TBILISI/June 17 (The Bulletin) — London-listed Bank of Georgia bought e-commerce platform extra.ge, highlighting its confidence in the country’s growing online penetration and marketplace.
It described extra.ge, a Georgian language ebay, as the “leading” Georgian e-commerce site with 350,000 visitors per month, 80,000 registered buyers and 100,000 products and services.
Bank of Georgia CEO Archil Gachechiladze said that extra.ge would fit into its strategy of offering more financial services for online clients.
“extra.ge will become our new digital offering built around the simplicity and convenience of a value-enhancing single umbrella model, which enables the stakeholders to make the best deals with each other, and rely on superior financial services offered by Bank of Georgia,” he said in a statement.
Internet penetration in Georgia, just like the rest of the region, has been growing. Geostat, the Georgian statistics service, said that more than 70% of households in Georgia now have internet and that more than 20% of the population has used the internet to buy products.
Bank of Georgia did not say how much it had paid for extra.ge but it did say that there was plenty of room to develop e-commerce in Georgia.
ENDS
— This story was first published on June 18 2019 in the weekly Central Asia & South Caucasus Bulletin