Business experts in Kenya have urged companies to adopt e-commerce as the future of their trade operations.
Speaking during an OLX Kenya SME training session bringing together more than 200 business leaders, Robert Wamai told delegates e-commerce provides an important stepping point to help businesses grow.
He added e-commerce had the potential to create multinationals from SMEs and thus increase the country’s GDP, which currently stands at US$32 billion.
Wamai said the country needs international brands similar to Coca Cola to help take Kenya’s economy to the next level through a platform that promotes efficiency and is not affected by geographical borders.
“The economy of the country will only grow if your businesses grow. How can a company like Coca Cola make more money than the Kenyan economy? Coke is just sugar, water and gas”, he said.
Wamai now wants businesses to adopt technology terming successful businessmen as chameleons who adapt to different circumstances and embrace change.
Peter Ndiangui, OLX Kenya manager, said the potential in the country is immense with more than 17 million Kenyans having made the internet part of their daily lives, up from just 200,000 in 2000.
He encouraged business owners to take advantage of the internet saying that advertising is slowly moving to the internet platform from traditional media.
“A lot of consumers have switched off the TV. If you don’t use internet, you won’t be able to reach them,” Ndiangui said.
“OLX is just a demonstration of how technology can make things easy for entrepreneurs,” he said.
“Anyone who logs into the OLX site can access the ad and if interested, they can contact the seller free of charge. If the entrepreneur links its OLX account to Facebook and Twitter, its ads will be posted automatically on its social networking pages.”
