Udobizness of The Week - Moonbay Group

Our feature for the week is the trading company; Moonbay Group.

Located in Suzhou Jiangsu province all the way in mainland China, it was created in 2020 by Jude Efulu to fill the gap of shipping high quality manufactured products from China to the rest of the world. Moonbay Group specializes in sourcing products for clients from trusted manufacturers. In the pre-shipping stages, the company is also involved with price negotiations, quality control and overall cost reduction studies on behalf of clients.

Jude lives in Suzhou where he runs the business. Before moving to China, he studied International Business at the University of Liverpool. After moving to China, he pursued his master’s degree in Operations and Supply Chain Management in Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool university during which he decided to explore entrepreneurship. His hobbies include playing football, hiking, travelling.

Starting a business in a new country was no easy feat per Jude’s own admittance. For one thing, there is the huge language barrier for people who are not fluent in Mandarin. This poses a huge problem during contract negotiations with partner factories and amplifies any difficulties involved with new client acquisition. The easiest way to overcome this language gap was partnering with a friend that is also an indigenous Mandarin speaker. So far, this collaboration has paid off immensely to get things up and running; however, Jude believes that there is still a huge amount of advancement needed to get to a satisfactory level. To get into specifics, these advancements include sourcing for clientele and building trust and a solid reputation. As we all know, people are always skeptical to try new companies and new businesses need to build trust with their clients who in turn can spread awareness about offered services and bring more customers and growth. Moonbay Group is constantly working to achieve this level of trust and growth. It has a business model based on solid market research to enable this dream become reality. To summarize this plan: In about a year, the company aims to have over fifty clients constantly trading with it. During this period, it also aims to hire more staff to help with the day to day activities. In 3 years or earlier they plan to expand the business and launch a B2B e-commerce platform. Expected IPO should occur in 8 years. Jude does admit that there is a lot of pressure and hard work required to make Moonbay Group a huge success, but this only drives his zeal to improve as he strives to make this a steady source of income. Amazing times ahead!

As a service-based company, Moonbay Group interacts with a lot of factories and clients. According to Jude, some of these clients and factories are very easy to work with and he actually ends up learning a lot from working with certain clients. On the other hand, some clients and factories are extremely difficult to work with. Communication is not very clear, most times due to excess management layers. This usually leads to longer wait time with regards to making payments and agreeing to contracts. Nonetheless he accepts that it is part of the job and as an entrepreneur, it makes sense to tolerate such clients till both parties have fulfilled their ends of the bargain.

Although Jude does not currently reside in Nigeria, he still sees Nigeria as his target market and had some comments regarding ease of business in the country. He believes that while Nigeria holds strength in population and diversity, this is also a weakness due to lack of policies and reforms that can exploit the aforementioned points to create an environment where unity prevails. He believes that Nigeria has the potential to be the fastest growing economy on earth but currently, the necessary tools needed to fulfil this dream are missing. When asked if there was any personal advice to give to new business owners or even struggling business veterans, he had a straight-forward reply. " Keep going, never give up". He also laid emphasis on keeping staff morale high by adopting a fair wage compensation model. When asked about the UdobizNG platform, Jude congratulated us on having a platform that is accessible to even the smallest businesses and the fact that providing free exposure for these businesses is in fact, priceless .
Thanks for the kind words, Jude!

You can find Moonbay Group on UdobizNG at http://www.myudo.biz/moonbaygroup or on the web at https://www.themoonbaygroup.com/ .
Instagram: moonbaygroup .
Facebook: moonbaygroup .