Source: mobilemagworld
Speaking in an exclusive interview in Lagos, Chike Maduegbuna said a move into the Kenyan market was high on the company’s agenda and described the action as radically and totally different considering the large differences that exist between the telecoms markets in Nigeria and Kenya.
Maduegbuna also revealed their preferred partner would be Kenya’s mobile giant Safaricom.
He said: “Kenya is radically different from Nigeria from three levels. Nigeria is a very aggressively incentivised society, Kenya is an organic society. The things you start here with incentives, if you try it in Kenya, it may not work. They may rather allow you to let it grow organically.
“Secondly, they have higher Internet speed and broadband penetration than Nigeria and we want to use them to test how peoples’ response will be to some of the things we do when we have higher broadband penetration. Since we are waiting for it to happen in Nigeria, how about those who already have it? Let’s just see how it works.
“Finally, Nigeria and Ghana, and to a large extent South Africa are predominantly BlackBerry device-driven, Kenya is Android. We want to do android community and see how it responds to what we are doing. That is actually why we are focusing on Kenya.”
On the preference of Safaricom, he said the network was an obvious choice owing to its control of the nation’s largest share of the telecoms sector.
“We plan to work with Safaricom although we’ve not made contacts with them. But from the information we’ve gathered, they own 70 to 80 percent of the market share. I’ve been there twice and we figured that we may work with them. As a matter of fact, we want to treat each market separately. We just want to get there and see what it looks like,” he said.
