Spiro’s growth spurt has slowed down

From the newsletter

Kenya-based Spiro is the largest EV maker in Africa, and arguably the most successful so far. We have analysed the company’s hiring over the past year, and reviewed other aspects of its personnel management. We conclude that Spiro grew aggressively over 12 months but is now slowing down. Likely, temporarily.

• The company expanded its team by 146 senior staff to a total of 326 in the past year. This 41% growth rate was focused on filling in many middle manager roles as its geographic profile shifted.  

• However, currently the company has only three open roles on LinkedIn, the lowest rate over the past year. The new team is settling in.

More details

• The greatest source of outside talent for Spiro is Roam, its competitor also based in Nairobi. The key hiring period for Spiro this year was from March to August. 

• One of the surprises in the analysis of Spiro’s hiring spurt has been attrition. While 146 senior staff joined the company, at least 42 also left over the same period. Personnel traffic has been in both directions. The senior staff attrition rate in the past year is 15%. That’s not tumultuous but nor wholly stable either. 

• The main explanation for attrition seems to be a shifting of team locations from outside Africa to the continent. Attrition was greatest among remote staff in India, UAE and Canada. 

• The company claims to have sold more than 20,000 electric motorbikes in Benin, Togo, Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Ghana, Cameroon, DRC, Angola and Tanzania.

• In the past year, it has grown faster in some places than others. The team in Nigeria grew 19-fold. The Kenya team grew more than 100% and the Rwanda team more than 50%. However, the largest teams are still in the company’s early markets in Togo and Benin. 

• Spiro is at a transition stage. It is no longer the startup it began as, experimenting to learn in small West African markets. But it hasn’t yet fully shifted to countries with evidently much greater potential (as well as much greater competition). Taken together, Togo and Benin still make up 48% of senior staff. 

• The team is still very engineering-heavy, indicating that it has not yet moved into a much more sales-heavy phase. Four of the top five university degrees present in the company are engineering-related. Operations, IT and engineering account for 35% of jobs, while sales and business development account for 26%. The top five hiring categories were all concerned with manufacturing and technology. 

• The strong growth in hiring over the past year has lowered the tenure rate at Spiro. The average staff has been at the five-year-old company for only 1.3 years. However, the workforce remains a solidly experienced one. On average, staff have almost 8 years of work experience, including but not exclusively at Spiro. A fifth of the senior staff have an MBA degree, or almost twice the industry average. 

Our take

• Who is hiring, and whom, can be a telling indicator for a business and sector. Spiro has been an early leader in African mobility for several years. It is also a fast-growing one, as our numbers show. That its sprint seems to have slowed is likely temporary. The company raised a whopping $50 million in debt six months ago. When that money flows into the company, a new cycle of hiring is likely. 

• Our senior staff analysis shows that Spirio, like its competitors, is still very much at the beginning of a long journey. The dominance of engineering roles points to what kinds of problems the company is solving at the moment. Yes, there are also plenty of hires in sales. But fine-tuning the vehicles and their production is still on the front burner. 

• Geography is another interesting aspect. East Africa and especially Kenya have emerged as a general hub for mobility in Africa. The scaling down of Spiro teams outside the continent and the slower growth of teams in West Africa is evidently in contrast to hiring in Nairobi. Spiro is moving closer to its (often still smaller) competitors in Kenya.