10/02/2026
This is so spot on.
When Everybody Sells, Nobody Profits: Why Many Businesses Are Struggling in Cameroon
By K*m Leonard
Across Cameroon’s major towns today, a troubling pattern is impossible to ignore. Snack bars, furnished apartments, beauty spas, and similar ventures are increasingly being advertised for sale. Owners are exiting quietly, not because they lack passion or effort, but because the expected financial returns never came or disappeared too quickly. Even more worrying, the future for many of these businesses looks bleak.
The collapse in profitability is often blamed on high rents, taxes, inflation, or weak purchasing power. While these factors matter, they do not tell the whole story. A deeper and more structural issue lies at the heart of the problem, market saturation without corresponding growth in demand.
Many of these businesses were genuinely profitable in the past. At the time, there were fewer players in each sector, meaning a relatively stable customer base shared among a small number of suppliers. Profit margins were healthy, and the businesses appeared attractive and easy to run. Success, however, became contagious.
Employees working in these profitable ventures quickly learned the trade and encouraged friends, relatives, and colleagues to open similar businesses. With time, almost everyone wanted a snack bar, a furnished apartment, or a beauty spa. The entry barriers were low, and the belief was simple, if it worked for them, it will work for me too.
What followed was predictable but rarely anticipated. The number of suppliers exploded, but the number of consumers did not grow at the same pace. The same pool of customers was now being chased by dozens of similar businesses, often offering identical services at similar prices. Competition intensified, prices were slashed, and profit margins evaporated.
Social relationships further complicated the situation. Customers increasingly patronize businesses owned by friends, family members, or colleagues, not necessarily because of better quality, but out of loyalty or familiarity. This informal redistribution of the same limited spending power means money simply circulates within the same social networks, instead of expanding overall demand. In such an environment, everyone is competing for the same money, from the same people, at the same time.
This pattern reflects a broader tendency in Cameroon’s business culture. Once a venture is perceived as profitable, mass imitation follows. Little attention is paid to market size, differentiation, innovation, or long-term sustainability. Years later, the sector begins crying for customers, not because the service is useless, but because suppliers now outnumber consumers.
The result is what we are witnessing today, businesses struggling to break even, owners burning out, and once promising ventures being sold off at losses. Profitability has not vanished because people stopped spending, it has vanished because too many people are selling the same thing to the same audience.
If Cameroonian entrepreneurship is to regain its strength, the focus must shift from imitation to innovation, from crowd-following to value creation, and from short-term profit excitement to long-term market thinking. Until then, many businesses will continue to open with hope and close with disappointment.
