Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Jumia's Results Conference Call for the First Quarter of 2020. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. I would now like to turn the call over to Safae Damir, Head of Investor Relations for Jumia. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our first quarter 2020 earnings call. With us today are Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara, co-founders and co-CEOs of Jumia, as well as Antoine Maillet-Mezeray, CFO. This call is also being webcast on the IR section on our corporate website. We will start by covering the safe harbor.
We would like to remind you that our discussions today will include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements may speak only to our expectations as of today. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise these statements. For the discussion of some of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from the forward-looking statements expressed today, please see the Risk Factors section of our recent 20F filings.
In addition, on this call, we will refer to certain financial measures not reported in accordance with IFRS. You can find reconciliations of these non-IFRS financial measures to the corresponding IFRS financial measures in our earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website. With that, I'll hand over to Sacha.
Thank you, and welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining the call. Before diving into Q1, of course, I would like to give some context on how COVID-19 is affecting our business so far and the actions that we have taken in response to that. The COVID-19 is bringing a complex combination of health, economic, and operational changes.
First, I want to start by acknowledging the hard work of our teams working on the front lines, carrying out essential duties, and in particular, those in our warehouses and delivery hubs. Our mission of facilitating consumers' access to goods and services, helping sellers reach those consumers in a seamless way while making a positive impact on the African continent has never been more relevant.
In these difficult times, we think that we have a crucial role to play helping the consumers and communities we serve Stay Safe, and as much as possible, functioning through the crisis. We are also hopeful that it will accelerate and help accelerate the long-term shifts towards e-commerce.
Let me walk you through how we have adapted to the situation as well as the business impact that we have observed so far. I'm now on page three. Our number one priority has been and remains the health and safety of our team, consumers, and communities. We took rapid action to adjust all our operations. We implemented work from home across all our offices. We took actions to operate our logistics infrastructure in accordance with high standards of safety and hygiene.
Measures we put in place include setting up separate team shifts, checking employees' temperature, sanitizing facilities several times a day. We required the use of masks and gloves as well as sanitizers for the handling and delivery of the orders. All members of our warehouse staff and our delivery partners were trained on all the best practices of personal hygiene and social distancing.
We have also facilitated social distancing, of course, by implementing contactless safe delivery, which has been enabled partly by JumiaPay, which allows consumers to prepay their orders online and have them delivered without the need for cash exchange or physical contact with the delivery agents. Again, making those changes has been a huge task, and we are incredibly grateful to our colleagues and delivery partners working on the front line. Moving on to page four.
We launched a broad effort to have our consumers and communities celebrate and thank what we call the Jumia Heroes through the social media campaign. A week after launching it, the hashtag Jumia Heroes was already trending on social media. We also established a solidarity fund for our Jumia Heroes, which is funded completely voluntarily by the Jumia employees and confidentially by staff contributions.
More broadly, in these difficult times, we think that we have a responsibility to support our communities, leveraging our assets. Thanks to our team and cross-border platform in China, we were able to donate half a million masks to health ministries across Africa for use by health workers. You can see on the right side of the page a few pictures of the delivery meetings, and we've done that across multiple countries.
We also supported local governments in nine countries with free educational campaigns on our platform to help consumers access reliable health and safety information. The campaign was set up within 48 hours and generated over five million impressions to date. This is also what we are about, making people's lives easier and contributing to the community, not only during good times, of course, but during also challenging times.
In terms of business impact, if you turn to page five, we have seen a combination of short-term supply and logistic challenges and positive impacts/unique opportunities for the long term. Most of these trends, of course, emerged in the final half of March 2020, and they're not yet fully reflected in the Q1 results that we are publishing right after that, but we expect those impact to continue playing out in the couple coming quarters.
On the one hand, we see certain challenges on supply and logistics in some parts of the business. On supply, the cross-border operations were disrupted from manufacturing shutdown in China. This supply chain disruption in China also impacted some of our local sellers, especially those who source their goods from China, in consumer electronics, phones, fashion categories. We also faced cross-border logistics challenges due to country lockdowns, which have impacted the cargo operations.
At local level, the confinement measures restrict seller operations. In some areas, some sellers do not even have physical access to their inventory. In some areas, the confinement measures prevent them from dropping their packages into the Jumia Logistics. In some countries, many of the restaurants have simply closed until further notice. On logistics, we are facing capacity limitations, which of course, affect our ability to fulfill consumer demand.
