We are very happy at Tekedia Capital. One of our portfolio firms is being acquired by a global unicorn. We will announce when everything is concluded. This is our 2nd exit. Who likes parties? Do not eat because RSVP (rice & stew very plenty) on the way. At Tekedia Capital, we’re creating value for our Syndicate members here
Comment on LinkedIn Feed
Comment: Prof, These Unicorns are coming along with such frequency that I am starting to think they are ordinary horses bred in Abia State with synthetic horn affixed at a secret factory in Ovim, …
but even so.. long may the successes continue.
My Response: Ovim has started a bigger factory. And the success will be unbounded. We think that abundance remains in the future. The Ovim Nation says a hunter does not go to work with fear. We need to hunt opportunities and we cannot be fearful because the best companies in Nigeria have not be founded!
I wrote here a few weeks ago that BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will morph into something that goes beyond trade and economic cooperation. Today, we are reading that for the very first time, China will join fully in a multilateral military exercise in Russia called Vostok 2022.
The People’s Liberation Army said in a statement: “deepen pragmatic and friendly cooperation with the militaries of the participating countries, enhance the level of strategic coordination among the parties, and enhance the ability to deal with various security threats” .
If you are the EU, would you prefer a Russia that becomes closer with China to the extent that China can do military drills in Europe? Indeed a new version of NATO with China and Russia entwined.
People, something new is happening in the world – and many could be losers. These men need to sit down and discuss these issues before they push the world into a global catastrophe.
Under Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, Beijing and Moscow have grown increasingly close.
A year ago this month, Russia and China held joint military exercises in north-central China involving more than 10,000 troops. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu praised the Sibu/Cooperation-2021 drills in China’s Ningxia and suggested they could be developed further.
In October, Russia and China held joint naval drills in the Sea of Japan. Days later, Russian and Chinese warships held their first joint patrols in the western Pacific.
The next month, South Korea’s military said it had scrambled fighter jets after two Chinese and seven Russian warplanes intruded into its air defence identification zone during what Beijing called regular training.
Shortly before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, Beijing and Moscow announced a “no limits” partnership, although U.S. officials say they have not seen China evade U.S.-led sanctions on Russia or provide it with military equipment.
Comment 1: I don’t think you’re right in the prediction about BRICS, India and Brazil will not go by the way of China and possibly Russia ?? when it comes to any serious issues beyond mere economic cooperation. And South Africa ?? will not either, it will be too costly for them. On military cooperation between Russia and China against the western countries will never be sustainable and tight like NATO. China will not fight to defend Russia, they’ve a lot to loose. Russia on the other hand may boldly get involved militarily in some way in defense of China ?? because they’ve nothing to loose. Russia has nothing to offer the west nor the world except petroleum and gas of which the west are finding alternatives to. There are two main reasons China won’t get into any flexing of military muscle with US nor NATO. First, Military cooperation with Russia & China will largely dependent on China, Russia has nothing to offer military wise. The joint strength of Russia and China will be almost equivalent to the strength of China. Of late China has grown into a military supper power but it’s strength is still very little in comparison to NATO. The second reason is that Chinese economy depends almost solely on the US and the West.
Response 1: ‘Russia has nothing to offer military wise” – I hope that is a typo. Do not judge US military because it botched exit from Afghanistan. And do not judge Russia’s military might because it messed up the first 3 weeks in Ukraine.
Comment 1b: Russia invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime but after 10 years it’s military packed up and left unceremoniously. The US did same in 2001 and dethroned the Taliban in just 2 months. Russia military might is completely obsolete, they only have nuclear weapons and so many other nations have them and no country can win a nuclear war
Response 1b: “Russia military might is completely obsolete” – that is not correct. Russia’s use of anti-radar systems and electromagnetic systems have stopped most drones in the Donbass region. Imagine a technology which you push and every electronics in Lagos will stop working. Russia has demonstrated that, crippling the ability for Ukraine to hit them well despite all the NATO weapons supplied. You do not call such obsolete. The NATO and Russia conflict in Ukraine is a tech fight and both seem matched at the moment.
