If you are paying attention, over the last few months, some web businesses in Africa are moving offline, even as they expand their online properties. The recent revelation of the depressing numbers from many of the online platforms shocked industry players: when it comes to spending money online, Africans are not in yet.
iROKOtv had figured this out many months ago with its physical kiosks. Jumia Travel has joined the league, adding offline presence in its operations in Uganda. Yes, Jumia is now your typical travel agent with physical address. It has physical operations now in ten countries, and will continue to roll out these new features across the continent.
Jumia Travel Uganda has launched a new travel agency, signaling a desire to win over Ugandan travellers who are not online by setting up a physical office in Kampala. The physical premises, according to Jumia Travel Country Manager Timothy Mugume are designed to tap into the significant market of Ugandans who do not have access to the internet.
“We have a very strong presence online, however we would like to be all inclusive and provide our services to the customers who are not online, and build them up to embrace it. Only less than 25% of Ugandans have access to internet or services, and our target market lies here too,” Mr. Mugume said.
Uganda therefore becomes one of 10 African countries where Jumia Travel has set up offices. According to a company official, this is set to increase to all major cities. In a statement, the company said the new travel agency will provide services including hotel reservations, flight/ticket bookings, and visas, among others. Jumia Travel said its online platform boasts more than 300,000 hotels worldwide
This is the new Jumia: Jumia 2.0. Expect the financials to come alive positively in coming quarters with this hybrid play. Jumia has brand recognition in Africa, and will become a clear leader as an offline travel agent in major African cities where it operates.
But this goes beyond travels: I expect Jumia to buy a major supermarket in Lagos or Abuja next year. Jumia Supermart will be a great ecosystem for people to shop. Think of Paris in Abuja; LA in Lagos. You cannot beat the brand.
Nigerian entrepreneurs: the industry is changing, from Amazon to Alibaba. You need to adjust your strategies to account for these changes. Sure, online is the future, but we must find cashflow to get over the next billing cycle. The implication is that we need to push into where the present opportunities are located even as we plot for tomorrow’s moments. The money is still in the physical space and we need to deal with that reality in our business models.
In the league of African telecom operators, Kenya’s Safaricom is peerless in innovation. It pioneered mobile money transfer through MPESA. It is profitable with one of the finest marketing strategies when it comes to telecoms in Africa. When you walk through the streets of Nairobi, you will feel connected with Safaricom with its local language promotions. Kenyans love Safaricom as they continue to rate it one of the top brands in the nation.
Yet, Safaricom is part of the telecommunication institutions which are going through redesigns due to over-the-top services like WhatsApp and Skype which make it possible for people to communicate more efficiently and cheaply, even when depriving the telcos extra revenue. The telcos do make money, at least for the users to be online, but they lose money when the people send SMS on WhatsApp and do video calls on Skype, without directly paying the telcos, for those extras. Indeed, you can load N700 (about $2) data in Nigeria and send 1,000 messengers on WhatsApp. Without WhatsApp, that could have cost you at least N40,000 in the hands of telcos. You have saved, but value has been destroyed for the telcos. Oh yes, you can argue that no value was destroyed until you start building telecom infrastructures. Telcos do believe that the N700 you have paid is not enough to cover the N40,000 worth of activities which went through their systems.
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Masoko from Safaricom
So, Safaricom is looking for growth and planning a future where data and voice may not take care of the margins. It has launched an e-commerce operation, named Masoko.
Safaricom has officially announced the launch of its e-commerce portal, Masoko. Masoko (Swahili for ‘markets’) aims to leverage the mobile phone to provide local merchants with unlimited potential to sell their products and services via an online platform.
Users of the platform will be able to access items ranging from groceries to books to auto parts.
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Masoko will accept all mobile money payments as well as Visa and MasterCard payments and will have dedicated delivery fulfillment partners such as Wells Fargo and Sendy to provide a seamless customer experience that is versatile, fast and secure.
“By leveraging the strength and reach of our network, our customer base, and a number of partnerships with vendors, we hope to create a solution that can power the next phase of growth for the Kenyan economy. We hope to create a universal platform that will connect the smallest of vendors in Kenya to a nationwide market,” said Mr. Ogutu.
