Thirteen months after entering Bangladesh as a direct competitor, African e-commerce giant Jiji has acquired Bikroy, the country’s largest online classifieds marketplace — its first acquisition outside Africa and a move that gives it instant category leadership in one of South Asia’s fastest-growing digital economies, reports TechCabal, a Lagos-based tech publication. 

Anton Volianskyi, Jiji’s chief executive officer, declined to disclose the transaction value but confirmed the deal was funded through “internal resources and shareholder support.” 

The acquisition is the second time Jiji has bought a marketplace from Sweden-based Saltside Technologies, which built and operates classifieds platforms across emerging markets. In 2022, Jiji acquired Saltside’s Ghanaian platform, Tonaton, after years of competing head-to-head in the same market. Saltside, backed by Kinnevik, Hillhouse Capital, and Brummer & Partners, has raised approximately $65 million across its lifetime and now retains only one major operating asset: Ikman, in Sri Lanka.

“This is a deliberate strategy, and we are direct about it,” Volianskyi said in an email to TechCabal. “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.” 

The compete-then-buy playbook

Jiji’s approach to Bangladesh was textbook. When it launched jiji-bd.com in March 2025, the company publicly framed it as a long-term play against incumbents — Bikroy, Daraz, and Ajkerdeal — while privately applying competitive pressure. Within 13 months, it had bought its largest rival.

The pattern is not new. In 2019, Jiji acquired OLX Africa’s operations in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania after years of head-to-head competition, pushing its monthly audience above eight million users in a single stroke. Tonaton in Ghana followed in 2022. Bikroy is the third competitor Jiji has absorbed in six years.

“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,” Volianskyi said. 

Why Bikroy matters

Founded in October 2012 by Saltside Technologies, Bikroy is the dominant classifieds platform in Bangladesh, a country of 175 million people with 131 million internet users. The platform has recorded more than 10 million app downloads since launch, serves over 400,000 monthly buyers and more than 100,000 monthly sellers, and processes more than $3 billion in annual gross merchandise value (GMV) — concentrated in high-value categories like real estate and vehicles, mirroring Jiji’s core categories across Africa. 

The platform employs around 420 people and reaches roughly three million unique visitors a month. It was first described as Bangladesh’s “first bilingual classified website” by The Daily Star in 2012 and reached operating break-even in August 2019.

For Jiji, which now describes itself as serving over 90 million annual users and processing $70 billion in annual GMV across its platform, the Bikroy acquisition brings a well-established brand with more than a decade of consumer trust — something that cannot be built quickly. 

“That kind of brand equity and category leadership takes more than a decade to build, and replacing it would destroy meaningful value,” Volianskyi said. 

What changes for Bikroy

The Bikroy brand will remain. Volianskyi was emphatic that preserving it is “central to the investment thesis.”

Under Jiji’s ownership, four things will change: the underlying technology platform, the monetisation model, marketing investment, and seller package architecture. Bikroy will move onto Jiji’s technology stack, built for small businesses and professional sellers. The flat-fee pricing model will be replaced by a performance-based bidding system — sellers pay only when shoppers click on their listings, and set their own bids and daily spending caps. Jiji will increase marketing spend to drive more shoppers to the platform, a playbook it has used consistently in Africa. 

Bikroy’s local team across commercial, operations, customer support, sales, marketing, and finance will continue to operate under a locally incorporated subsidiary now owned by the Jiji Group.

A market worth owning

Bangladesh’s e-commerce sector is projected to reach $12 to $13 billion by 2027 to 2029, according to Payments and Commerce Market Intelligence (PCMI). In 2024, 79% of Bangladeshi consumers shopped online and 47% said they were comfortable paying on digital platforms. 

With Bikroy now folded in, Jiji’s primary remaining competition in Bangladesh narrows to Daraz, the Alibaba-owned e-commerce platform with a broader product catalogue. But Jiji enters that competition holding the country’s largest classified asset.

“Beyond our core six African markets, we look at opportunities where the market has the right structural fundamentals and where we believe our operating model can deliver category leadership,” Volianskyi said. “Bangladesh fits that profile, and Bikroy is the right asset in that market.”