climate and comms

The mobile operators have been the ‘unicorns’ of Africa for the last 20 years.    Consistently outperforming, not only their global peers, but also all other sectors in Africa – even resources.    Historically African MNO’s have enjoyed higher EBITDA margins than their developed market peers – but it seems the African mobile fairy tale is coming to an end as we approach the bewitching hour of midnight.   The nasty sisters of MTN’s Nigerian Cinderella have reared their ugly heads with the imposition of a punitive $5.2bn fine.     Like Apple, whose once unstoppable iPhone sales have started to slow, most African MNO’s   need to come up with something new and smart or risk marginalisation as demand slows.     The killer App in Africa to date has been voice – but this market is saturated now with   customers from the very bottom of the pyramid – and so voice ARPU’s have declined.    According...

I saw an article the other day headlined   “ Why saying ‘ seven of the ten fastest growing economies are in Africa ‘ carries no real meaning” [1] (By Morten Jerven writing on africanarguments.org).    Not one to be put off by such one eyed perspectives – I thought I should read it.    Always get the ‘other ‘ perspective is what   I believe and advocate,   and so I did.    What followed was a clinical analysis of GDP’s, growth rates, inflation rates and the like, indicators, so oft leant upon by economists to underpin their arguments.   Basically a dismissing of the current African economic turnaround as being statistically misleading and so on.    But all was not bad – there was a concession at the end that   ‘ the evidence does not yet readily provide us with an answer ’.   Had it been included in the title as a rider, perhaps one would have read the article with a little less disregard for the approach of the aut...

We in the southern part of the UK have started to see our Indian summer start to slowly fade as we get into this first week of October.    It has been a wonderful but disorientating week with temperatures in the high 20’s (80’s F) – and clear blue skies - I could have sworn this was Jo’burg in Summer.   All that was missing was the swimming pools ! Well I know that parts of the mid-West have also had some great weather.  Indeed in the good ol’  US of A October has become known as  National Cyber Security Awareness month.    Who would have thought ten years ago that a whole month would be ‘honoured’ with such a strange moniker.     Well I guess 10 years ago no one would have predicted that we would have become so utterly dependent on the Web – our every waking and in some instances sleeping moments have some Web connection.    E-mail, social-media,  telephony,  shopping, business, entertainment, gaming  – ju...

Google have just announced with some fanfare that they have created a mobile money eco-system.   Android users can now use their devices fitted with NFC chips to make payments at selected Points of Sale in the US.   This will only be launched on a limited scale some time in the Summer.  It is not actually ready yet. ( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/coming-soon-make-your-phone-your-wallet.html ) There is no doubt that those of us in the ‘advanced’ West will value the utility of being able to swipe our phones (which have become extensions of our very beings) when we buy coffee  - the Starbucks app has been out for a while – ( http://www.starbucks.com/coffeehouse/mobile-apps ) or when we make our day to day purchases.   It will be  ‘cool’ just as it is cool today to flash an NFC enabled credit card at an NFC enabled POS when making small value purchases. However I would argue that the utility,  of the full functionality of mobile money transa...