China giveth and China taketh. Yes, the valuation of Ant Financial, which until recently was one of the world’s largest financial institutions, has been cut. Through an asymmetric attack from the Chinese government on Ant Financial after an own-goal comment by its founder, Jack Ma of Alibaba empire, the company has been decimated.
A company that was valued more than Goldman Sachs has been taken out of the main league after the government dismantled its money-making operations. That dismantling was ferocious and unparalleled with license withdrawn and operations redesigned by fiat rules.
The company whose IPO was put at $300 billion in 2020 is now valued as low as $70 billion! Unfortunately for the American companies which heralded that aborted IPO are not even sure this floor is the lowest. In other words, this company can end up $0 as China continues to work on its magic.
Fintech giant Ant Group Co.’s valuation was trimmed again by global investors who bought private shares ahead of its suspended initial public offering.
Boston-based Fidelity Investments cut its estimate for Ant to $70 billion at the end of May, according to Bloomberg calculations based on filings. That’s down from $78 billion in June last year, and $235 billion just before Ant’s IPO was torpedoed by regulators in November 2020.
We all admire China but things like this make you feel better that you live in Nigeria where, at least, we have the “freedom” to own assets even though we may not be where we can be as a nation. China can wake up and suspend the license of edtech companies worth billions of dollars, and mandate them to become charities, after investors have put hundreds of millions of dollars in these firms. I do not admire such high voltage searchlights on personal properties as they can burn visions and energies.
There is nothing ant-like in these numbers. Yes, Alibaba’s affiliate fintech company, Ant Group (of Alipay), does generate more payment volume than Visa & Mastercard combined! Ant does $18 trillion while the American giants bring in $16 trillion. Ant operates primarily in China while Visa and Mastercard run around the world!
China, why must you spray insecticides on a $300 billion ant?
Comment 1: #china has an alternate view on economics n wealth. We will falter if we try to apply western n capitalistic frameworks to assess China mkt opportunities and China state policies.
A simple point seems to be that China doesn’t see big value in serious concentration of wealth in private pools.
Response 1: “A simple point seems to be that China doesn’t see big value in serious concentration of wealth in private pools.” – that is the revelation indeed. But how do you help people if companies cannot become big and provide jobs, opportunities, etc? When companies become big, the owners are typically rewarded! I cannot see another way China will cut that off.
Comment 2:Jack Ma is nowhere to be seen. Jack Ma is not complaining.
Is the Chinese government spraying insecticides or the people breeding the insect that is harvesting it?
I am not insinuating anything. Just saying, this world where there is no technology for us to publicly listen to the conversation of these world leaders and CEOs is something else.
Respond 2: “Jack Ma is nowhere to be seen. Jack Ma is not complaining.” – how do you know that he is not complaining? When your university is renamed and taken from you. Your company cut into pieces, pushed you out of the Board, dismantled your operating licenses on your cash cow, etc, what do you mean by ” Jack Ma is not complaining”?
Nigerian businesses have strived for years without access to digital bookkeeping, exposing them to evitable loss of business transaction records. Recently, the situation opened a huge opportunity for startups trying to fill the gap.
Several startups across West Africa, including Kippa, Bumpa,OZÉ and Bamba, are creating platforms to offer digital bookkeeping services to businesses.
The startups, left with the job of digitizing the data of Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), an industryreportedly worth more than $200 billion in Nigeria, have been attracting investors who see huge growth potential in the emerging market.
Pastel, a digital bookkeeping startup has announced a seed raise of $5.5 million led by pan-African venture capital firm TLcom Capital. Participating in the seed round are other VC firms such as Global Founders Capital (GFC), Golden Palm Investments, DFS Labs, Ulu Ventures, Plug and Play and Soma Cap.
The startup has been under the radar. It raised a $620,000 pre-seed last year from some of its existing investors.
