About Onyekachi Izukanne
Onyekachi Izukanne, CEO and co-founder of TradeDepot, has described the Nigerian retail market as largely offline, with modern stores accounting for only two to three percent of sales. He stated that the company’s goal is to use technology to reduce supply-chain inefficiencies for informal retailers, who he said represent the majority of the market. Izukanne noted that TradeDepot provides a mobile B2B platform that allows retailers to order goods via an app, WhatsApp, toll-free lines, or USSD, and that the company also offers working capital financing based on transaction histories, reporting a 97% repayment rate in pilots.
Izukanne said TradeDepot began operations in August 2015, initially focusing on milk distribution with a large dairy distributor. He added that the company has since worked with organizations such as PSI and is building relationships with consumer goods companies including Coca-Cola. He described the company’s vision as becoming the default B2B supply platform for retailers in the consumer goods space, with a focus on creating APIs to enable direct manufacturer-to-retailer supply.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Onyekachi Izukanne's recent appearances.
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Transcript (1 segments)
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Onyekachi Izukanne0:10
Hi, my name is Onyekachi Izukanne and I'm a co-founder at TradeDepot. We're based in Lagos, Nigeria. TradeDepot is a mobile B2B supply platform for consumer goods. The problem we have is that in Africa, retail markets are highly fragmented and you have probably about five million different retail outlets supplying the consumer goods that folks buy. Supplying them today is a bit of a nightmare. You have to try all sorts of things to be able to address this volume. What we've done is through the digital platform to control the supply and put this platform in the hands of the retailers. We've been doing this now for two years. We started in August 2015. Our first focus was milk. We worked from a seed of one of the largest dairy distributors on the supply platform of choice B2B for retailers within the consumer goods space. We are gradually building trust with a lot of the consumer goods companies like Coca-Cola and so on. By and large, we see a scenario in which the retailers get the supplies they need directly from their manufacturers to work to create APIs. A bit about my background before TradeDepot: before I worked in another company called C2G Consulting. C2G has been around now for the last 15 years. Our focus has been working with large corporates. On the back of this, we've been partners with a few other larger equipment manufacturers to provide services optimized for the Nigerian emerging markets in general.