We have curfews in many countries, which are impacting the operating hours, and of course, in turn, constrain the delivery capacity. In South Africa, for example, the deliveries of fashion items were just completely suspended for a few weeks. Overall, the implementation of the safety measures, which I mentioned in our warehouses, like team shifts or safety distancing, are leading to reduced order processing capacity. Those are the challenges.
On the other hand, of course, we are seeing unique opportunities for long-term e-commerce and payment adoption. More and more sellers are embracing e-commerce, and are keen to join Jumia, because of course, offline distribution channels are disrupted. We are seeing unprecedented demands from brands and sellers. Since March, we have started to announce many new partnerships, including with household care and FMCG brands like Reckitt Benckiser, Unilever, P&G, Nestlé, Coca-Cola.
On Jumia Food, we see grocery and convenience retailers very eager to join our on-demand platform, which has the logistic infrastructure to complete deliveries in less than 45 minutes. We also did some partnerships to deliver fresh foods. On the demand front, we have seen a surge in demand for all the essentials, starting of course, the second week of March, and the grocery category has experienced a big four-time increase in terms of items sold compared with last year.
We hope, of course, that those dynamics will help accelerate the consumption shift towards online. This demand is also helping us generate sales and advertising efficiently. On the advertising front and the advertising revenue front, we've seen resilient demand as the advertisers favor direct response online channels that can deliver measurable results.
Last but not least, the launch of contactless safe delivery is helping us to further promote JumiaPay, which provides an opportunity to drive long-term payment adoption. Now if you turn to page six, you can see on this page a few illustrations of those demand and supply trends. Here you have a weekly evolution of items sold for selected parts of the business over March and April, and the data has been rebased to 100, starting in the first week of March.
You see on the black line at group level, we ended the month of April, about 3% above the first week of March, and you can see that there's some negatives and some positives. Jumia Food was and continues to be affected by the fact that many restaurants are just closed, right, across many of our geographies.
We managed to launch a number of convenient grocery stores, but it remains very affected. In South Africa, we paused all deliveries. We are starting to see now some recovery as the deliveries are resuming on certain apparel categories. In Nigeria, the confinement measures had a big impact on our sellers and their ability to bring their packages to us.
A lot of our top sellers simply stopped operating for a few weeks, and you can see that since then, part of the sellers have resumed their activity, some partially, some entirely, and volumes have gradually picked up, right? By the end of April, volumes were almost back to their early March level.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have countries like Morocco or Tunisia here that we have put as examples where we are experiencing, and we have experienced a surge in volumes, peaking mid-April at more than twice the volumes of the first week of March, and throughout April, we continue to see volumes at least 40% above the levels of early March. Of course, those volumes are also somewhat constrained by the logistic capacity challenges, which I mentioned before.
Again, here you see some positives and some challenges. Of course, we're going to continue to adapt to the situation as it continues to develop. Overall, we think that we are very well positioned to become even more relevant to consumers, sellers, and to the broader communities in the coming months. If you turn to page seven, we can see here the highlights of Q1.
Our strategy, as you all know, is based on four pillars, grow the usage of Jumia, drive the penetration of JumiaPay, increase monetization, and to do all this while improving cost efficiency. In 2019, we have started to focus on what is proving to be crucial to navigate the current situation. The focus on everyday product categories is supporting usage and consumer adoption, while all the actions we undertook on the cost are starting to pay off as we're making progress on our path to profitability.
Annual active consumers reached 6.4 million, and orders grew 28%. This is while sales and advertising expense decreased by 25% over the same period. JumiaPay grew very strongly in volumes and transaction terms. TPV increased by 71% and transactions by 77%. On monetization, marketplace revenue grew 22% and gross profit 21%.
On cost, gross profit after fulfillment reached a record EUR 2.5 million, and our Adjusted EBITDA loss decreased by 10% compared with last year, which is the best level in absolute terms in the past six quarters. With this, I'll pass it on to Jeremy, who will walk you through our Q1 performance in more detail.
Thank you, Sacha, and hello, everyone. If you'd like to join me on page nine, please. Let's take a closer look at our top-line growth dynamics. We decided to rebalance our business mix last year. We further accelerated this shift in the first quarter in light of the changes in the demand as a result of the COVID-19.