Launched in 2020 as Sabi Cash by Abuzar Royesh, Olamide Oladeji and Izunna Okonkwo, Stanford graduate students, Pastel has grown into a multimillion dollar company within a short period.
The company’s ultimate goal is to help small businesses in Nigeria that have stayed offline for years – using non-digital means to store information and essential data, to get their data online. The absence of digital storage for Small Medium Businesses (SMBs) is said to be responsible for the failure of many businesses, many of them couldn’t last longer than five years.
Cofounder and chief growth officer (CGO) Okonkwo said the bookkeeping and customer relationship management Pastel launched last year recorded more than 100,000 merchant sign-ups by December 2021.
Pastel has tried to distinguish itself from other companies offering digital bookkeeping and credit services with a different strategy. Unlike other platforms operating a sort of super app, where all their services are held together, Pastel has made each of its products, Quick Receipt and Pastel Financing, standalone.
This is believed to have boosted the number of enrollments, which stands at over 45,000 active merchant users, in the platform.
“Our thought process was to get traction quickly by solving a merchant’s pain point with a free and easy solution. The next step was to capture value. So we added value capture features to the Sabi app that our customers love. Now we are building a lot more,” Okonkwo said. “The way we’ve thought about it is, as opposed to creating a super app that a lot of other fintechs have or are in pursuit of, we are taking a more platform approach, meaning that any Pastel user can create an account with any of our apps. With the same login they can access all the other solutions that we’re providing.”
Functioning separately, TechCrunch reported that the Quick Receipt app provides businesses with simple invoicing and receipts tools and over 60,000 active merchant users. On the other hand, the Swift Money app, which leverages local saving groups called ajo in Nigeria to provide financing for businesses, has been stealthily built for the last three months through Pastel Financing.
Onboarding ajo, a popular financial scheme in Nigeria where individuals or a group of people contributes money in the care of a leader, the report said the Swift Money app is designed to work with already established ajo leaders and their groups.
The leader assumes an oversight role with tools to look after the group’s activities and interest that involves financing. The leader’s role includes downloading the app to set up profiles for members and helping them to collect and deposit cash in a [Pastel] bank account for savings.
Members of the group are evaluated based on their credit history to ascertain their creditworthiness when they need a loan. Pastel, which runs on a free app, only started making revenue recently and does so by charging interest and a small fee on loans.
Many facts and activities since the devolution of the USSR have made and continue to make Russia unique in all aspects. Russia is a country that contributes significantly to the development of Europe and other continents around the world, from politics to the economy. Its capital (Moscow) has the most billionaires per capita in the world. Russians have invented tools and software that have assisted locals and other nationals in solving numerous problems or meeting needs.
However, the purpose of this piece is not to examine Russia’s economic and political prowess. Its purpose is to explain the ongoing media convergence strategy of private and public media organizations. Various policies and programs tailored to the media industry have assisted media owners and professionals in creating and capturing long-term value over the last decade. The industry’s liberalization has resulted in new forms of competition in the print and broadcast media spaces. It has also contributed to the development of locally produced technologies for print, broadcast, and digital journalism.
For example, some recent political decisions made by the Russian government resulted in the development of a few social networking sites. VK (Vkontakte) rose to prominence and saw a spike in usage during a political dispute with Meta, the company that owns Facebook. According to a recent study, it is the second most popular medium among Russian online users after WhatsApp. RuTube, which was established in 2006 and competes with YouTube, is similar to VK. The Russian developers also created Fiesta and Rossgram as Instagram alternatives. As a rival to TikTok, Yappy was created on November 29, 2022.
There is no doubt Russian developers are providing some locally owned new media to the media sector in preparation for the anticipated and required convergence with the foreign ones toward rapid content distribution to local and international audiences. We found that 28% of the phases are for VK and 25% are for OK after analyzing 53 phases of convergence with locally developed social networking sites. Telegram and Zen are in third and fourth place in the convergence with the locally developed social media, with 21% and 17% of the phases, respectively. The top two spots held by VK and OK confirmed the earlier observation that they are the most popular local social networking sites.
