Ratio Magazine :: The Inside Track to East Africa’s Economies - News Analysis: Google Trader Launch

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News Analysis: Google Trader Launch - Bad News for Local Classifieds Sites?

Wednesday, 19 October 2011

After the Uganda and Ghana platform, Google has now also launched a Google Trader site for Kenya. Trader is a free online classifieds service covering products, services, jobs etc. From the press release:

‘Olga Arara-Kimani, Google Kenya Country Manager said: “The launch of Google Trader in Kenya will go a long way in simplifying buying and selling. By offering this free and easy to use service across the web and mobile web platforms, we aim to make the service as accessible to as many Kenyans as possible.”

Google’s mission in Africa is to make the internet relevant and improve the online ecosystem, and the launch of Google Trader will encourage the creation of locally relevant information online.’

A nice gesture? Kenya already has a number of classified and auction sites: dealfish.co.ke, Craigslist Kenya, Nation Media’s n-soko, and a good number of smaller local start ups. No doubt several of those will fail and there will be a consolidation in the market, but Kenyan companies are clearly giving this a go.

In sub Saharan Africa, Google is not (yet) in the market for revenues – at this stage, the company mostly pursues market development, it says, to create conditions that would allow their usual advertising revenue streams to flourish. With this in mind, Google is also lending support to initiatives like the IHub, an ICT community and incubation centre that hopes to nurture a local ICT community so that can eventually generate companies and jobs. Classifieds sites are readily, easily available already in Kenya, and companies and individuals seeking to sell anything have a reasonable choice already. Google doesn’t need the money - in 2010, Google’s revenues were roughly equivalent to Kenya’s 2009 GDP. So why does Google then compete in this nascent market against the very community it wants to develop?

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