As part of the business mix rebalancing and to support our path to profitability, we decreased the promotional intensity and the consumer incentives on the lower consumer lifetime value business. In parallel, we've increased our focus on everyday product categories to drive long-term consumer adoption and usage. Looking at the GMV growth trends on the chart on the left-hand side, what we see is that the majority of product categories posted GMV growth above 20%.
Phone and accessories, and to a lesser extent, electronics, were affected by enhanced promotional discipline as part of the business mix rebalancing. The mobile phone category was also affected by the scaling down of the Mobile week promotional campaign in certain markets, also as a result of the COVID-19 supply disruption.
The suspension of all the processing and delivery at Zando, our fashion platform in South Africa, due to strict confinement measures, negatively impacted the fashion category. In terms of items sold, we have seen consistent growth across all product categories, with the exception of mobile phones. Volume growth was particularly strong in the FMCG categories, which surpassed 80% year-over-year. As mentioned by Sacha earlier, growth of the grocery category further accelerated in the last 15 days of March as the confinement measures were put in place in a number of countries.
Moving on to our top-line growth drivers at group level on slide 10, please. We see that GMV was EUR 190 million, down 11% year-over-year, reflecting the effect of the business mix rebalancing combined with the COVID-19 related supply disruption. The annual active consumers reached 6.4 million, up 51% year-over-year, and the orders were up 28%, reaching 6.4 million in Q1 2020.
Our focus remains on driving consumer adoption and usage. Let's now look at how we have been driving the usage in the time of COVID-19 on page 11. In order to drive the usage, featuring supply of essentials and priority categories has been a major focus for us in the latter part of the quarter Q1.
As part of this effort, we launched the Stay Safe campaign in partnership with Reckitt Benckiser to give the consumers access to hygiene and sanitary products at attractive prices. As part of the campaign, Reckitt Benckiser is financing free shipping while we are waiving commissions on the relevant products.
We have also seen a surge in demand from sellers and brands in particular to join the Jumia platform, and we have prioritized the onboarding of sellers offering critical product categories. We launched a number of partnerships covering multiple countries with high profile FMCG brands such as Unilever, P&G, Nestlé, Beiersdorf, Coca-Cola. We have also further solidified our partnership with Carrefour, with its launch in Algeria.
In Kenya, we announced a partnership with Twiga Foods, which connects producers and farmers with vendors, offering our consumers online access to fresh produce directly from farmers. In terms of merchandising, we launched curated product collections targeting specific needs resulting from confinement measures. For example, they include the Stay Fit at Home collection, featuring sports and fitness products, Home Entertainment collection, including children games, toys, or the TikTok Lovers collection, featuring phone and selfie accessories, as a result of the increased reliance on social media and video to connect with each other.
Lastly, on the social media front, we seek to engage our consumers with bespoke live content. We launched the Stay Entertained with Jumia series, with live music streaming events and DJ sets in a digital party format, notably in Ghana, in partnership with various brands, including MTN, Pernod Ricard , and KFC.
Let's now move on page 13 to look at our progress on JumiaPay, please. In Q1 2020, we continued expanding the reach of JumiaPay while launching relevant features and payment use cases for consumers. We launched JumiaPay in Tunisia. JumiaPay is now live in seven countries, Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Kenya, and Tunisia. Also, our contactless safe delivery campaign was partly enabled by JumiaPay.
To remove the need for physical contact or cash exchange at delivery, we encouraged the consumers to prepay orders online using JumiaPay, and we rolled out a pay on delivery feature leveraging JumiaPay. Lastly, we launched new consumer use cases as part of the JumiaPay app. To support the fight against COVID-19, we introduced a direct donation system via the JumiaPay app, covering five relevant charities in each country.
As part of the home entertainment team, we launched a number of games on the JumiaPay app, including Free Fire, PUBG, Fortnite, and League of Legends. Consumer can purchase game subscriptions or credits for in-app purchases on our app. Now, if we move to page 14 on the performance of JumiaPay in Q1 2020. JumiaPay TPV increased by 71% year-over-year, reaching EUR 35.5 million in Q1.
This takes on-platform penetration as a percentage of GMV from 9.7% in Q1 2019 to 18.7% in Q1 this year. If we move to page 15, the JumiaPay growth trends are even stronger on a transaction basis. The number of JumiaPay transactions increased by 77% year-over-year. This led to an increase in the on-platform penetration to 35.5% of orders in Q1 2020, up from 25.5% in Q1 2019.