With 8% and 2% of the phases for RuTube and Yappy, respectively, it is clear that media organizations are employing foreign competitors. For example, 28% of 39 phases of convergence with foreign developed sites are for YouTube, RuTube’s competitor. In these orders, social media such as Twitter (23%), Facebook (18%), TikTok (10%), Instagram (10%), Flipboard (5%), and Viber (5%) are also used.
Understanding how the industry is integrating social media by ownership and media type reveals that privately owned media companies are integrating social networking sites more than publicly owned businesses. Newspapers and radio stations each had 24 of the 61 traces of convergence found for private organizations, while television had 13 traces. The 22 traces of convergence found for publicly-owned organizations were led by radio stations and newspapers. The full nine traces of convergence for media organizations with both public and private owners are for television stations.
Overall, an analysis of 275 convergence traces from 18 media organizations reveals that newspapers (39.80%) and radio stations (36.40%) are the dominant media types that are converging with both forms (local and foreign) of social networking sites. Television stations trailed newspapers and radio stations with 31.40% of the traces.
Exhibit 1: Social media convergence by media and ownership pattern
Source: Media Organisations, 2022; Infoprations Analysis, 2022
Exhibit 2: Russian media convergence with local and foreign-owned social networking sites
Source: Media Organisations, 2022; Infoprations Analysis, 2022
They mostly converged with locally developed and growing social media networking sites rather than those developed in other countries and growing globally (see Exhibit 2). In this regard, when Russian media consider social networking convergence, the selected media organizations have primarily connected with VK, OK, Zen, and Telegram. Russian technology developers created these social media platforms. Less media organizations are using RuTube, which was created as an alternative to YouTube. It is obvious that Russian media organizations must connect with platforms with a rapidly growing global user base among the foreign social media. Many of them are using Facebook and Twitter. This suggests that Russian media organizations want to gain access to a wider audience than the national and regional audiences that can be provided by locally created social networking sites.
Expanding the frontiers of distribution and reaching audience
Russian media organizations, like their counterparts in other countries, are expanding their content distribution and audience reach strategy by engaging in some activities that are thought to be beneficial in achieving the desired results. From print to broadcast media, authors and management inclusion, book, cartoons, castings, content integration, content promotion, feedback, guest profiling, live chat, live concert, management inclusion, music request, online mobile phone conversation, other stations interlinked, partners’ websites interlinked, partners project, presenters and management inclusion, programme schedule, partnership project, readers’ interview survey, special projects and thematic channels are being considered and prioritised for creating the needed visibility, disseminating content and dynamic audience capturing.
Exhibit 3: Social media convergence by pattern of content distribution
Source: Media Organisations, 2022; Infoprations Analysis, 2022
Significantly, media organizations that use both offline and online content distribution patterns are more likely to use the identified social media than those that only use online content distribution. This implies that organizations with an online content distribution pattern believe that simply being on the Internet is enough to deliver and capture value for a local and global audience. On the other hand, traditional offline media organizations believe that using this approach alone is insufficient to ensure adequate content dissemination and capturing value in terms of gaining new audiences around the world and obtaining favourable advertisement placement from advertisers. Exhibit 3 shows that Russian media with offline and online content distribution patterns prefer locally developed social networking sites to foreign ones. The same pattern has been discovered for media organizations that primarily use online content distribution.
Fit and Sustainability
What is Russia’s strategy for media convergence? This question cannot be answered without considering the fit and sustainability of the previously demonstrated converging patterns in the Russian media market. From all indications, it is easier to conclude that the market’s approach to social media convergence aligns with government actions in some cases, as well as the strategic steps that organizations must take in the face of global media convergence trends. Meanwhile, the approach’s long-term viability would be heavily reliant on Russian technology developers’ ongoing innovation. What is Russia’s media convergence strategy now? Though this article focuses on the social networking site aspect of new media and/or emerging technologies, it is clear that Russian media convergence strategy is appropriation of vertical integration of local and foreign-owned technologies for hybrid visibility, content dissemination, and value capture.
