KENYAN E-LOGISTICS COMPANY EXPANDS TO THE NIGERIAN MARKET

Kenyan e-logistics company, Lori, has officially announced its expansion to Nigeria in a bid to cement its footprint across Africa. The company, which is the largest e-logistics service provider in East Africa, launched in Kenya in 2016 to seamlessly connect cargo owners to transport in frontier markets.

Over the past ten months, Lori has completed a successful pilot in Nigeria with some of the country’s top cargo companies including Olam, Honeywell Flour Mills and Flour Mills Nigeria.  This expansion presents a massive opportunity for Lori as the company seeks to facilitate and connect technology innovation, smart policy and government partnership, and seamless operations in order to continue lowering the cost of goods. As Africa’s largest single market, Nigeria faces challenges with a congested port and a shortage of transport options.

In July, Lori announced the appointment of new global leadership to drive the company’s expansion efforts across Africa. “Lori is at the forefront of revolutionizing cargo transport across Africa from the ground up,” said Uche Ogboi, Lori chief operating officer.  “Our mission in Nigeria is to create a more efficient logistics experience for cargo owners who are burdened with the task of moving their goods across the country. We have successfully created a digital platform to enable the movement of goods through a transparent supply chain management system that is affordable, reliable and flexible,” she added. 

As a digital marketplace and elogistics service provider, Lori provides value to clients in three key areas: technology, operational excellence and customer service. For cargo owners, Lori offers reliability by working with high quality transporters who have been vetted, verified, successfully on boarded and constantly rated on performance. Lori is developing sophisticated technology tools to package and deliver meaningful data to provide management teams with insights for better control. These tools also facilitate better tracking with greater context for goods on journey. Ultimately, cost savings is achieved directly and indirectly with better end-to-end coordination with transporters.

For transporter partners, Lori optimizes truck and asset utilization for on-boarded trucks by up to five times through access to its pool of cargo owners and with quicker turn-around times and through proactive loading and off-loading activities. Lori also offers access to working capital in the form of fuel financing and insurance, with better payment terms, so that there is no delay in getting trucks on the road. It has also developed proprietary systems and software for automatic invoicing to relieve administrative burden.

Lori’s mission is to solve the problem of high cost of goods across Africa where in certain countries, up to 75% of the cost of a product on the continent is attributed to logistics, compared to only 6% in the U.S. The company aims to achieve this by eliminating customer pain points along the cargo journey with new technologies and superior user experience.