Going The Extra Mile to Accelerate Africa’s Import and Export Trade

MVX
3 min readMar 1, 2022

--

According to statistics, 75% of new businesses don’t survive past the first year. However, MVX has witnessed tremendous growth in the last 3 years, facilitating trade for over 300 small and large organizations, including BUA Group, Promasidor, Perfetti Van Melle, Flour Mills of Nigeria, Ladgroup, Big Dutchman, Sunray Ventures and many more.

MVX is driven by a larger vision for Africa. Their vision is simple.

‘We are creating economic prosperity in Africa by making it easy and seamless for businesses to access international trade transactions online and move freight to and fro to over 192 countries.’ — Tonye Membere-Otaji, CEO of MVX.

That’s why MVX defies the odds to make it possible.

Great companies solve hard problems that matter. In the last 3 years, MVX has focused their efforts on providing solutions to the problems in the trade sector, apart from designing an all-in-one digital platform where a customer can book an import and export shipment request in minutes, they have also built a tracking and visibility system, freight financing product for SMEs and other digital solutions that makes it easy for customers to access international trade transactions seamlessly.

In 3 years, MVX has been featured on credible international platforms such as BBC, Techcrunch, TedX e.t.c. As they celebrate their milestones today #WeDiditin3, they are also strengthening their commitment to building the future of trade in Africa.

The company’s story started in 2019 when the Founder and CEO, Tonye Membere-Otaji discovered frictions in the maritime industry in Nigeria and built a team to design a technology solution to fix them. Before MVX, African merchants have had to conduct their business under opaque, lengthy, and bureaucratic shipping processes that cost money and time. The inefficiencies with this system hampered growth and made businesses in Africa uncompetitive in the global marketplace. For example, the cost of moving cargo from Shanghai, China, to Lagos port is almost the same as the cost of transferring the same cargo from Lagos port to mainland Lagos.

Infrastructural deficits are part of the challenges of shipping in this clime; however, the opaque processes of clearing and moving cargo contributed to the high and unsustainable cost of freight shipping in Nigeria. MVX solves this problem by offering aggregated finance and freight forwarding services through a one-click digital platform, therefore, eliminating middlemen and cutting down shipment booking time and cost drastically.

With this solution, among others, the company has effectively revolutionized the trade sector in Africa, and it is at the core of enabling the realization of AfCFTA’s full potential through financing trade and moving freight to markets across the continent. MVX’s innovation and business growth has attracted local and international investors. In 2021, the company raised USD1.3 million in seed funding to continue building its trade platform for the global market.

It is hard to believe that the company has accomplished all these while just three years old. But if your vision is as immense and critical as the one MVX pursues, and you are as determined and committed as MVX, there is nothing impossible to achieve. The trade-enabling company is just getting started, and the trade sector in Africa will benefit from their innovation for decades to come. MVX is doing the hard work of promoting trade across the world and ensuring prosperity for all Africans. The future can only get better for them.

Looking for a reliable logistics partner to manage imports and export trade transactions for your business? Visit www.mvx.trade, call +2347040119703 to speak with our experts or chat up Tania on WhatsApp by tapping here.

--

--

MVX

MVX is a tech-powered end-to-end trade company, financing transactions and handling shipments for SMEs around Africa.