Reports: OLX Shuts Down Office In Nigeria

We now have official confirmation from Sjoerd Nikkelen, CEO of OLX in Asia, Middle East and Africa that OLX has indeed shut down physical operations in Nigeria. He however made no mention of Kenya or Ghana. He said:

We made a difficult but important decision in Nigeria to consolidate our operations between some of our offices internationally.

Our marketplace will continue to operate here — uninterrupted — as it has since 2010, and we remain committed to the many people here who use our platform to buy and sell every month. We continue to be focused on constantly innovating to make sure that OLX remains the top classifieds platform in the country.

Of course, we are committed to helping our affected colleagues during this transition and have already offered them meaningful financial and other support. As we’ve expressed to them directly, we are extremely grateful for their many significant contributions to OLX’s success.

Multinational media group and investor Naspers has allegedly shut down all OLX offices in Africa except the one in South Africa. Operations in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya are going to be affected by this announcement.

OLX is a global classifieds platform, with physical presence in nearly 40 countries.

According to a report on Innovation Village, staff in these offices have been informed today and are expected to fully move out by the end of March 2018. The same report says OLX will still be present in these countries but will be run remotely and at press time, the Nigerian and Kenyan websites of OLX are still up and running.

Naspers are investors in MultiChoice — operators of the DStv and GOtv satellite televisions — and the recently acquired Konga.

This move is a possible indicator that Naspers is slowly moving its investments away from Africa.

Techpoint reached out to the communication team at OLX Nigeria but they neither confirmed nor denied this report.

This is a developing story.