Global cloud services spending may hit £141b by 2017

By Bankole Orimisan

Global spending on cloud infrastructure and services is expected to reach $235.1bn (£140.5bn) by 2017, according to IHS Technology.

  And spending this year alone will increase by 20 per cent compared with 2013, up from $145.2bn last year to $174.2bn in 2014. 

   Overall, the organisation suggests that spending will triple between 2011 and 2017. 

  "The robust growth will come as an increasing number of large and small enterprises move more of their applications to the cloud, while also looking at data analytics to drive new insights into consumer behaviour," said IHS analyst Jagdish Rebello.

  "With the cloud touching nearly every consumer and enterprise around the globe, spending for cloud-related storage, servers, applications and content will be dedicated toward building a framework that is rapidly scalable, highly dynamic, available on-demand and requiring minimal management."

   IHS talks of a "new cloud paradigm" that will underscore company management and consumption of data.

   However, the company also warns the industry that, while spending is clearly rising, there are a number of factors not yet properly addressed in the IT industry to smooth the arrival of cloud.

   Security, mobile data use and privacy remain major concerns and inhibitors to growth, says ISH, that must be tackled.

   While Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google are now all operating huge and largely successful cloud operations, the real competition will be between smaller, more bespoke services as Barracuda, Dropbox and others as they vie for position and grow via acquisition - both friendly and hostile.

   IHS calculated that there were some 630 million customer subscriptions to cloud platforms in 2013, and estimates that this will rise to 730 million this year.

VDT communications graduates more Modular Engineers's

By Bankole Orimisan

The leading broadband communications firm, in the country, VDT Communications,has passed its second batch of successful candidates from the organization’s Modular Trainee Engineers’ programme into the Nigerian market.

 The Managing Director/ Chief Executive Officer, VDT Communications, Mr. Biodun Omoniyi, at the graduation ceremony held in Lagos over the weekend said: “The VDT Modular Trainee Engineers’ programme was necessitated by the need to contribute our quota as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility activity, to reduce the teeming population of unemployed youths in our country”.

   Omoniyi, now called on the government of Nigeria, education administrators and corporate organizations both in the private and public sectors to join hand and do much more to close the gap between theoretical and practical experience in our education system. According to him, such a move is imperative to give applicants in the country the much needed practical experience that would increase their employability, thereby significantly reducing unemployment in Nigeria.

   He pointed out that though the percentage of unemployment in Nigeria is very high with 23.9 per cent all time high as at January 2012  with over 16million able Nigerians unemployed, a closer look at the issue however, indicates that a good percentage of unemployment in Nigeria is heightened not only by lack of jobs but also lack of experience and competency on the part of the applicants, adding that a good number of applicants especially in the area of technology lack practical experience.

Omoniyi made this statement duration the graduation ceremony of the second batch of successful candidates from the VDT

  According to the MD, having identified the challenge, VDT decided to take the bull by the horns by initiating the modular trainee engineers’ programme for fresh graduates in Nigeria. “Advertisement is run yearly  to get the fresh graduates to apply for the programme. 

   However, this selection process involving an assessment test with interview, due to a large number of applications usually received coupled with limited training facilities. After the test and interview, the successful candidates are enrolled into the programme which last for one year. 

  Omoniyi, noted that programme is completely free to all trainees while the VDT pays all the candidates a stipend while undergoing the training”, he added

  He emphasized that the company even goes beyond the training, by offering jobs to a number of successful trainees depending on the available vacancies.

  On the impact of the programme, he noted that , “Already, we are receiving success stories from other organizations, as our trainee engineers are among the best candidates considered for employment”.

VDT Communications an ISO 9001:2008 Certified company and winner of several awards including  “Bulk Internet Provider  2011 and 2012” and "Wireless Backhaul Provider 2009 and 2010", provides digital leased circuit, wireless network and corporate internet services. 