The strong growth of JumiaPay was partly attributable to the ramp-up of the JumiaPay operations in Ghana and Morocco, which were newly launched in the first quarter of 2019, and Kenya, where we launched JumiaPay in the second quarter of 2019. It was also a result of increasing penetration of JumiaPay in the countries where it was already live in Q1 2019, driven by continued consumer education around payment and enhancement of the JumiaPay value proposition. I now hand over to Antoine, who is going to walk you through our financial performance update.
Thank you, Jeremy. Hello, everyone. We are now on page 17. In parallel with driving usage and consumer adoption of our platform, we seek to monetize this usage and transactional activity in a granular manner. Marketplace revenue reached EUR 19.1 million in Q1 2020, up 22% year-over-year, while gross profit increased by 21% over the same period.
Let's now take a look at our various marketplace revenue streams on slide 18. Commissions, which are fees charged to our sellers, increased by 35% year-over-year. Commissions grew despite GMV reduction, thanks to the category mix rebalancing, enhanced promotional discipline, and reduced deployment of consumer incentives, which are partly accounted for as deductions from commission revenue. Fulfillment, which comprises delivery fees charged to consumers, increased by 29% in the first quarter of 2020 on a year-over-year basis in parallel with orders growth.
Value-added services, which includes revenue from services charged to our sellers, such as logistics services, packaging, or content creation, decreased by 3% in the first quarter of 2020 on a year-over-year basis. This was largely a result of a sharp reduction in international logistics revenue starting from February, as our cross-border business was affected by the manufacturing facilities shut down in China and cargo disruption. Here, I would like to point out that we made changes to the pricing of Jumia Global products, which will cause a shift of a large part of international logistics revenue from the value-added services account to the fulfillment revenue account.
Marketing and advertising, which corresponds to the revenue generated from the sale of a diversified range of ad solutions to sellers and advertisers, increased by 34% in Q1 2020 on a year-over-year basis. While marketing and advertising revenue grew by triple digit rates in the first two months of the quarter compared to the previous year, March 19 was marked by large marketing contributions as part of last year's Mobile Week, which was scaled down this year as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. To wrap up on the monetization front, I would say that this is a part of our business which has been quite sensitive to the COVID-19, partly due to the impact of our cross-border business.
We have also been careful not to increase monetization pressure on our sellers as we are conscious of the challenges they are facing in the current environment, and we also want to avoid any detrimental impact that an increase in monetization may have on prices for our customers. Let's now move on to the progress on cost efficiency.
This has been an area of strong focus for us since 2019, and one where we see our efforts starting to bear fruit. As a reminder, we have three main costs in our P&L. Fulfillment expense, which is largely variable, sales and advertising expense, which is discretionary to a certain extent, and general and administrative expense. Let's start with fulfillment expense. Slide 20. We are pleased to report another quarter of positive gross profit after fulfillment expense, reaching EUR 2.5 million in Q1 2020 compared to breakeven in Q1 2019.
If we look at our fulfillment expense in absolute terms in Q1 2020 compared to Q1 2019, we see an increase of 5% while orders increased by 28% over the same period. This was partly due to a lower proportion of cross-border packages, which reduced our overall freight and shipping expense per package. Our second main cost component is sales and advertising. I am now on slide 21.
Sales and advertising expense decreased by 25% in Q1 2020, reaching EUR 8.9 million, which is the lowest level in almost 12 quarters, while orders increased by 28% year-over-year. The reduction in sales and advertising expense was partly driven by an effort to adjust demand to supply and logistics constraints, as well as a focus on our path to profitability.
Sales and advertising expense per annual active consumer decreased by 26% from EUR 11.1 per annual active consumer in the first quarter of 2019 to EUR 8.2 in the first quarter of 2020. We have made a number of enhancements to our performance marketing strategy across search and social media channels, allowing us to acquire new users and drive conversion in a more effective manner. We also improved the performance of our CRM channels via cross-selling initiatives aimed at driving repeat purchase based on the purchase history of consumers.
Finally, our third major cost area is technology and G&A. I'm now on slide 22. Our technology and content expense increased by 22% compared to the first quarter of 2019, as we continued investing in our tech infrastructure. G&A, excluding SBC, reached EUR 24.4 million, up 4% compared to the first quarter of 2019.
