Category: Business

Read Adedeji Olowe’s take on business, business models, and other transformational topics about business in Nigeria, Africa, and the world.

Apple Watch is Evolution in Real Time

Could this be the beginning of the end or end of the beginning?

I’m not trying to sound dystopian, but an evolution may start where normal watches would join dinosaurs in the archeological dig.

Ok, what happened?

Apple launched a $10,000 smart watch. You heard me right, 100 Benjamins for a digital watch! Not even Seiko ever dreamed of that.

It’s official, Apple got into the wearable fray and everyone sat up. While we thought that the likes of Samsung, LG, Motorola and Pebble are in for a genocide, the actual victims may be far away in cozy Switzerland, oblivious of the catastrophe heading their way, faster and deadlier than a Tsunami.

The market for expensive watches has been around for centuries and it’s every man’s dream to own something he could pass on to the next generation. Till date, their prices have been largely unaffected by the global economy yoyo. The brands are classy and exclusive. The wearers, especially the nouveau riche, are obnoxious and want everyone to notice them.

Money is good.

Why do we even buy these expensive time machines? So that all those tiny chewing gum chicks can know we have arrived? Or maybe get some respect from the old cougars? It is mostly the pass to the rarefied world of the upper class.

Here comes Apple the electronic bully. With a $10K watch, the average dude that has part of his brains in his nether regions may use that as a cheaper alternative. While there are markets for very expensive watches most watchmakers are usually sustained by the cheaper, more affordable models. Take that away, and Rolex executives could find themselves mopping floors of Geneva’s local malls.

Maybe I’m just beefing. Maybe not. But I can’t help feeling schadenfreude.

MTN Nigeria made $2.6B Profit in 2014 – Beat that!

MTN Group just released their 2014 results. For once I sincerely believe I’m sure I’m in the wrong business. First thing on Monday, I’m taking a flight to Abuja to get my own telecoms license. You think I’m wrong? How can those numbers be wrong?

Ok, time to face realities.

MTN Nigeria had a bumper time last year. Forget about the pessimistic outlook splashed out on the annual report. Making $2.6B profit in a year na beanz? I tried to calculate that in Naira but my calculator displayed this result “Are you on cheap weed?” If I got that from Mallams, I would have to bring along, or say, freight along N590,534,092,350. How many alabaru can carry that?
Don’t even start me up on all the things you could do with that amount of money. But let’s try some:

I could send SMS to all Nigerians, the whole 170M of us, 868 times. What would I even say to them? At 160 characters per SMS, I could send them a short book. Nigerian’s don’t read so by the time I’m done, I would be the biggest spammer in the world.

I could be magnanimous and get all Nigerians, still the whole 170M of us, 57 loaves of bread each. The bakers would be happy. But after the second loaf, everyone won’t be having that much fun.

Or maybe I could just buy phones? I could get 3,192,076 lucky guys iPhone 6. But trust me, we may get more! With that many number of phones, Jumia would be stupid not to cut a deal.

Or get them cars? I could add 109,358 Hyundai ix35 to Lagos traffic and just make everyone’s life more miserable. Or I could be nicer and simply get 15,540 Merc S500 to clog just Banana Island alone.

Let me do something more constructive though, let’s get everyone a home. Going by the going rate of new homes in my estate, I could buy terrace duplexes for 13, 122 families. With that many homes, we may simply start a new town. Yellow Town? It may be a cute name but a nightmare for interior decorators if we had to paint houses that color.

The traffic on Lekki Road is now so terrible so I’m actually more inclined to use the money for an alternative route from VI to God knows where. I would enjoy the sparring that Julius Berger, Hitech and PW Nigeria would have in my office but trust me, I won’t get less than 200KM of 10 lane NaijaBahn between Ahmadu Bello Way and beyond Epe. I could get to the office in 15 minutes. Wait, with that type of money, do I ever need to work again? I may just charter a Falcon 2000 and fly for 23 years non-stop.

Most people think that the Lekki-Ikoyi bridge had a lot of “pork” but let’s imagine that’s the real price, I may simply build 20 of such bridges. Ha ha ha, the folks in Ikoyi with their upturned noses would have to contend with Obalende and Ikate area boys who will then have more bridges to cross than ever.

We may really build 10 fourth mainland bridges and just move on.

You know the sad reality; we lose twice more than that every year to oil thieves. Today, bunkerers steal at least 400,000 barrels of oil today. Say they sell them at $30 per barrel, that’s some $4.3B going to someone in Nigeria today and not a simple SMS, bread, phones, cars, roads, bridges, for his community. Some people will simply roast in the toastier parts of hell!