Opportunities and challenges of e-Commerce in Nigeria

The Chief Executive Officer of Konga.com, Sim Shagaya, in this interview with Bankole Orimisan, spoke about the online retail market in Nigeria, the challenges and how MainOne’s broadband service has enhanced the operations of Konga.com

1.  You have become a force to contend with on the online market platform. Who really is Sim Shagaya?

  I was born and bred in Lagos, Nigeria. My father is from Plateau, and my mother is from Delta. I think what drives me and a lot of my colleagues here to do some of the things we do is a very deep abiding love for our country and for the promise of this great land but even more than that, I think technology has a great role to play in the way that we will conduct business, in the way we trade with each other, do commerce, the way our country is governed and society is organised. We love technology and the application of technology and that’s what drives a lot of the things that we do. It’s what has brought this great group of people together to build Konga, which is a turning out to be an astounding technology company.

 2.  You seem to have your fingers in many juicy pies: you own Dealdey, Konga.com and eMotion Advertising.  What’s the story behind your many business interests?

I don’t know if I would call them juicy pies as they are still young businesses that require a lot of work but I have a stake in those businesses along with other Nigerians and a few international institutional investors. 

eMotion is the oldest of those businesses. I started eMotion in 2006 along with a colleague, and with two digital billboards in Abuja. These days you see digital billboards everywhere but then we were the pioneers. I have been given a lot of opportunities and Nigeria has given me a lot. I had the opportunity when I finished school to stay abroad but few weeks after, I knew I had to come back home. I knew that there were opportunities here.  This was in early 2000 and democracy still looked shaky but I knew that the future was bright for Nigeria and so I, like a few others at the time, bet on the country. All our savings at that time were put into this billboard business called eMotion and we started off with two billboards in Abuja and it has grown tremendously. It’s one of the largest out of home advertising companies in Nigeria now. 

eMotion later gave birth to Dealdey which became one of the first e-commerce companies in Nigeria with considerable size. Dealdey is a special e-commerce company where you come looking for offers and deals; what we have is what you get, and that experience told me that there was something deeper we could do in Nigeria, something much more profound and that’s what led us to Konga. Konga is a full-fledged retailer with hundreds of thousands of products.

We never really had these retailers in Nigeria. We had some of them like Kingsway and Leventis that were really trying to take off in the 1980s before the Structural Adjustment Programme truncated their existences. But since then, we haven’t had structured retail until the arrival of Shoprite, Game and others. I knew there was an opportunity here for structured retail but I also knew there were real constraints in doing it the old way so I reached for this new way by using e-commerce and believing that it would work better. It’s not like when you go to London where there is seemingly a Marks and Spencer at every corner; here we don’t have that core retail infrastructure.  

So we have to build not just the core but the supporting logistical infrastructure and that’s why we are building Konga, we are building this massive infrastructure not only for us as a retailer but as a platform for other smaller retailers also.

 3.  How would you describe the present state of e-commerce in Nigeria?

It’s still early. It’s still a baby but with what I’m seeing, it’s a big baby and we are still trying to figure ourselves out. And just like a baby you stumble, you fall and bump your head sometimes, but it does look like the opportunity is quite bright. Like many things in the world nothing comes for nothing.  The opportunity looks great but the challenges also look quite big. 

Let me tell you about one of the challenges for e commerce; if you were in the United States and you are starting an e-commerce company, you can easily rely on the United States Postal Service or the Royal Mail in the U.K.; all you do is to operate your warehouse, your goods in your warehouse and Royal Mail will come to pick up things from your warehouse. Your focus is on intra-warehouse operations and technology. 

Here in Nigeria, NIPOST and EMS have made a lot of reforms, but we still have work to do. You find that as an e-commerce company, you have to build the infrastructure outside the warehouse; the goods are not going to get themselves out from your fulfillment center to your customers’ door, so you have to build that link and that is where the biggest challenge is going to come from and that’s what Konga is tackling head on. Same goes for the internet connectivity which is strategic to our deliverables to the customer. We took our time sourcing for a service provider that will ensure that steady, consistent QoS and MainOne broadband gives us that edge.

