By JONAH NWOKPOKU

Nigeria’s first online one-stop shop for beverages and alcohol drinks, www.drinks.ng has said that it has recorded 105 percent growth within one year of operations.

Founder/Chief Executive Officer of Drinks.ng, Lanre Akinlagun stated this while speaking with Vanguard on the operations of the online drinks portal and state of e-commerce in Nigeria.

According to him, “We have generated over N65 million so far this year. This represents about 105 per cent of our growth and we still have the festive period to come. This has been achieved through key partnerships with the likes of Diageo, Guinness, Pernod Ricard and Moet Hennessy. Our next day delivery service has proved popular with consumers.”

Akinlagun explained that Drinks.ng is an innovative tech solution which helps beverage owners who are bringing new drinks into the market; give them easy platform to get their products visible to a large amount of people all at once.

“We have also provided a platform that allows consumers to find easy way to find transparency while searching for products. People know a lot of drinks but they don’t know the prices or where they can get it. With drinks.ng, you don’t need to worry about that. You just let us know what you want and they will deliver it for you,” he said.

Explaining further, he said: “The opportunity is really there for all three tiers of the beverage and alcohol business. The consumers get accessible way to make choices from a variety of products. We have over 1,300 drinks and they get to pick through all of them through the categories.

“The manufacturers and the importers on the other hand get an opportunity to display their products in a biggest landscape where more people can see them. If you go to the market, the problem that you have is that everybody displays the common drinks, the ones that they think everyone wants. These include the Red Label, Hennessy, Jack Daniels, Remmy Martins etc. The smaller and obscure drinks are not seen, and that is where we come in. So the opportunity is really a partnership between the manufacturers, importers, and also a social agreement between us and the consumers, to help them get what they want.”

Akinlagun said the opportunity in online dinks market is huge as its values runs into billions of dollars, adding that with the necessary support, e-commerce should acquire reasonable stake of the industry.

“The complete value of the beverage industry in Nigeria is $8.8 billion a year. The alcohol industry alone is about $5.5 billion and the soft drinks industry is about $3.8 billion. The sky is the limit for e-commerce’s stake in the industry. On our part, we have a target within our first five years of business which we hope to gain between one and five per cent. We can’t say for sure until we try. The industry is very fragmented and we are focusing on consolidation and ease of purchasing and delivery and once we can consolidate that fragmentation, we will see how we can proceed then,” he said.