Jiji has acquired Bikroy, Bangladesh’s largest digital classifieds marketplace, in a deal whose financial details were not disclosed, marking the Nigerian-rooted company’s first acquisition outside Africa.
The acquisition comes barely thirteen months after Jiji entered the South Asian country in March 2025 through its Bangladesh-focused platform, jiji-bd.com, where it directly competed with established players like Bikroy, Daraz, and Ajkerdeal before eventually buying the market leader outright.
Jiji Chief Executive Officer Anton Volianskyi, in an email to TechCabal, said the company financed the acquisition using “internal resources and shareholder support,” but declined to reveal the transaction value.
Founded in 2014, Jiji operates as an online classifieds marketplace where users buy and sell products ranging from cars and electronics to real estate and household items. In Nigeria, its biggest and most strategic market, the platform has become almost synonymous with online classifieds, particularly for used vehicles, smartphones, apartments, and business equipment.
The company dramatically expanded its footprint in 2019 after acquiring OLX Africa’s operations across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania, a move that effectively ended one of Africa’s fiercest digital marketplace rivalries and pushed Jiji into a dominant continental position.
Today, the company says it operates across several African countries, including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire, while serving more than 90 million annual users and processing roughly $70 billion in annual GMV — short for Gross Merchandise Value, a metric used to estimate the total value of goods traded on a platform.
The Jiji strategy
The Bangladesh acquisition highlights what has now become Jiji’s unmistakable expansion strategy: enter a market organically, compete aggressively with the dominant player, then acquire that rival once consolidation becomes commercially sensible.
“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,” Volianskyi said.
That strategy has now repeated itself three times in six years.
First came the acquisition of OLX Africa’s operations in 2019. Then Tonaton in Ghana in 2022. Now Bikroy in Bangladesh in 2026.
According to Volianskyi, the Bangladesh expansion was never meant to be a symbolic international move but rather a calculated attempt to pressure the market before consolidation.
“This was a calculated, deliberately phased approach,” he 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.”
The move also signals a major strategic pivot for Jiji.
Back in 2021, after acquiring Cars45, Jiji co-founder Vladimir Mnogoletniy had suggested that Africa’s classifieds market was already largely consolidated, leaving limited room for further acquisitions on the continent.
What this means for its African market
For Africa — especially Nigeria — the acquisition could further strengthen Jiji’s dominance rather than weaken it.
By expanding beyond the continent while maintaining leadership in its core African markets, Jiji may be positioning itself as one of the few African-founded consumer internet companies successfully exporting a homegrown business model abroad.
The company already claims leadership positions in six core African markets, with Nigeria remaining its most commercially important territory.
- In November 2024, Jiji disclosed that it hosted over six million active listings worth more than $10 billion and attracted around 12 million monthly unique visitors across Africa. The latest figures released alongside the Bikroy acquisition suggest that scale has now grown significantly.
Industry analysts say that scale matters enormously in classifieds businesses because the more buyers a platform attracts, the more sellers it pulls in, creating what technology experts call “network effects” — a situation where a platform becomes more valuable simply because more people are using it.
The Bangladesh acquisition could also provide Jiji with additional revenue diversification at a time when competition in African e-commerce is intensifying.
In Nigeria, for instance, Chinese-owned Temu entered the market aggressively in 2024, while Daraz continues to maintain a broader Asian e-commerce footprint.
Still, Jiji enters that competition with Bangladesh’s largest classifieds asset already under its control.
Importantly, the Bikroy brand itself will not disappear after the acquisition.
- According to Jiji, Bikroy has recorded more than 10 million app downloads since launching in 2012, processes over $3 billion in annual GMV, and attracts roughly three million monthly visitors.
Volianskyi described preserving the brand as “central to the investment thesis,” arguing that replacing a platform with over a decade of market trust would “destroy meaningful value.”