So I think it’s still very early but we have been encouraged with the signs that we’ve seen; how quickly Nigerians have taken it up and it’s not only Nigerians in the typically assumed areas like the Islands of Lagos but everywhere. We are seeing orders coming from everywhere. A microwave being shipped to Aba, Shoes to Gusau, Phones to Ibadan. Its everything to everywhere. So I think it’s early but the future is bright and there is a lot of work to do. 

4.     As a current customer of MainOne, how would you describe your relationship with them so far?

I think it’s been great; it has been very cordial and professional. They are a very responsive company, which was something we found lacking in other companies.  We are a very customer-centric company so we show our respect when other people show similar customer-centricity. Even the CEO gets involved in our service issues few times that they exist; she took a sort of personal interest in how things are going, so I think they are very professional. It’s being great and like I said, they still have a lot more work to do. Some of this work, they shouldn’t be the ones doing it but they just have to do it to really get the cost even lower and have more Nigerians access the internet service.

5. In terms of service/product, what service does MainOne provide to Konga as the core ISP?

MainOne provides broadband connectivity to our head office and distribution centres.

6.    How has your internet connectivity been since joining the MainOne network?

The network is of the highest quality from experience till date. The uptime and the speed of connection is impressive.

7.    Talking about service quality, how has MainOne’s connection impacted on the bottom-line of Konga?

We are an internet-based business. So it is important that we have a reliable connection with integrity and speed for us to serve our customers. If we don’t have that, then we cannot serve our customers. And our business and operations will deteriorate. So reliable connectivity is at the core of our business. It is like asking how important diesel is to a truck driver. It is important because without it, the truck cannot move. So the MainOne network has positively impacted on our business.

 8.    What challenges do you face in your business?

On some level we know what the challenges are but I’d tell you about the two that keep me up at night the most. The first and the most fundamental challenge we have is the availability of quality human resource. That is because of the failure of 20-30 years of the poor educational system at the tertiary level especially, so because of that, we find it hard to find people with the sort of analytical thinking that is required for the kind of thing we do. It’s not because Nigerians are not energetic; we think we are very energetic, very intelligent people but the educational system has not done very well for us. This is one of the biggest challenges. 

Don’t forget that as a retailer we are subjected to competition from other retailers from other parts of the world that are coming to Nigeria where they have a longer legacy of retail and a stronger technical and educational base. This is the area where young Nigerians and Nigerian businesses are going to struggle the most. It’s not just in grabbing the opportunities or even the infrastructural deficit of Nigeria, it’s how to compete with players from other parts of the world where the educational system has worked for much longer and the technical experience is there. It means that the average Nigerian entrepreneur or the average Nigerian young business has to run at 150 percent basically. 

That’s one big problem, and the other problem is the one I talked about before, which is logistics. We have to build out logistics. The long term vision of Konga is that in every state capital in Nigeria, we will have a physical presence there that pushes inventory out and in; that gets your goods to pass through that centre and goes to your house. If you need to return something because you’re not happy with it or that the device, by chance is faulty, you can take it back there. These are not internet web pages we are talking about. This is serious infrastructure. These are the two things that keep me up at night. But we are confident we can tackle them. We know that the opportunity in Nigeria is large enough or deserving enough for the effort we need to put in this.

 9.    Should banks and other financial institutions play any role in e-commerce?

Huge, absolutely very big and I think they are starting to wake up to it. They have several roles to play on many levels. The first is with enabling the payments. I’d give you a small example. Right now if you come to Konga and you choose an item, there are many ways to pay on Konga; you can pay with your card, pay cash on delivery or you can do a bank transfer or deposit. If you do a bank transfer or a deposit right now on Konga, we still have to go and check with the bank to see that the deposit has come in and that’s a very tedious process, which is not efficient. 