Here, I would like to point out that the first quarter of 2019 did not fully reflect a number of organizational enhancements made in the course of 2019 to operate the business as a listed company. We therefore believe that the amount of G&A expense, excluding SBC, of the fourth quarter of '19, is a more relevant comparative base for the first quarter of 2020. G&A expense, excluding SBC and restructuring expense, was EUR 31.7 million in Q4 2019.
In Q1 2020, G&A, excluding SBC expense, decreased by 23% or more than EUR 7 million compared to Q4 2019, partly due to staff cost and professional fee savings. As a result of increased usage, monetization, and cost efficiencies, our unit economics are improving, and we are making progress on our path to profitability. I am now on slide 23.
Our adjusted EBITDA loss decreased by 10% year-over-year, reaching EUR 35.6 million in Q1 2020, the lowest level in the past six quarters. The business mix rebalancing we undertook alongside cost discipline is paying off and driving clear improvement in our unit economics. On average, we have smaller size but more profitable orders.
On the table on the right-hand side, you can see that while our average order value decreased by 31% from EUR 42.5 to EUR 29.5, the order contribution of gross profit minus fulfillment expense on a per order basis moved from breakeven to EUR 0.40 per order in Q1 2020.
Our sales and advertising expense per order decreased by 42% to EUR 1.4 per order, while tech and G&A per order decreased by 16% to EUR 4.9. As a result of these efficiencies, adjusted EBITDA loss per order decreased by 29%, from EUR 7.9 to EUR 5.6 in Q1 2020.
We are pleased by the progress on the unit economic front, which illustrates our progress towards profitability. Moving on to page 24. Our path to profitability is further supported by our asset-light business model. CapEx in Q1 2020 was less than half a million EUR as we operate Jumia Logistics as a platform with very limited CapEx requirements.
Net change in working capital resulted in an outflow of EUR 5.9 million during the quarter, mostly due to a shorter payables cycle. As a result of these features, our adjusted EBITDA is a close proxy for cash utilization, and the delta between operating cash flow and adjusted EBITDA was approximately 10%. Finally, at March 31st, 2020, we had EUR 191 million of cash available. With that, I'll hand the call back over to Sacha.
Thank you very much. Just a few remarks before we open to Q&A. Of course, the current situation is challenging in many respects, but it also gives us even more confidence on the relevance of Jumia, e-commerce, and online payments in Africa. When we look ahead, one, we think that for some time there will often be, here and there, some level of supply and logistics disruption.
We have a lot of levers to navigate them, and we also expect them to be more short-term and somehow eventually resolved. Two, we are preparing for potentially very tough economic times ahead. You already know that we started many actions last year, the portfolio optimization, exit from travel, three countries, cost reductions, promotional discipline. In a way, this is very good for us because we are somewhat ahead of the curve from that perspective.
I want to say that we have not stopped our efforts on cost discipline and expense reduction, and we have continued to carry on some actions already in Q1. Three, during those challenging times, combined or not with the need for social distancing or sometimes periods of confinement, we have seen consumers turn to Jumia as we strive to give them the best prices and a very convenient and safe experience.
We believe that this will continue, and we will continue to see strong consumer adoption and usage. Four, similarly on the seller side, we have already started seeing unprecedented demand to join the Jumia platform, and especially from big brands. This is of course very good for us because it enables us to bring more choice and selections, which helps consumer adoption, and also to drive the trust on Jumia.
We believe those dynamics will help accelerate the shift towards online on both the demand and supply sides, which again gives us a lot of confidence in the relevance of the company and for Jumia in Africa. We remain committed to reducing our Adjusted EBITDA loss in absolute terms in 2020 while driving consumer adoption and usage. Now I want to thank you for your attention, and we are ready to open up the call for Q&A.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. Today's first question comes from Mark Mahaney with RBC. Please go ahead.
Okay, let me try two things. One, the trends that you're seeing at the end of the last quarter and into this quarter in Morocco and Tunisia looks so different than what you're seeing in your overall company in the other markets. Could you explain again why you would see a surge in what looks like an order volume and specifically in those two markets versus the others?
Secondly, could you just, again, address the liquidity issues for the company? It sounds like your goal is to bring down EBITDA losses for the full year. How far do you think the existing cash can take you? How do you think about what an appropriate minimum level of cash you need to have in order to run the business with confidence? Thank you.
