entry into Bangladesh in March 2025, the company told the Bangladeshi publication The Business Standard that it planned “further expansion in Asia in the coming days”, without naming specific markets.

Why Jiji went outside Africa

Jiji’s expansion outside Africa marks a sharp pivot from how the company itself framed its options as recently as 2021. When Jiji acquired Cars45 that year, co-founder Vladimir Mnogoletniy told TechCabal that the African classifieds market was already largely consolidated. 

“We are already a leader in Africa, so I think there’s very limited space for whom to acquire,” he said at the time, framing future deals as either adjacent business models or competitor consolidation.

The Bangladesh entry, and now the Bikroy deal, are indicative of Jiji’s response to running out of acquisition targets in Africa as it expands its geographic presence outside the continent. At the group level, the pivot appears to be paying off.

In November 2024, Volianskyi told TechCabal that Jiji had over six million active listings worth more than $10 billion, drove annual transaction volumes “in the range of $10-20 billion,” welcomed 12 million unique visitors monthly, and operated in eight African countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire.

In response to questions on the latest deal, the company provided substantially larger figures. It now describes itself as serving “over 90 million annual users” and processing “$70 billion in annual GMV across the platform,” and operating in six “core” African markets where it holds the leading position. 

What changes for Bikroy

The Bikroy brand will survive the transaction, and Volianskyi was emphatic that preserving it is “central to the investment thesis.” 

According to figures provided by Jiji, Bikroy has more than 10 million app downloads since its 2012 launch, serves over 400,000 monthly buyers and more than 100,000 monthly sellers, processes more than $3 billion in annual gross merchandise value (GMV), and reaches roughly three million unique visitors a month in a country of 175 million people. 

The GMV is concentrated in high-value categories like real estate and vehicles, mirroring Jiji’s core categories in its African markets, where vehicles and property together account for the bulk of the platform’s $10 billion-plus listing value.

“That kind of brand equity and category leadership takes more than a decade to build, and replacing it would destroy meaningful value,” Volianskyi said.

What changes, the company said, come down to four things: the platform itself, the monetisation model, marketing investment, and the seller package architecture.

Bikroy is moving onto Jiji’s technology, which Volianskyi described as built for small businesses and professional sellers. The way sellers pay is also changing. Instead of flat fees, sellers will bid to appear higher on the platform and pay only when shoppers click on their listings. They set their own bids and daily spending limits, Volianskyi noted. 

Jiji is also spending more on marketing to bring more shoppers to the Bangladesh platform as the extra traffic benefits sellers who pay for visibility, a playbook Jiji has used in its African markets. Seller plans will range from individual to enterprise, and each plan includes a promotional budget that sellers can use in the new bidding system, he added.

Bikroy’s local team across commercial, operations, customer support, sales, marketing, and finance will operate under a locally incorporated subsidiary now owned by the Jiji Group.

Jiji’s competition in Bangladesh

Bangladesh’s e-commerce sector is projected to reach $12 billion to $13 billion by 2027 to 2029, according to Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence (PCMI). 

In 2024, 79% of Bangladeshi consumers shopped online, and 47% said they were comfortable paying on digital platforms, per PCMI survey data Jiji cited on entering the market. 

With 131 million internet users in a population of roughly 170 million, the demographic profile closely mirrors that of the African markets where Jiji has established dominance.

With Bikroy folded in, Jiji’s most direct competitor in Bangladesh narrows to Daraz, the Alibaba-owned e-commerce platform that Jiji already faces elsewhere, including indirectly in Nigeria, where Chinese-owned Temu made an aggressive entry into the e-commerce market in 2024. 

Daraz, with its broader e-commerce footprint, presents a different kind of competition in Bangladesh, but Jiji is entering the competition with the country’s largest classifieds asset already in hand.