Beyond MVNO, Our Focus Is MVNO Linked To Satellite Direct-to-Cell in Nigeria

Good People, thanks for the questions on the MVNO investment opportunity. Let me provide more details. First, Tekedia Capital is not interested in investing in any mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) as I have written here many times that we do not see any value in that business category in Africa. Why?

MVNO makes sense in markets where telcos have OVERcapacity and need help to bring customers into their ecosystems. For example, Verizon (MTN equivalent in America) may have a network capacity to support 20 million customers in an area but it has just 5 million customers. So, working with an MVNO makes sense as that MVNO can use its local knowledge, superior customer service, etc to add maybe an extra 5 million users.

But in Nigeria, all the telcos are operating at above capacity. In other words, they have capacity for 10 million users, but they could have 25 million already. Under that framework, adding more users via MVNO does not improve any customer experience. Rather, it is more customer congestion. As that happens, the MVNO has no leverage to differentiate on service from the telcos since the core product is broken. That is why we are not interested in investing in any MVNO. It has nothing to compound competitive positioning in any way possible!

However, if you are an MVNO and can get NCC (Nigeria’s telecom regulator) to allow you to partner with Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink, to pipe its direct-to-cell satellite service, cutting out the terrestrial telcos, Tekedia Capital becomes interested once you get your approval-in-principle from NCC. But just being an MVNO is not something we find interesting.

Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA (June 9 – Sept 6, 2025), and join Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe and our global faculty; click here.