OLX aims to activate Pakistan’s dormant economy

Country manager feels there is immense potential in e-commerce segment

KARACHI: There are several avenues in Pakistan waiting to be tapped. Be it the energy sector, where the government has planned to undertake massive investment with the help of China, or the ecommerce space, where the growth of mobile broadband has spurred the rise of many startups and attracted global players such as Careem and Uber as well.

OLX, the online platform that connects buyers and sellers, is also aiming to tap one aspect of the Pakistani economy — the dormant sector that just keeps growing, but doesn’t add much to business activity.

“There are numerous households in Pakistan that have stockpiled goods that can sell for a lot of money,” Bilal Bajwa, the OLX Country Manager for Pakistan, told The Express Tribune in a recent interview. “We have conducted studies based on the actual numbers. By introducing them to potential buyers, and vice versa, we’re activating a dormant economy, which has been our main aim. From a community perspective, this generates economic activity.”

Bajwa’s comments mean that the roughly $270-billion economy has much more potential than the actual number suggests.

OLX, founded in 2006, operates in 45 countries, and is among the largest online classified ads company in Pakistan. With the digital sphere gaining traction, the time for classified ads in newspapers might just be over.

“On OLX today, every three seconds, a new item is listed, every day, there are a reported 500,000 daily active users and 5 million unique, active users visit a month. We have also launched two new categories; agriculture and business & industry. It has been a fantastic journey for us, but when I look ahead to how internet penetration has increased, I think, and I hope, we’re just getting started.”

Spreading awareness in a society that is still undergoing a transition to the digital sphere, however, is a challenge.

“There’s a big burden on us to help educate and mature the market. And I think, the more competition we get, they will help us develop the market and vice versa.”

While funding may be an issue for OLX, Bajwa said the company’s global perspective will help it innovate.

The country manager has previously worked as general manager at Zynga, leading several global gaming franchises.

“I was very fortunate to be in Silicon Valley at a time when social media was taking off. Around the time when there still a battle between MySpace, Bebo, HiFive and Facebook, and it wasn’t clear who was going to win.

In that era, we started developing games. One of the things that really struck me about gaming was how it is so good at merging a very data driven approach, where they are looking at every single click and every user action

“In my time at Zynga, I was associated with many, very large franchises. I was heading projects like Frontierville, Café world, CastleVille, hidden chronicles and worked to some extent with Zynga Poker. It was a fun experience, being part of a company that goes to IPO, and I wanted to bring that experience to OLX.”

However, Bajwa said Pakistan needs companies to go beyond the national boundaries.

“We desperately need some organisations to deliver on their promises. Right now, there’s a lot of promise, and a lot of people taking initiative, but we need a few of our tech companies to scale nationally and go beyond just their niche.”

The official added that the country’s young blood needed to be trained in order to be able to pursue taking a startup beyond the idea-stage.

“I have been to a number of startup pitches, where young graduates, who have close to no experience in the market, throw around claims without having a product up and running. There is a naivety about the young blood in this industry and this hurts our growth.

“I think we need to put our head down, learn and experiment. We have tripled the size of our team, we are hiring and we’ve built that culture where the youth can learn to enjoy their work, while also growing and learning. We focus on training our workforce under the best conditions; we’ve recently commissioned our employees to trainings in Kenya and Dubai.”

Edited by Bilal Memon