MultiChoice buys 20% in Betking for $81 million, valuing the company in excess of $400 million.  Essentially, MultiChoice does not just want to live on European soccer rights which keep rising on aggregate price, affecting margins in a continent where consumers are discovering alternative ways to be entertained.

So, provided you call it entertainment – watching Ronaldo and Messi or playing and betting their avatars – money can be made. With BetKing, MultiChoice thinks there is an opportunity to ramp up revenue from this exploding sector in Africa, and it could do that without relying on the capacity to ship more money to hold football rights in European capitals.

MultiChoice, Africa’s biggest pay-TV operator, has acquired a 20% stake in BetKing, a pan-African sports betting group.

As part of the deal, MultiChoice has made an upfront investment of $81 million
(R1.3 billion), with the potential for a further payment of $31 million (R500 million) should certain earn-out targets be met between December 2021 and December 2023.

As the group exercises significant influence over BetKing, the business will be equity accounted as an associate from 1 October 2020 by MultiChoice.

Now that MultiChoice has moved into betting, expect major regulations to begin to emerge in this domain. Why? It is easier to attack a visible enemy than these digital startups no one knows where they operate from. I am not sure BetKing may like what would come, in near future, but of course that is a good problem to have when you can cash $81 million.

I voted in 2020 because of one critical issue: I want to ensure that black kids in America would continue to attend top universities in the nation. The Trump administration had mounted ferocious attacks on one of the ways which enable black kids to get into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc, by fighting to dismantle affirmative action. Today, I am happy that the Appeals court has sided with Harvard: race could be considered during admission.

When people write that America does not need affirmative action in these top schools, they have been unable to explain why in some schools, most students who needed affirmative action to get in are not ALWAYS the least performing in classes. Yes, Obama needed one but he was never the bottom of his class. This does imply that the “stable state system” is not fair. So that perturbation of considering race becomes necessary since implicit privileged race had played a role in the stable state selection. The Appeal court ruling is correct.

The Trump Rally in Nigeria

We are building business cases for mainly African and Africa-operating businesses and brands as we prepare for Tekedia Mini-MBA in 2021. We have expanded our curriculum with many empirical learning systems to deepen outcomes.  I report that MTN business case is in. We see three phases in the growth of his amazing African brand: 

• – The age of Voice telephony (before and decade of 2000s)
• – The age of mobile internet (decade of 2010s)
• – The age of application utilities (decade of 2020s)

From MTN, we postulate how the future of the industry would be. As SpaceX Starlink and other satellite players arrive (with expected affordable satellite phones), we see disintermediation threats to the likes of MTN, Airtel and other terrestrial players, but those threats could be mitigated if they play well in the age of application utilities. Yes, selling data will not be enough but playing into that data becomes strategic. 

 Register for Tekedia Mini-MBA.

Cloud kitchens, also called ghost kitchens, shared kitchens, or virtual kitchens, are commercial facilities purpose-built to produce food specifically for delivery rather than sit-down service. These commissary kitchens work with delivery-only food brands to serve communities where they operate. Uber Founder and ex-CEO, Travis Kalanick, runs a popular ghost kitchen startup called CloudKitchens. This sub-sector is getting popular in some major cities.

Once a curious addition to the food delivery craze, ghost kitchens have taken new prominence amid the pandemic. A report by Restaurant Dive argues that these kitchens — delivery-only cooking warehouses, essentially — may play a prominent role in the food landscape of the future given the explosion of delivery apps, a movement toward convenience and the effects and after-effects of the virus on the dine-in restaurant space. In a similar vein, Chipotle is opening its first digital-only restaurant in New York state that caters solely to pick-ups and delivery. 

Largely, you take a rent in a big city, turn that place into a place to cook food with no customer coming there to eat. Rather, you use delivery apps and bikers to send food to customers as they buy via their apps. One cloud kitchen can serve many delivery brands, making it a platform for sourcing cooked meals.

Cloud kitchens are commercial facilities purpose-built to produce food specifically for delivery. They do not have brick-and-mortar dine-in areas and consist of shared kitchen space with culinary staff preparing meals that are then delivered to customers at home or at work, typically through online delivery companies such as Uber Eats, Postmates, Grubhub, and DoorDash. […]

Cloud kitchens are much cheaper to set up than brick-and-mortar restaurants; there’s no need for them to be in prime locations, no need for cool designs, and no need for seating space. One estimate we heard was that a brick-and-mortar restaurant in New York City costs $1 million to $1.5 million to set up, while a cloud kitchen can get up and running for $100,000.

Today in Nigeria, the food delivery business is still at infancy. Even most of the food delivery apps depend on regular sit-down restaurants. A good cloud kitchen can improve marginal cost, and use scale to reduce cost of meals by 30%, in Lagos, with an improved delivery logistics. Mamaput is for small business owners; cloud kitchen is for entrepreneurs. Nigeria wins with entrepreneurs, not small business owners. Let’s think big here.