In Lagos, a retailer stares at empty shelves and faces an impatient customer base. Restocking their store leaves them with one of two choices multiple phone calls, endless waits, and access to a small selection of products due to limited contacts or a long trip through traffic with cash to pick up goods from their wholesaler.
When the goods finally arrive, they find that the costs have unexpectedly risen, cutting into already thin margins.
This retailer’s experience is not isolated; it represents the inefficiencies and frustrations of the traditional supply chain in the Nigerian FMCG industry.
Global tech firm RedCloud Technologies has a singular mission: eliminate the barriers to fair and profitable trade and transform how consumer goods are traded across the world’s fastest-growing markets with their proprietary Intelligent Open Commerce Platform.
Currently operating in four emerging markets – Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina. RedCloud supports FMCG brands, distributors, and merchants by digitally linking all the stakeholders in the consumer goods industry and providing the tools they need to drive economic growth.
RedCloud is addressing one of the biggest challenges affecting FMCG distribution in Nigeria – the lack of end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, which leads to severe inefficiencies, like stockouts at the retailer and overproduction by FMCG brands.
RedCloud’s solution is an AI-powered Open Commerce Platform, and its advantages can be distilled into four key elements: convenience, choice, cost, and data.
With RedCloud’s Intelligent Open Commerce Platform, merchants can conveniently place orders and restock their inventory anytime and anywhere at the touch of a button.
This level of convenience is a game-changer for local merchants who traditionally rely on a limited set of contacts for their inventory needs and could only access a narrow selection of products but now have a plethora of choices at their fingertips.
Another significant benefit of Open Commerce is its cost-effectiveness – by removing the trade barriers typically found in the inefficient, traditional distribution model, merchants can participate in an open, competitive marketplace with transparent pricing.
More than just enabling transactions, however, RedCloud’s Intelligent Open Commerce Platform captures real-time data across the entire supply chain from over 50,000 live data points and leverages artificial intelligence to provide sellers with a detailed high-fidelity view of the market in real-time.
For FMCG brands and distributors, the entire market is divided into battlegrounds, where the competition is fierce; white spaces, where there is demand for their products but significant distribution challenges; and blindspots, where there is no visibility on the demand for their products.
RedCloud has worked with multiple brands and over 200 distributors across Nigeria to digitise their business and provide end-to-end visibility across these three market segments.
By leveraging RedCloud’s predictive data analytics solution, these businesses can now identify market trends, and purchase and ordering patterns across the entire market.
This integrated analytics solution offers such precise demand planning that brands can accurately forecast market needs, leading to more effective inventory and procurement planning, ultimately reducing waste and boosting profitability.
RedCloud moved beyond an initial pilot phase with some of the biggest FMCG brands in Nigeria and has helped them improve their planning by providing them with advanced integrated route planning capabilities for production, inventory, and demand planning.
These brands no longer rely on dated information or gut feeling; RedCloud’s AI-driven Intelligent Open Commerce Platform offers real-time data and actionable insights for better decision-making.
Within 12 months of operating in the Nigerian FMCG space, RedCloud has announced a $500 million trading milestone on their Intelligent Open Commerce Platform, with over 200,000 merchants trading.
- Speaking about this feat, Justin Floyd, the CEO of RedCloud, said, “Our vision for Open Commerce is to enable trade anywhere through the next evolution of commerce.
- With AI, we are driving a new kind of B2B commerce experience, bringing badly needed economics to brands, distributors, and retailers everywhere. Big Tech has failed many of these businesses, and we are here to put that right.”
- “Achieving half a billion dollars in trading volume in just over a year in a single market is confirmation of the need for a digital transformation that puts an end to unnecessarily high commission charges and transaction fees while providing the digital access that all businesses deserve.”
