Copia Global, a Kenyan eCommerce platform for online shopping, has stopped taking orders from several markets in Kenya temporarily. The affected markets are Naivasha, Machakos, Meru, Embu, Kericho, and Eldoret in central and eastern Kenya. Employees in these areas have been put on leave.
This decision came just a week after the company went into administration and appointed Makenzi Muthusi and Julius Ngonga from KPMG, an audit and advisory firm, to manage the process. When a company enters administration, it’s to save a business that’s still valuable but having money problems, and administrators are appointed to handle it.
Before this happened, Copia Global had around 1,800 employees and over 50,000 agents across different regions in Kenya. The administrators decided to stop operations in some markets to save money while the company looks for new investors.
According to Anne Mwihaki, Copia’s director of human resources, the company will inform everyone involved, like stakeholders, agents, customers, and transporters, about what’s going on. She said that the main goals of this administration are to keep the company running and to find new investors.
One of the administrators, Makenzi Muthusi, told employees that even though there might be a delay in paying them for May because of bank issues, the company has enough money to cover it.
Before going into administration and stopping orders in some markets, Copia Global had to let go of more than 1,000 employees because of money problems. They said there were too many uncertainties, and if they couldn’t reduce costs, they might have to close.
This layoff happened five months after the company got an extra $20 million in funding in December 2023, adding to the over $120 million they raised in total from different investors.
This isn’t the first time Copia has faced problems like this. After starting in Uganda in 2021, they had to stop operations there in 2023 and let go of up to 700 employees because they wanted to focus on Kenya. This was because of tough economic times and not enough money in the markets.
Even though Copia tried to boost sales with a mobile app campaign in November 2023 and got more funding in December, including partnering with Visa, they still had to let go of employees, go into administration, and stop taking orders in some Kenyan markets.