Cashless Nigeria by Force, by Fire!

I was recently reviewing a CBN report on Cashless Nigeria and it is scary to know that 65% of Cash in Circulation is outside the banking system. I guess everything the CBN can do to cajole those who have ecstasy at the sight of cash wouldn’t work. Time we did it differently. What will happen if the CBN changes the Naira design with 1 year for everyone to comply or the Ghana-must-go of cash becomes an anthropological artifact? The whole cash would have to come to the banks to be changed, isn’t it?

What if the CBN puts a cap on the amount you can get back as cash but the rest has to be paid into some accounts, even if it is a mobile wallet? What if there is no penalty for pay in but there is for cash out?

We have done even crazier things in Nigeria and we can pull this off. The whole Cashless stuff is kind of tiring when you consider the efforts guys have put in but then nobody said it’s gonna be easy. The rest of the country is going to be on Cashless in few months and I hope we can drag them kicking and screaming into the new dispensation.

50,412,559 Nigerians on the Internet

The reality is, I’m not much better than the armchair consultants I ranted about. Some months ago I wrote that Nigeria doesn’t have more than 17M internet users. I did my calculation based on MTN’s year end result and extrapolated that for the whole industry.

Please read paragraph 5 of page 50 of the MTN Group Annual Report for 2012.

Not a bad try but then NCC poked their fat fingers into my eyes and called me a freaking liar.
Based on the current data, as of July 2013, 50,412,559 dudes are watching porn using the internet in Nigeria from mostly their mobile devices.

Well I’m starting to see that around. Not that I can see 50M Nigerians dancing Azonto on the internet. After all, how many users actually come around to read my rants? I’m not that popular. You never know, I could be suffering from a chronic case of megalomania.

I can’t overcome the temptation to rant.
Some years ago, Blackberry was the king of Nigeria’s fondlesmob market. But they were expensive and very bad. Sammy and Lugi boys came around but they were expensive too. Then Ching Chong! The market is now getting driven by extremely cheap, I mean outrageously cheap, Android phones knocked out from X,000 Chinese factories for the world to use. And they work! Some days ago, I heard how the 5 inch Tecno Phantom A+ apparently sold out in Lagos; at N35K a pop, that was a badass bargain :-). Now we even have N14K full Android phones and of course they are all on the internet. The executives of MTN and others must be going through a paroxysm of excitement.

You can read more about the latest NCC internet data here.

By the way only about 114,760,406 lines are active now. That’s more than all the population in the other African countries combined 10 times. OK, that was a joke!

Do we understand data?

Nobody can correlate anything around here – I mean Nigeria. For example we still can’t wrap our heads around the idea that 170 million Wazobians crammed into Nigeria is a joke.

Someone pointed to the number of GSM lines but wait, can’t he see that everyone has at least 2 lines? Now that the networks are a bit better and guys are dumping the other SIMs – invariably for the first time ever, the number of active lines in Nigeria declined. Maybe people are dying off but I doubt it, in fact almost all my friends are popping twins while slowmos like me are doing it one at a time.

What’s the rant?

We simply don’t understand data. We don’t know what it means to have complete and accurate data about anyone. Check any bank’s database, what you see there is poultry carpet. Phone numbers are wrong; addresses point to a dung yard. In fact many names are not spelled correctly and sometimes some customers are born in the future. But the most important things – customer balance and transactions are always OK. Interesting!

The Telcos amassed a Mount Everest size data during the last government enforced registration but what are they doing with it? Probably the silly admin is using it to find the age of his girlfriend’s sister and deciding if hitting on her could be term pedophilic.

Meanwhile NIMC is running around to look for the same data about everyone. FRSC is doing same. The Police are also on the racket. Yet that data is there, right under our noses. Why can’t they start from there? Why can’t banks and others who want to verify identity (like the dude stepping up to my younger sis) connect via some open standard web API to check things out. Why can’t your mobile phone number be your ID number? Basic rule, telcos can never recycle numbers again. If you have gazillion number of SIMs then they are also your identity. Most people I know have many names; even married girls dump their fathers’ names and yet never lose their identity, per se.

Back to my insurance company – they sent me text message wishing me a happy birthday 5 months after I did it all because some nincompoop mistyped my birthday. If they think data is serious, someone should have cross-checked that. After all, they never advanced me a free year insurance by mistake. Can you spot their priorities?

Ok. Rant over. Time to hit the sack. Good night boys.