Why This Is Unique
Unlike most ecommerce operators in Africa, Safaricom could find success easily. If you read clearly, Safaricom is looking for the best way to expand the Kenyan economy because that is where its “currency”, MPESA, is very dominant. If that “next phase of growth for the Kenyan economy” happens, through its contribution in this new venture, Safaricom’s MPESA will benefit. It wants to build an integrated market that will unlock more values in the Kenyan economy, including the informal sector. Here are the core strategies this company is deploying:
One Oasis Strategy: Safaricom is launching this ecommerce to help in the growth of MPESA, its very best product: “Masoko will accept all mobile money payments …” The more Safaricom can move more Kenyan commerce to MPESA, the more it benefits because MPESA is in its ecosystem. So, technically, even if it does not make money through ecommerce, Safaricom will make money through more activities in MPESA. Ecommerce is generally hard to make money, but there are many ways of making money in it. You play parallel, using it to grow another product.
Double Play Strategy: Safaricom is going to run the typical double play which is used by leading global ecommerce businesses. These companies always have complementary services to ecommerce. Safaricom has one in MPESA and that will help its positioning in the market
In baseball, double play is a defensive play where two players are put out. It turns out that the leading ecommerce companies like Amazon and Alibaba have such strategies in their businesses. Amazon runs an ecommerce operation, which largely loses money, but makes money via cloud computing services. In the world of Amazon, if it can destroy many brick and mortar retailers and force them to go online, it will have cloud services to sell to them. For Alibaba, its double play comes from its asset-light marketplace and the Ant Financial which processes payments across its ecosystems. Besides the commission for selling on Alibaba, Alibaba takes another cut for handling the payment. When you examine these companies, one thing is obvious: no one makes good money by running just an ecommerce operation; you need a double play to supplement it.
Safaricom Data
I am expecting Safaricom to move into other sectors like insurance after this ecommerce venture has been executed. The fact remains that no one understands the buying habits of Kenyans more than MPESA. By looking at MPESA, you can get a good picture on how Kenyans are spending. This means that you can create products and services around those patterns. No other company in Kenya can do this better than Safaricom in Kenya.
It can use data from MPESA to have a very good feel on what is trending in Kenya and then make sure it is prepared for it. If people are buying insurance from one of the merchants that sell so, Safaricom could see that as the next big thing. (Data policy in Africa is weak, we will continue to debate what companies can see and not see. But today, no one is policing them.) This ecommerce operation is largely a marketplace where it is mainly bringing buyers and vendors together, without necessarily carrying inventory. Yet, it is possible that Safaricom can see from MPESA the wares which are selling well and could decide to stock and sell them directly.
The best business Safaricom will have in coming years will be data business. MPESA makes that possible because you are using real data on actual purchases. It will be hard for anyone to beat any operator with that level of insights about any economy and the broad consumers.
All Together
Yes, the data Safaricom has about Kenya is unprecedented and this company can use it to build new businesses. The ecommerce business it is running is not the risky type: this is a marketplace where the risk stays with the vendors. The main goal of this new venture is helping MPESA to remain the dominant mobile money despite whatever the banks are planning in Kenya.
I do not see a highly successful ecommerce operation that will defeat Jumia in marketplace sub-sector, but I see an operation that will seed more markets and opportunities for MPESA. That is One Oasis Strategy fused with Double Play which has been used by leading ecommerce giants around the world. When those are executed in sync, with the data Safaricom has on Kenyan commerce, through MPESA, great things happen. That is the brilliance of Safaricom.
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If you ever have to design chips, you must write software which will make it possible for the hardware to link to software. There are many levels of this software. You have the BIOS (software stored on a small memory chip on the motherboard that enables our computer systems to start when turned on, loosely the firmware for input and output in our computing systems), which is the elemental software that enables microprocessors to boot up before they handshake to other software. From the BIOS, you get to the operating systems like Windows before you can get to applications like Microsoft Office.
If you are making sensors like webcams you need to make firmware that will make it possible for the hardware to be recognized by another level of software. This is the most important part of technology industry because if you cannot get this working, everything built on top will crash. In short, you cannot even build anything because you will have no hardware product. Before Facebook can make the Likes, the products like smartphones must exist and the firmware must be working really fine.
That is why Intel’s note that it has been shipping firmware-vulnerable chips is big news. This means that Intel software was vulnerable, even before we can get to operating systems like Windows or Linux. Largely, that is the closest you can get to the machines, and the silicon that makes them switch to our computational delights. In the world today, 99.99% of security solutions are not designed for that software level. You expect Intel Corp that wires the silicon to get the firmware to handover to the operating system will always own that space, efficiently.