But if you go to some other markets like South Africa for example; if you made that deposit in a bank, the bank systems immediately talks to Konga system and there is no human intervention in between. It’s frictionless. It happens much quicker. That’s one area. The other area has been a blessing to us in a way. I’d explain what I mean; it is the unavailability of consumer credit. Everything you see in Nigeria, it’s amazing actually; everything you see in Nigeria whether it’s a house or a car or a Samsung Galaxy phone is paid for in cash and that’s an amazing thing so it helped Nigeria get through this credit bubble that the world just went through for the past ten years because the average Nigerian doesn’t owe anybody anything, but that’s not sustainable. 

As we go forward, a bit of consumer credit is desirable and the banks now need to start waking up to the fact that retail banking is about enabling people’s dreams by providing them with credit facilities for them to buy that new microwave or that new fridge or that new television. A couple of the banks have actually approached us about this already and we are working with them to find out how you can do it so that someday within the next 12 months you can come to Konga, buy a large appliance like a fridge, a deep freezer and then as you check out, you fill out a form for an application for credit which we will forward to the bank. 

Hopefully, if that credit is approved within 24hours or 48hours then the bank pays Konga and we deliver your goods to you and you can then pay via an automatic debit to the bank every month. Those are the two ways but there are other many ways. The banks are just one component of commerce and so far the entire system of commerce in Nigeria has been bank heavy but now we are seeing that there are other critical components to it, for example retail and logistics, and we must work closely together.

2.3G Spectrum bid boxing small operators to a dead end

Bankole Orimisan

Following the recent announcement by the NIgerian Communications Commission (NCC), that two firms, Bitflux Communications Ltd and Globacom Limited,are the only shortlisted bidders to participate in the forthcoming 2.3GHz Frequency Auction is shocking to the many Nigerians in the country.

   The dominant feelings among the major operators in the industry is that Globacom as a second national operator with its huge financial strength is not supposed to take part in the bid. Glo’s participation makes the bid an unfair competition which is not healthy for growth of the industry because the survival of the upcoming operators in the industry is clearly threatened.

   Baring the Nigerian Communications Commission giving a good explanation, one is surprised that the lack of interest shown in the license tells a very bad story of the industry. And that our Second National Operator is also on the list and on its way to cornering the license into its bouquet of licenses give serious worry.

   Industry search shows that those who constitute Bitflux Communications Ltd are young enterprising Nigerian professionals who have made a point of excellence in the industry although are far away from being money bags. Bitflux is a Consortium of VDT Communications Ltd, Bitcom Systems Ltd and Superflux International Ltd. Those are companies that are the hopes of the industry when the prospects of a well managed broadband landscape is considered.

   VDT Communications Ltd for instance is an ISO 9001:2008 Certified company and winner of several awards including  “Bulk Internet Provider  2011 and 2012” and "Wireless Backhaul Provider 2009 & 2010", provides digital leased circuit, wireless network and corporate internet services.     

   The company operates one of the most advanced telecommunications networks in the country primarily by the convergence of multiple networks into one. 

   The company's Network infrastructural design is structured towards providing a broad range of end-to-end efficient and reliable IP-based (data and voice communications) services across West Africa while building a long term, trusted partnership with its clients.

  This is not a protest against Globacom but a strong feeling against monopoly.

  Thus the management of the 2.3G spectrum bid is raises a number of questions begging for answers:

-Is money or quality service to the end-users the primary objective of the sale of the 2.3G Spectrum? 

  -Is it the role of NCC to encourage monopoly rather than ensure the totality of industry balanced  health and growth? 

 -Shouldn’t the role of NCC fit into the overall national objectives of encouraging the growth of SME’s and sustaining employments in our country?

   Small operators are being boxed into an ugly corner and one feels thoroughly ashamed  unless NCC offers a satisfactory explanation on how it has managed the industry to lead these small operators to this  dead end.

