Silicon Lusaka? Not Quite. Why Dot Com Zambia’s Imperfect IPO is the Perfect Wake-Up Call

By Fareed Mubiana Inambao

Date: December 11, 2025

Forget Palo Alto! Forget Nairobi for a second (Because that's where the funding is right now!). The most interesting tech story of December 2025 just happened right here in Lusaka, and if you weren't paying attention, you missed a seismic shift in the Zambian business landscape!

Dot Com Zambia (DCZ), the digital logistics and payments company led by Mawano Kambeu, didn't just list on the Lusaka Securities Exchange (LuSE) Alternative Market, they smashed the door off its hinges!

Their Initial Public Offering (IPO), seeking to raise ZMW 12.3 million, closed a week early on December 5th. Why? Because they were swamped. The offer was oversubscribed by 114%, raising ZMW 14.05 million.

The hype is real. But as builders, investors, and critical observers of the Zambian scene, we need to look past the confetti. What does this IPO actually mean? Is the company as solid as the subscription numbers suggest?

And, crucially, why should this make you pick up your tools and get back to building your own local solution right now?

Image courtesy of LUSE.

A Critical Look Under the Hood

Let’s be brutally honest. If you look at Dot Com Zambia’s prospectus with a traditional Silicon Valley VC lens, you might scratch your head, according to the financial data released during the IPO push, DCZ reported jaw-dropping revenue growth. For the year ending December 31, 2024, revenue hit ZMW 528.9 million—a massive 147% increase from the previous year. That sounds incredible.

But here is the critical rub: the profit after tax for that same period was just ZMW 3.5 million.

Do the math. That is a profit margin of less than 1%.

The Bull Case: They are scaling aggressively, reinvesting everything into infrastructure, and capturing massive market share. The revenue growth proves demand.

The Bear Case (The Critical View): They are moving enormous amounts of money but keeping very little of it. This is typical of low-margin logistics and payment processing businesses. Furthermore, a significant chunk of their success is tied to B2G (Business-to-Government) contracts like the national eToll system.

When your biggest client is the government, you have stability, but you also have a single point of failure attached to political winds. Investors in this IPO aren't buying high-margin intellectual property yet; they are buying high-volume operational infrastructure.

The Real Victory: Local Solutions, Local Capital!

So, if the margins are razor-thin, why am I so excited? Why was the offer oversubscribed?

Because Mawano Kambeu didn't try to build "the Uber for dog walking in Lusaka." He didn't chase a sexy, foreign-sounding problem.

He looked at Zambia and saw friction. He saw the mess of manual tolls, the difficulty of fuel management, and the fragmented logistics. He built boring, unsexy, absolutely vital infrastructure to solve our problems.

And here is the most motivating statistic of the entire IPO: Of the 500+ new shareholders who bought in, reports indicate over 95% were Zambian individuals.

This wasn't foreign venture capital swooping in to validate us. This was Zambians opening their own wallets, betting their own kwacha on a homegrown solution. That is vastly more powerful than a TechCrunch headline.

THE MAN OF THE MOMENT!

CEO of Dot Com Zambia; Mawano Kambeu.... like the Avatar, Aang, Mawanu vanished, or did he? But he came back when the (tech) world needed him the most!

Waking Up the LUSE and the Tech Scene

For years, the LuSE Alternative Market (Alt-M), designed for high-growth SMEs, has felt a bit like a ghost town. Tech founders viewed it as irrelevant, preferring to chase foreign grants or VC funding.

But Mawano just proved them wrong!

By listing, DCZ has injected adrenaline into the LuSE. It demonstrates that the exchange isn't just for massive mining conglomerates or banks. It’s a viable path to liquidity and capital for founders who are willing to do the hard work of governance and transparency required to go public.

This IPO tells every tech founder in a hub in Lusaka or working from a garage in Kitwe: The capital is here if the solution is real!

The "If Mawano Can Do It..." Effect

The psychological impact of this cannot be overstated. We needed a win! Zambian techies, can you hear me?

We needed to see one of our own go the distance, from startup grind to public listing, on our own soil!

Dot Com Zambia is far from a perfect company. Their margins need work, and their reliance on government contracts is a risk factor that new shareholders must monitor when trading begins on December 17th.

But perfection wasn't the goal. Progress was!

Mawano Kambeu and his team have proven that you don't need to move to Silicon Valley to build something valuable. You need to look out your window, find a painful Zambian problem, and relentlessly build the solution until the market cannot ignore you!

Mawanu Kambeu watching the sun rise on a new world forged by him and the Dot Com Team and We The People.

They built the roads for digital payments in Zambia. Now, it's up to the rest of us to build the vehicles that drive on them and build our own world, financed by us and export it to the region and then the world!

This proves the point I have consistently tried to get across to my fellow innovators and developers, to succeed, build actual solutions to real world problems in our local context, building it doesn't necessarily mean they will come, but if you build with purpose and position yourself correctly, they most certainly will!

So, which local problem are you ignoring today that could be Zambia's next big IPO tomorrow? let this thought marinate and support and support your local innovators!

Did you get your share of Dot Com?

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Written by Fareed Mubiana Inambao