CPU king Intel admitted that software it included in nearly every chip it sold in recent years is riddled with security vulnerabilities. PC users were urged to download a patch to eliminate the flaws that could allow a hacker to run malicious software or bypass security checks.
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The security holes reside mainly in a feature called the “management engine” on Intel CPUs, like its brand new 8th generation Core Processor series. Intel said it had developed software patches to eliminate the problems, but listed only one manufacturer—Lenovo—that had created a way for customers to actually update their computers. While some other PC makers listed fixes on their own web sites, some of the vulnerable chips reside in smart, connected devices (part of the so-called Internet of Things) and may never be updated.
This is the phase of computing which we do not pay a lot of attention in Nigeria. Firmware development is really the zenith in software because without it, you will be unable to get hardware and software to talk to each other. Without that capability, you cannot design sensors and hardware solutions. It is the most sophisticated part of software development. Yes, it involves controlling electrical signals which must be handled the way they must be handled, and nothing less.
Meanwhile, the next iPhone will have augmented reality. Apple paid $30 million to acquire a Montreal virtual reality headset maker Vrvana. Typically, when Apple buys, you get the picture where it is going. This product will appear very soon in new iPhones.
When the Bankers Committee wanted to associate the bank accounts in Nigeria with the biometrics of their owners, they came together. Through the Bank Verification Number (BVN), a customer once registered in one bank could link that same BVN in accounts maintained in other banks. There was no need of duplicating or replicating biometrics data in each of the banks. The impact is massive saving for the banks under a top-grade data consolidation regime. I always like how the Bankers Committee makes decisions: they analyze, commit and execute. The BVN has become a virtuoso project that continues to strengthen the institutional governance in Nigeria.
Contrast that with how the telecommunication sector approached the same problem. MTN, Glo, Airtel and 9Mobile (yes, Etisalat NG) decided they could not band together. Everyone went on its own way, wasting money and multiplying databases of Nigeria’s biometrics, a clear evidence of lack of National Data Policy. Interestingly, the telcos are techies who could have done this better. But as we already know: technology does not necessarily make you smarter, strategy does. So, MTN has its own database, Glo has its own, and so on. These companies consumed thousands of man hours of Nigerians, just for the privilege to have phone lines.
Largely, the telcos could have done what the banks did: if you have a sim card with MTN associated with a number (let’s call it Mobile Verification Number, MVN) tied to your biometrics, you can use that MVN to get sim card from another operator, without supplying new biometrics. For example, to get a Glo sim card, you do not need to do another biometrics, you simply give them the MVN, and they will sell you a sim card linking the phone number to the biometrics MTN had maintained.
Magically, that will save money for all the players. Of course, that is on the assumption that the telcos do greet one another. The way we do competition in Nigeria takes away any element of cooperation. That is unfortunate. We simply destroy our margins through unnecessary waste of resources. Only the banks have figured out how to build industries and ecosystems.
What is happening in telcos is happening in Immigration, Drivers License Office and clusters of entities across Nigeria where they continue to capture biometrics. I do think that Nigeria may need to redesign the Acts that govern NITDA (National Information Technology Development Agency) and NIMC (National Identity Management Commission) to deal with many pressing issues on technology and data management. If we collapse them as one, we can have an Office of Chief Information Officer, for Federal Republic of Nigeria; call it National Chief Information Officer (NCIO). The present Director-General of NIMC can assume that office as NIMC has more roles in the consolidation of the disparate databases in Nigeria, and certainly more strategic than NITDA.
Adapting from a similar role in U.S., the CIO will be the administrator of the electronic government evolution in Nigeria. The position will be appointed by the President and will oversee national technology spending, federal IT policy, and strategic planning of all national IT investments. The NCIO will be charged with establishing a government-wide enterprise architecture that ensures system interoperability, information sharing, as well as maintain effective information security and privacy controls across the Federal Government.
Besides, the incumbent will make sure that the Nigerian government buys software license as one entity instead of disparate ways government agencies acquire them today. So, instead of each ministry and agency wasting money on direct purchases of software licenses, Federal Republic of Nigeria can acquire the licenses, and then share (adding more user base where necessary) with MDAs (ministries, departments and agencies). That is one way of saving cost which the Ministry of Finance has not considered. There are many other ways, if only the nation sees the big picture.
If Data is the new oil, Nigeria needs to be prepared for that data future. Yes, we cannot use the structure for the “old oil” for the “new oil”.
