The early bird registration deadline for the 6th edition of Tekedia Institute Mini-MBA (Sept 13-Dec 5) is today, Aug 28. Our program is online, self-paced, and costs $140 (or N50,000 naira) per person. It involves pre-recorded and live Zoom sessions, facilitated by executives from the finest companies you admire.

We have many goodies if you beat the deadline including attending our Innovation Week and Career Week free besides access to my books, and certificate courses at Facyber.com. You will also have access to the critics-loved The Dangote System (yes, bring it on, lol).

Beat the deadline and join the best school. Click and register and my team will get you in. They run 24/7 because now we serve 39 countries. Become an innovator and a champion of markets; click and register here. 

Cristiano Ronaldo makes it back to Manchester United in a €15 million deal with a potential €8m addition. He will sign a two year contract to reconnect to the old club after 12 years. On business, this is superb but on sports and trophies, this is poor. They will get more TV rights but that is it!

Ronaldo is a legend. He scored more than 80 goals in Italy in 3 years. But under him Juventus degraded. Before his arrival, Juve was easily winning the league – 9 straight! In Ronaldo’s last session, the Old Lady was 4th. Notice that they made no progress on the Champions League: lost to Ajax in quarterfinals and last 16 to Lyon and Porto. Largely, Juve won only one knockout game with him. Not his fault except that he was in the midst!

Ronaldo will score many goals in Old Trafford. But scoring goals without creating goals or having others who do, will rarely win Champions League. He scored many goals in Italy, winning the battle but if you check, he lost the war. I do think that ManU needs a different type of player because ManU lacks consistency in structure in the midfield.  The ManU coach Solskjaer was an open book which other coaches read quickly!

I am never a good footballer but in secondary school, my nickname was Sausa: the football strategist and analyst. What a village boy! Welcome home Ronaldo, nevertheless.

Updated After Facebook and LinkedIn Comments

General response on my Cristiano Ronaldo’s piece. Yes, my problem is that I wrote something unpalatable about a god to many. I would not have written that piece if I am currently in Lagos. CR is a god and Manchester United is a temple. The altar remains the streets of Lagos and beyond where fans congregate on any ManU game.

So, I am aware that I was going against the crusaders of the Red Devils for pointing out that CR won his battles in Italy with many goals but lost the war of bringing Champions League to the Old Lady. But if you believe in numbers, my point is clear.

But when it comes to gods, even numbers are meaningless. CR, I am with you on this. Break the nets and may we forget our problems in Nigeria from those goals!

The article – https://lnkd.in/e6H8izyC).

Good People, join me to congratulate a good friend, Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) Malam Mele Kyari, for what he is doing in NNPC. He continues to improve the numbers, hitting a N287 billion profit after tax in 2020. If NNPC becomes this efficient, I posit that by 2025, it would be delivering at least N1 trillion per year to Nigeria.

“For NNPC family, this is a very proud moment for us and for our shareholders because we no longer declare losses. We moved from loss of N803 billion in 2018, reduced to N1.7 billion in 2019 and in 2020, we are making profit after tax of N287 billion, this is in no doubt a huge progress but no means sufficient….We saw the opportunity to be more efficient by automating our system and processes that made thing work faster and ultimately reduced logistic cost that added additional cost to our business, Borrowing at lower rate in 2020 also helped us to reduce cost of production,’ GMD NNPC

To the NNPC Team, congrats for great execution. Yet, we MUST still do better. I do think that Nigeria needs to run compounding acceleration on value realizable from our energy assets to go ahead of the inflection point of any energy flip. Sure, moving from red to black is a welcome development. Now, SCALE that black fast!!!

Greetings. We thank you for your partnership. We are writing to inform you that we are seeing new patterns in markets, and Covid-19 has drastically re-wired the architectures of economies. These changes are enabling new dimensions of opportunities across industries and territories.

Case 1: Africa seems to have found a working ecommerce model. In the last 6 months, B2B ecommerce companies like Suplias, Alerzo, TradeDepot, Omnibiz and others like them have raised $millions in Nigeria alone. And these firms are not burning money but have found extremely niche ways to capture value in markets. They provide sellers in open markets and supermarkets a means to order bulk merchandise through their apps, and they deliver to those shop owners. By doing this, the shop owners do not need to leave their shops, among other benefits.

Case 2: Portfolio company Lafiya Telehealth was originally conceived for the African market. But due to orders on its cloud hospital, the company has opened a physical sales location in the US to serve states which found it innovative to build a hospital within hours instead of days!. So, even in advanced nations, everything has changed: decentralized everything connected by technology.

Cases….

Tekedia Capital wants to play a major role at the early stage of funding these new species of companies. Our goal here is to see that even if our members decide to exit during relative mid-tier valuation secondaries, they could have made decent returns. In other words, if bigger investors come, and decide to buy out early investors, returns will still be significant.

Our strategy is proactive: never wait for builders to come; go after them. If we keep finding them, we will be well positioned for this decades-long digitization of African economies. The potential reward is massive.

We are excited about the promises of the future. We are always here for one-on-one conversation on what we see in markets. We are here to discuss at deeper levels these patterns with relevant market cases. Thank you for your partnership.

Regards,

Tekedia Capital Team

We Welcome New Members: Use this link for Tekedia Capital Syndicate registration

For prospective investors & startups looking for funds, email capital@fasmicro.com