Thanks, Mark. On the first question, here we put four of our geographies as well as the Jumia Food business, or category or service. Here is more of an illustration to show that we have some positives and some negatives. Where we see the positives is because there's a combination of confinement measures, but which are not disrupting the supply in a way which is detrimental to addressing this demand, right?
Pretty much everywhere, the demand is there, right? The question is more the ability for the supply and to some extent the logistics and payments to fulfill that demand. In Morocco and Tunisia, we have typical examples of situations where we have the demand and the supply and the logistics, which are working together. In Nigeria, we have a very big disruption in supply.
If you have a very big disruption in supply, then of course, you can't generate the right level of demand. This surge in those two countries is really driven by the combination of those elements. Let me know if that answers your question. On the second one, you have seen our cash level. We have about EUR 190 million.
We have made very clear that we want to drive gradual reduction and a clear trend in the reduction of our cash burn on a quarterly basis, and the same for the adjusted EBITDA loss. I think you see already in Q1 that some of the choices that we have made are starting to pay off. For now, that's what we comment on.
We continue to be committed to the strategy, which will drive the lower cash burn on a quarterly basis and trend toward profitability. That's where we'll take it.
Sacha, one follow-up. Do you have visibility into when some of those confinement measures will change and supply challenges you're seeing will be lifted in some of your larger markets like Nigeria? Are conditions on the ground improving enough that it looks like the confinement measures that affect your supply base are going to be changed this month or next month? Any visibility there?
Yes. You can see already on the charts at the end of April, Nigeria was almost back at the level at the beginning of March, right? Already a number of signs were happening and were driving the business back to normal. I think here maybe it's worth that I sort of tell you the type of actions we do to secure the supply, right? There's a large number of actions that we are doing.
One is that we are strengthening the partnerships with the big sellers, and the big sellers tend to have more stock, more inventory, and stronger operations. Two, we are leveraging Jumia Express, our own warehouses where we can store the goods from the sellers. As soon as the sellers can access their inventory, they can put it on Jumia Express. Three, we can do retail.
As you know, we have the ability to do 1P, and sometimes we decide to engage into 1P, especially if we want to secure the supply. In some cases, that can be very helpful. We have multi warehousing capabilities. Sometimes in the countries you have transportation between regions which is disrupted, so it's very interesting to locate some of the Jumia Express inventory in the region where the consumers are ordering from.
We have a lot of new big sellers and big brands which are joining, which is also bringing that. We have a multi-category approach, a multi-country approach, and because we are a marketplace, we have dozens of thousands of sellers that we can go to. In a way, we are leveraging and pulling a lot of levers to drive both minimal disruption and using all the tools and the levers we have to minimize the disruption.
If there is disruption, the good news is we have so many countries that when a country is down, well, there's a country which is up, right? Which is the benefit of being Pan-African, multi-category marketplace, because when parts of the business is suffering temporarily, then you have another part which is doing well, which is one of the big benefits of our platform, which is somehow not de-risked completely, but we've a lot of leverage to de-risk it.
Thank you, Sacha.
Our next question today comes from Aaron Kessler with Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks, guys. Maybe just a couple of questions. First is maybe on engagement or consumer engagement. If you could talk a little bit to traffic you've seen, maybe app downloads, just trying to get a sense for kind of how consumers are responding in terms of that demand. just maybe on the expense side, should we think about Q1 as kind of at base level, or is that not fully reflected?
Should we expect further kind of some reductions in Q2 and as we think about expense levels throughout the year as well? third, just any update on Egypt, obviously now, I think your second biggest country, if you can provide any updates on Egypt as well. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, Aaron. On the first one, definitely, we've seen engagement curves in terms of traffic, app downloads, which are similar somehow to the curve of items sold. Where the demand has been surging, of course, it's been also coming together with a very strong engagement, very strong app downloads, and overall a lot of good dynamics on traffic and engagement.
I think we have that situation pretty much everywhere. People are turning to online, and they're looking for solutions. This is overall driving a lot of good engagement. Most importantly, I think you're seeing this from the number. Those are happening at really a very good marketing efficiency levels, right? Because you have to always look at the growth of the usage together with the evolution of the sales and advertising expense.
