Awareness and observation are antennas into the minds of customers, sharper than any MBA. Some entrepreneurs have used both to make out of chewing stick an organic toothbrush.
To be a successful businessperson, you do not need to be as mathematical as Chike Obi or grammatical as Wole Soyinka. All you need is awareness and observation on market frictions, finding solutions to them, and rapping up in a matching story. If you can get those three in sync, you will experience glory.
MTN gets into the game and could be in for something bigger than powering calls and data: instant messaging. Yes, the African mobile giant plans to introduce instant messaging [IM], capturing the best of WhatsApp and WeChat in all the countries where it does business, beginning on trials in West Africa. This is a very fascinating vision for the company. It has recognized that the future of selling data and voice is not necessarily bright with satellite competitors and ICT utilities like Google and Facebook surrounding Africa. (I do think this IM may work only for MTN customers since the company is only launching in countries it currently operates.)
MTN Group has announced it will launch an instant messaging (IM) service akin to China’s WeChat and Facebook’s WhatsApp as it seeks to expand revenue from digital services and mobile money.
With the IM platform, which will form part of the group’s mobile money initiatives, MTN wants to build what group CEO Rob Shuter calls the “WeChat of Africa”. WeChat, developed by Naspers affiliate Tencent, is by far the largest IM app in China and offers a wide range of in-app services from chat to payments.
This is the key deal why MTN has a real chance in this instant messaging business: it has the infrastructure and can make people do instant messaging even when they have no data by fusing SMS and IM. WhatsApp cannot do that today – you must have data before you can do WhatsApp or WeChat but MTNChat [a name I just gave it] will work even when you do not have data [MTN will surely bill the SMS implying that it re-allocates funds from voice to enable data-solution to work]. MTN sees this investment as part of its future: “We are extending our Bright strategy to build MTN into a digital operator with a major focus on the fintech, digital, enterprise and wholesale business areas,” MTN Group CEO Rob Shuter said in a statement.
MTN’s Duality Element
This vision is huge and MTN needs to run it with the construct of duality element. Yes, it can give out data to help people use MTNChat to ensure MTNChat grows. As that happens, it will take market share from WhatsApp. Amazon loses money on ecommerce, crippling physical retailers which in turn go online only to sign-up for Amazon Web Services which remains very profitable. Alibaba makes listing on Alibaba.com easy but makes money via Alipay which is the default payment on Alibaba. So, let MTNChat have that interface with the voice and data business in MTN while using MTNChat to create new sources of growth revenue. This is a great double play opportunity.
For Samsung, provided Apple continues to place orders for chips, it would be fine irrespective of what happens in its mobile phone business where Samsung has been lagging: “Samsung posted lower-than-expected sales of its flagship Galaxy 9 smartphones”. But having the Galaxy series ensures that Samsung does not have to secure external orders before innovating in the chip business.
Yes, provided the chip business has an internal customer (the mobile device unit, the oasis in my strategy), Samsung will continue to commit resources as the oasis has removed most of the risks in investing billions of dollars to build new factories in the chip business. Yes, the mobile device unit (the oasis) makes the chip business better by being a “reliable customer”, irrespective of whatever happens externally. That is the heart of the one oasis and the center of Double Play Strategy in business.
All Together
The future of telcos in Africa cannot be selling voice and data credits. What MTN plans to do here is what is needed to keep this industry competitive as ICT utilities through the OTT solutions distort revenue models. As noted in the earnings call, MTN is seeing huge numbers even as it targets “double-digit growth in service revenue”.
It increased its subscriber base by 16 million to 233 million customers across 21 markets in Africa and the Middle East. The number of active data users increased by 10 million to 79 million and the active mobile money subscriber base rose to 27 million.
My only recommendation to MTN is one thing: add stablecoin features on MTNChat so that you can use it for remittance and many other things in respective local economies. Yes, with stablecoins, the cryptocurrency becomes pegged to the local currency removing the uncertainty we see in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Possibly, with this solution, we can hit that product no fintech or bank has ever built in Africa: a location-, currency-agnostic intra-African payment and remittance system.
To already qualified Zenvus Loci partners and intending partners [apply by sending email here], Zenvus Loci moves to the new phase: assembly. Our boards are superb after all quality assurance tests. It is a beauty. We have since moved to testing the firmware and all the behind-the-scene software that makes electronics work.
This is our first consumer product; we typically make solutions used by companies and government entities. But they are all the same thing: machines feeding on electrons!
I am looking for business development partners across Africa with solid local structures; reach out to me or click for my team. They will send the necessary documents.
AirBnB has done what many expected: add hotel reservations at scale. Yes, renting parlors and tree-homes will not do it, for a long time, because many people especially in trust-challenged developing world will not sign-up in droves. So, it is a beauty that AirBnB is now going to offer hotel reservations.
The $31 billion home-sharing site said today (March 7) it had signed a deal to acquire HotelTonight, a curated booking site for boutique and independent hotels. The companies will operate as separate brands for now, while over time it will add select boutique HotelTonight rooms to the Airbnb platform.
The deal price was not disclosed. HotelTonight’s fundraising round in 2017 valued the company at about $460 million.
The acquisition follows Airbnb’s efforts to add more professional and curated listings—more hotel-like, you might say—to its site ahead of a rumored initial public offering. In January, Airbnb said the number of rooms available on its site that hosts classified as hotels, bed and breakfasts, hostels, or resorts increased 152% over the previous year, though it didn’t provide the underlying numbers on that inventory.
This new strategy will help AirBnB grow in Nigeria where I have noted that the company is struggling. Unfortunately, the implication is that Hotels.ng and Jumia Travels will now be on the crosshairs of AirBnB. As that happens, customers win via competition in the sector.
The root of this issue is Nigeria, and it is a big problem that is evident to most entrepreneurs, depending on the business sector. Because of the low level of trust, especially in digital business, Nigerians like “cash and carry” transactions, where that cash now includes digital payments.In essence, we want to spend money on something and get the gratification immediately. Or better, we want to inspect before we pay.
AirBnB has hotel-booking business now
All Together
The commodification of trust is an industry challenge in Nigeria. That is the weakest link of AirBnB business. But with hotel chains, people will feel safer. The fact is this: paying for a stranger’s living room, just because you saw it online is not what many Nigerians are open to. But paying for a hotel is assumed to be less risky because the hotel is there unlike a home. Uber does not have this issue because the service is offered before payment is made to the Uber system. In AirBnB, the reservation is done before the service is done, creating a new layer, that requires deepening of trust first. With a hotel booking site, AirBnB opens a new dimension in its business which will be promising in Nigeria.
