On December 22, 2020, STANDAGE Inc. and MVXchange, a Nigerian logistics startup company, connected their platforms to strengthen the delivery system in Nigeria.

Japanese logistics companies tend only to handle delivery to sea or air ports in Nigeria and West Africa. From there, customs clearance and delivery from the ports are left to local Nigerian companies.

However, since the African companies buying these Japanese goods are often small or medium sized enterprises (SMEs), it is often too much of a burden for them to carry out import customs clearance procedures due to lack of manpower.
Accordingly, these SMEs want to put the requirement on the Japanese seller companies to deliver to their own designated warehouses. Furthermore, Japanese seller companies require that the location of their products are tracked down to the last mile, to know whether their valuable goods have been delivered properly.
These are the problems of logistics in Africa.

STANDAGE provides DiGiTRAD, a comprehensive trade service that can complete all trade operations, from matching buyers and sellers, to settlement and financing, and cargo delivery.

MVXchange provides the MVXtransit service, which enables digital cargo management, delivery arrangements, import/export and customs clearance procedures for local logistics in Africa.

In order to solve these local logistics issues, MVXchange’s MVXtransit APIs and STANDAGE’s DiGiTRAD APIs were linked.
DiGiTRAD users and cooperating logistics companies can now easily perform MVXchange import customs clearance procedures and local delivery arrangements from the DiGiTRAD system.

The API integration has already been completed.
As a first step, we will start operating this service in Nigeria.

By the end of fiscal year 2021, we plan to expand this service not only to Nigeria but also to other West African countries.
We will jointly aim to realize a service that allows both buyers and sellers to trade safely, securely, and easily.

STANDAGE Inc. and MVXchange are funded by Kepple Africa Ventures.
Kepple Africa Ventures is a Venture Capital firm specializing in start-up investments in Africa.
We received a comment from Mr. Shinada of Kepple Africa Ventures on this system integration.

■Comments from Mr. Shinada of Kepple Africa Ventures
There are still very few examples of collaboration between Japanese startups and African startups.
Therefore, the partnership between these two companies is very innovative.
The collaboration between the two companies, which have a deep understanding of the needs of both Japanese and African customers, will create an end-to-end trade, payment, and transportation platform that connects exporters and importers.
I hope that Japanese companies will further expand their business in Africa based on this platform.

■About MVXchange
https://mvxchange.com/
MVXchange is a maritime trade and logistics platform.
In March 2019, MVXchange began operations with “MVXenergi.com,” a booking platform that matches demand for offshore support vessels in the energy industry.
In March 2020, “MVXtransit.com” was launched to provide digital freight forwarding, customs and in-land logistics services..

【Contact Us】
4F Shiba NA Building, 3-6-10, Shiba, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan, 105-0014
STANDAGE Inc.
CEO: Akinori Adachi
COO: Kenta Omori
E-mail: info@standage.org