I think here definitely the engagement is helping a lot. If you take our expense levels, we have three types of expense, fulfillment, sales and advertising, and G&A. The fulfillment, to some extent, it will depend on a lot of factors, whether the cross-border business will come back or stay where it is, and whether more pickup stations or more door delivery and all those factors that we explained.
What matters here is that we are able to pass a healthy part of those expenses to the consumers and to the sellers. If you look at the evolution of fulfillment expense together with the evolution of fulfillment revenue and value-added services, you can see very healthy development. In a way, we will continue to capture some efficiency at fulfillment level, and we will continue to see a healthy pass-through. On this, we're very confident.
On the sales and advertising, you can see a sharp reduction in absolute terms. I think if we continue to see that level of engagement, which is somehow very organic, we're going to take advantage of that, but of course, continue to invest. Here we will drive that, I would say, quite tactically depending on what we see.
For example, the moment the restaurants can open back, well, we will be very happy to invest more and more sales and advertising to drive the consumer back to the platform. Again, this is a very discretionary investment, so we will drive it based on the traction that we see and the level of engagement that we want to drive. In terms of G&A, we have still to see here some benefits of some of the actions that we have done.
On this one, we can confidently see those G&A to continue to reduce, but at moderate speed. The goal for our strategy is to keep G&A as stable as possible, maybe to see a downward trend. Most importantly is to drive the growth of the usage and monetization.
Great. Lastly, on Egypt, any update there on performance on Egypt?
Oh, yeah. On Egypt. Egypt is in the upper part of the chart. It's doing well, and it's benefited from good trends. It's a country which is closer to the blue and the red than the green and the orange.
Got it. Great. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Sarah Simon with Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi. I've got a couple of questions. One was for, well, I think two were for Antoine. Antoine, can you just remind us what you were saying about the shift of revenue between out of Jumia global logistics and that were coming out of value-added services? I didn't really understand that bit. That was one.
The second question was, on competition. Sacha, obviously some of your competitors are single country players. I'm just wondering whether you think that through this process, those single country players are losing market share to you, and how you see the competitive landscape at the moment relative to pre-COVID. Thanks.
Maybe, Sacha, can you take the first one?
Antoine, do you want to take the first one, please?
I was not able to hear it, sorry. The line
No problem. It's clarifying the impact of the reclassification of the Jumia global revenues. Remaking the point and re-explaining the reclassification, the upcoming reclassification.
First, this was not yet included in our financial statement since it was on post end of March. what we're going to do is that we're going to shift a part of the international logistics revenue from the value-added services account to the fulfillment revenue account. it's more a matter of reclassification than anything else.
Okay. We should expect further contraction in value-added services, at least in that bit, but fulfillment would be better.
Yes.
Can you give us an idea of the kind of proportion of value-added services revenue that represents?
Well, it's a little bit too early to comment on that at this stage. We'll have more clarity at the end of Q2, I guess.
Okay, thanks.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the question-
It's something that would not change the gross profit after fulfillment. Right?
Sure.
Sorry, I think Sarah had a question on competition as well, operator, that I will take. I agree with you. It's a huge benefit for us to be Pan-African because it makes us the natural partner for all the global brands, gives us more economies of scale, and also for talent mobility and for de-risking the business as well, b ecause sometimes when you're in a given geography and the given geography is not going the way you want, then you are suffering so much more.
I think it's been a very good asset for us to have this Pan-African presence, and it's driving a lot of value. Market share is very hard to measure because no one else publishes data. We have some competition in free markets, mainly, and then we have a lot of local players and initiatives.
At the moment, we are really focusing on growing the market and growing the usage. Of course, I think all the benefits of being Pan-African are playing out, and we think we're doing very well. At the same time, there's really no reliable data on market share.
Right now, we're really focused on driving a lot of consumer usage and having a lot of users coming to Jumia, a lot of sellers coming to Jumia, driving a lot of efficient transactions. We think that's the right strategy, and that when you do that, ultimately, you're in a good position. It's a bit of a vague answer, I'm sorry, Sarah, but there's really no data on this, and we're focusing on doing what's right and driving the business forward here.
Thank you. This concludes the question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to the management team for any final remarks.
Thank you, everyone, and as always, we are available if you need any follow-up. Most importantly, I hope everyone is safe and stay safe. Thank you, guys. Take care. Bye-bye.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. We thank you all for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines, and have a wonderful day.