   One may ask whether there is anything legally wrong in Globacom picking up the available licenses and the right answer will be that the purpose of regulation goes far beyond playing legally but more with the need to examine legal, moral and industry obligation, make interventions and go ahead to legislate what ordinarily would end up having an industry where the yawning gaps between peoples and classes are truly reduced. Of course we cannot pretend that it is all good that our Second National Operator for eight years has no known rollout of Fixed services and you wonder what the whole essence of regulation is about!

   Nothing may be wrong legally, nothing may even be wrong morally, but something must be definitely wrong with us as a nation.

Time will tell.

Nigerians want good telecoms service, not sanctions, says ATCON ...Backs NCC on exercise of regulatory powers

By Bankole Orimisan

THE Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) has said that Nigerians would rather want the telecommunications operators in the country to improve on their services rather than seeing them sanctioned by the regulator.

  ATCON President, Lanre Ajayi, who stated this in Lagos, on Monday, at the new broadband campaign forum organised by Ministry of Communications Technology and the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), noted that it would be better if the challenges operators face were tackled adequately.

  Ajayi, while commending the Ministry of Communications for reaching a truce with the Lagos State government on reduction in Right of Way fees in the state, reckoned that if such could be replicated by other states in the country, it will bring about infrastructure roll out that will boost services.

  According to him, challenges including multiple taxation and regulation; vandalism; erratic power supply among others are still issues to contend with, “sanctions should not be over used. It should be the last option.”

  The ATCON boss however, called on the operators to embrace co-location, saying co-location is a great success factor to achieving broadband penetration and improve telecommunications services.

  Meanwhile, at the weekend, Ajayi, while speaking to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), urged the House of Representatives to encourage the NCC to exercise its regulatory powers.

  According to him, the regulatory body was made up of professionals who understood telecommunication laws. 

  It will be recalled that the House of Representatives recently mandated its Committee on Communications to review the pre-qualification criteria for companies, which is participating in the proposed auction of the 2.3GHz broadband spectrum by the NCC, which holds today and tomorrow in Abuja.

  The House said that the 2.3 GHz broadband spectrum, which NCC valued at about N3.6 billion was a national communication asset, stressing that the criteria should have included that bidding companies be listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) and subject to regulatory authority of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

  However, Ajayi said that the Communications Act, which established the NCC as Nigeria’s telecom umpire, made the commission to enjoy some levels of autonomy.   

  “I am not sure the House has that kind of power. It has power to make the law but not power to interpret the law. The interpretation of the law is within the purview of the court. I have not seen any law that says you have to be on the Stock Exchange before you can be licensed to operate a telecom service,” Ajayi said.

According to him, it is not appropriate for people to interfere in the operations of the regulator, except where it is obvious that something wrong is being done.

  NAN reports that the House of Representatives’ decision was fallout of a motion on the planned NCC auction moved by the Vice Chairman, House Committee on Capital Market, Chris Azubogu (APGA-Anambra). Azubogu said that most of the major players in the industry - MTN, Airtel, Etisalat – which indicated interest to participate in the auction, were privately held companies. He said that those telecommunication companies were not publicly listed companies.

WhatsApp claims 50b messages sent daily on its network

By Bankole Orimisan

OVER The Top (OTT) messaging service, WhatsApp says that it now has over 430 million active users each month, which makes it the world’s largest dedicated mobile messaging platform.  

  At the DLD conference in Germany recently, WhatsApp CEO, Jan Koum, also revealed that the network now processes around 50 billion messages per day.  He said that the messaging statistics is broken down into around 36 billion outbound messages and 18 billion inbound messages every day.  That sort of number puts WhatsApp ahead of the estimated global daily text messaging volumes.    

  It also puts the recent revelations that the USA spy agency, the NSA is trawling 200 million text messages per day into some perspective. That’s 200 million out of 50 billion text messages, plus 50 billion WhatsApp messages, plus how ever many tens of billions sent by all the other OTT platforms.  Already, global expenditure on telecommunications operator messaging services, including SMS and MMS was said to have declined for the first time in 2013 following its peak in 2012.  

  According to Strategy Analytics operator revenue from messaging services fell by almost four per cent last year to just below $104 billion.  

  The report noted that continued intense competition for subscribers between operators combined with the fast growing popularity of OTT instant messaging services like WhatsApp, Line Messenger and Tencent’s WeChat drive a 20 per cent fall in global operator messaging revenue by 2017.      

  Furthermore, Strategy Analytics explained that the projected 20 per cent decline in messaging revenue by 2017 would be more pronounced in regions with the greatest penetration of smartphones and data users, like North America and Western Europe, where SMS and MMS expenditure will decline by 38 per cent and almost 28 per cent respectively.    

  Director, Wireless Media Strategies (WMS), Nitesh Patel noted: “The fast rising popularity of smartphone messaging applications, both from smartphone vendors Blackberry and Apple, and independent messaging applications like WhatsApp, Line Messenger and WeChat, is significantly hurting both operator messaging volumes and revenue. While SMS volumes remained flat in 2013, operator revenue from messaging declined by almost four per cent.”

  Strategy Analytics believed mobile operators must act on a number of fronts in order to mitigate the decline in messaging revenue, including bundling SMS into integrated price plans.    

  Director, Media & Apps, David MacQueen added: “While RCS/ RCS-e enables mobile operators both to evolve mobile messaging beyond SMS and MMS and keep operators relevant in mobile messaging, it will not offset the current decline in messaging revenue. We forecast that by 2017 there will be just below 180 million users of RCS/ RCS-e based services. 

  “However, RCS/ RCS-e messaging will contribute little direct revenue for mobile operators. To offset lower consumer spend levels, carriers should aim to tap opportunities such as mobile marketing, or increase innovation by opening up SMS platforms to businesses and the developer community.”

VConnect eyes Ghana market, lists 950,000 businesses in Nigeria

By Bankole Orimisan

AS part of its expansion drive, Nigeria’s local search engine, VConnect will soon be exploring market opportunities in Ghana.

  VConnect, which claims to be the seventh most visited site in Nigeria, said it has listed about 950,000 businesses on its website.

  According to the co-founder and General Manager of VConnect, Deepanker Rustagi the firm’s entry into the Nigerian market has left positive footprints, following its strong level of acceptance which has seen it surpassing its target by a sharp 160 per cent growth in all parameters last year, including revenue, traffic, topline among others.

  Rustagi said the lack of a formal system of street numbering and unavailability of a working postal system are some of the setbacks the company experiences. He however, stated that VConnect would not rest on its oars until all SMEs in Nigeria are empowered and taken to the peak. 

  Meanwhile, he said the firm is already making plans towards extending its reach beyond the shores of Nigeria. 

  According to him, by May 2014, the firm would pitch its tent in Ghana, where a similar shortfall of business information has been noticed.

  “Africa is set to witness another new media powerhouse in a few years’ time, as VConnect will not only attend to all business information needs in Nigeria, but will become a Pan African solution provider,” said Rustagi.

  He disclosed that VConnect.com developed a user-friendly mobile WAP site because statistics have shown that a huge percentage of website visits are done via the mobile phone, adding that the company also recently launched its Android and Blackberry Applications.

  On the firm’s achievements so far, Rustagi said “due to the galloping development of ICT worldwide, SMEs in West Africa face the formidable task of surviving and competing in a global market, thus the presence of a local search engine like VConnect.com which has a wider reach, would help deliver unprecedented opportunities to the businesses. It will be interesting to see how this startup would expand geographically in other parts of Africa.”  

  The VConnect Co-Founder noted that the SME sector has been a direct beneficiary of these positive spin-offs, especially with the efforts the firm, stressing that it has help to put them on the map so those interested in their products and services can easily reach them.

Airtel allays job loss fears over tower sales

By Bankole Orimisan

Airtel has dismissed fears that the selling off of telecoms towers by telcos in the country will lead to job losses, sending thousands of workers out of employment.

 Its Chief Executive Officer, Segun Ogunsanya, who spoke to ICT editors in Ikoyi, Lagos, said: “Yes, indeed there are plans by operators to sell off, not necessarily outsource, the towers. It is the trend globally, and …it is meant to allow operators concentrate on their core competences and allow those who are better equipped professionally to manage the towers to do so. The telcos had already outsourced their network operations to experts like Ericsson and Huawei, who in turn outsourced maintenance services like fuelling, cleaning and security to local companies known in industry parlance as ISMs.

 “It is evident that the eco-system of telecommunications business is growing a wide value-chain, which has Nigerians (locals) at the epicentre. So, more jobs would be created rather than lost, given that the new owners will definitely like to grow their businesses. Regarding the Call Centres, which were outsourced to BPOs (business process outsourcing), it is inaccurate to say jobs were lost! On the contrary, the number of people employed in the Call Centre business has grown exponentially, by over 300 per cent.”

  He averred that rather than create fears in the minds of indigenous engineers, who will be moving to the tower management companies, and disaffection in the hearts of Nigerians, who have been unapologetic beneficiaries of the global system for mobile (GSM) communication revolution started in 2001, the immense advantages inherent in this strategic business move by the telcos should be highlighted.

  According to Ogunsanya, there are many positive stories coming from the telecommunications sector which, he said, has attracted over $20 billion in foreign direct investment (FDI) over the last 12 and a half years. He added that it is the only industry that has continued to creatively take advantage of a combination of economic factors including technology, competition, outsourcing, and other economies of scale, to drive costs down hence price of telecommunications services and related products like phones and other devices. 

“The telecommunications industry has demonstrably employed more people directly and indirectly since 2001. The marketing communications industry, construction, security, petroleum marketing and several others have experienced a boom with the activities of the telcos. Indeed, telecommunications can be described as the goose that lays the golden egg in the Nigerian economy,” he said.

Jumia Nigeria Announces new CEOs

JUMIA, one of the leading online retailers in Nigeria announces its new CEOs; Nicolas Martin and Jérémy Doutté. They will replace former Managing Directors, Tunde Kehinde and Raphael Afaedor, who decided to leave JUMIA Nigeria to start their own businesses according to reports from JUMIA Nigeria.

The press report made available to us further states: “JUMIA had a very successful 2013, from launching the leading e-commerce app in Africa to building our e-commerce campus in West Africa. We have to say a big thank you to everyone who has contributed to this. Especially to Tunde Kehinde and Raphael Afaedor, for their achievements with JUMIA Nigeria. They’ve made a great impact on our development and we wish them all the best” Sacha Poignonnec, Co-CEO Africa Internet Holding (AIH)

Raphael Afaedor and Tunde Kehinde were also a part of the Co-Founders team,which set up JUMIA together with the AIH in 2012. Last year, JUMIA was the first African company to win a World Retail Award as “The Best New Retail Launch of the Year”. Further to this, MTN and Millicom announced its investments into AIH.

Raphael Afeador, former Managing Director of JUMIA: “JUMIA was an exciting one and a half year journey for us. We are extremely proud of JUMIA and wish all the best to the company and all the people here. E-commerce in Nigeria is growing very fast and is an exciting industry to be involved in.”

Bidding farewell to the JUMIA team, Tunde Kehinde, former Managing Director of JUMIA: “As we move on to start our own businesses, we owe a lot to every member of the team, together we made history, together we have built Nigeria’s first and biggest online retailer; a fate we never would have achieved without you. Let us urge you to continue to hold the values of looking after and satisfying every customer, supplier, and the people around you. There is no doubt we are building a great team of entrepreneurs that will leave a huge mark on this nation’s history”.c