Nipate
Forum => Kenya Discussion => Topic started by: RV Pundit on October 24, 2019, 04:23:57 PM
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https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/news/Former-EABL-finance-director-tapped-as-new-Safaricom/539546-5323584-eeit6iz/index.html
Solid choice. Peter Ndegwa, the former managing director of Guinness Nigeria Breweries Plc, has been named the new head of Diageo's operations in Europe to become the first African to hold this position. Ndegwa took over this position in July and he has been working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
(https://scontent.fnbo2-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/73251698_2504392613151439_3998767002440171520_n.jpg?_nc_cat=104&_nc_oc=AQmnyy3DogimBmlpXFodQE4g6QlQVBVGBJTuRBv4SMvOVl5remOsjuUF8jVjDojS1dw&_nc_ht=scontent.fnbo2-1.fna&oh=add2a7f820e9fc774b61f5126cd1d33c&oe=5E656A9A)
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Interesting profile. time will tell.
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Absolutely.... a solid pick! Wishing him all the best.
I hope he will bring about some transformative and disruptive new change at Safaricom. Only earlier yesterday we were saying that their is none amongst the senior management who could take this office. Mulinge would have been a woeful pick.
Peter was credited with disruption at EABL sales & distribution line of business, hope he brings new ideas at Safcom and thinks outside the box. Time to build and scale new innovations ala what Robina suggested. He needs to have a radical mind.
Time to also debunk the notion that there are no Kenyans who can run (a successful) business like Safcom.
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Pragmatic that's lotsa hope i see. Selling Tusker is hardly props for running tech. A Pepsi guru once attempted and presumably with catastrophic failure settled the matter. It is my take that this man Ndegwa is more doomed than endowed.
Time will tell.
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Safaricom is not a tech company - it's more a telecom company like AT&T or Vodafone- and I think if Ndegwa concentrates on the core business he will just be fine - and so will the company. Voice is going down - data and m-pesa are going to be their salvation - and nicking Ethiopia would be the holy-grail. Now that they are not being shackled by Vodafone - Safaricom should try to expand to countries like South Sudan, Somalia and name them - using M-PESA are their launching pad. They have cash - and are paid handsome dividend - that money can be invested in snapping companies and regional expansion.
Pragmatic that's lotsa hope i see. Selling Tusker is hardly props for running tech. A Pepsi guru once attempted and presumably with catastrophic failure settled the matter. It is my take that this man Ndegwa is more doomed than endowed.
Time will tell.
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I am inclined to allow this guy some serious creds. He is enormously credible. I also know his capabilities and credentials first hand. He is better than MJ if I may venture to say. He will listen to venture outside their comfort zone. He isn’t a techie, yes, but it doesn’t mean he won’t look yonder.
The Pepsi man went on a vendetta mission and lost the plot. He was on a “whose d... is bigger than the other’s” and lost track of the business altogether.
Pragmatic that's lotsa hope i see. Selling Tusker is hardly props for running tech. A Pepsi guru once attempted and presumably with catastrophic failure settled the matter. It is my take that this man Ndegwa is more doomed than endowed.
Time will tell.
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The story of John Sculley is a very big history that should not be underconsidered. He was a master salesman - milked the billions out of Jobs and Wozniak's inventions. When there was nothing else to hawk - and reserves nosedived - he proposed to split the company. He was sacked 10 years late - almost ran the company into the dustbin. Jobs had to return to fix the mess. MJ is exactly a Jobs. Bob was enough Sculley - no need for another. You are wrong my friend.
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Pundit, we don't anymore have telco business in the strict sense... disruption is shaping up that industry and certain strategies wont work anymore. Premium Content and Cross Industry Alliances, Mergers and Acquisitions are the new normal. The AT&T and Vodafone that you quote are now unified businesses and are looking for consolidation up the value chain to survive. Content is king and if you don't control content you will be history. Robina has been telling this.... that is how Google has shaped up with Alphabet and Facebook has done similar to control the content value chain as well as dominate the space. You know who owns, whatsapp, youtube, vimeo etc.... You will see a huge drive at revenue optimization, optimization with no compromise; decreasing margins mean rationalization of operational cost. Digitization in customer support for improved efficiency, IOT, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (Robotics, Chatbots) etc. These and 5G are the trends that are shaping the industry.
Safcom wont go to South Sudan, or Somalia there is no value in going to a market where conditions are not favorable and Safcom can't compete in that kind of market. In Kenya, it has benefited immensely from state capture and a relatively easy environment. It has had an easy ride. Ethiopia would be good for them if they can get in, but they will need some bit of helping to get ahead. A bit of what they got here....buying into Ethiotel (state telco) and benefiting from some state protection otherwise if they were to go for an independent license and build from scratch, they won't hack it.
Let us be honest buying into Ethiotel or building a new network would require deep pockets. Safcom doesn't have that money and will require a big brother (Vodacom or Vodafone) to stand by it and syndicate some big greens. A couple of billion dollars for a 49% stake. Ethiopia remains one of the biggest market available globally for a new wave of investment. It is going to be competed for aggressively.
Telco operators are now mostly looking to "rent" the infrastructure that they operate on. This gives them flexibility to do other things and be innovative from a technological view. So today you have new providers who offer purely infrastructure co-location e.g. cell towers, fiber infrastructure, data centres, satellite infra etc... This is a new market that has opened up and some of the MNO's simply ceded/sold off their tower infrastructure to independent service providers and used that money on other ventures and emerging unique offerings. Soon we will also see the re-emergence of VNO's (virtual network operators) who own no infrastructure at all and concentrate on only some niche offerings e.g. mobile money (with voice as a freeby!) piggy-backing on someone else's infra...
So, in short, if you were the one advising Safcom and insisting to them that they are a telecom company....they will be receiving very bad advice! There is no demarcation between a tech company, a telecom company and a consolidated business with different lines of business!
Safaricom is not a tech company - it's more a telecom company like AT&T or Vodafone- and I think if Ndegwa concentrates on the core business he will just be fine - and so will the company. Voice is going down - data and m-pesa are going to be their salvation - and nicking Ethiopia would be the holy-grail. Now that they are not being shackled by Vodafone - Safaricom should try to expand to countries like South Sudan, Somalia and name them - using M-PESA are their launching pad. They have cash - and are paid handsome dividend - that money can be invested in snapping companies and regional expansion.
-
Time will tell... Let us watch his early moves. If he simply slides into the job and takes a business as usual default setting, then we will know you were right on the money!
The story of John Sculley is a very big history that should not be underconsidered. He was a master salesman - milked the billions out of Jobs and Wozniak's inventions. When there was nothing else to hawk - and reserves nosedived - he proposed to split the company. He was sacked 10 years late - almost ran the company into the dustbin. Jobs had to return to fix the mess. MJ is exactly a Jobs. Bob was enough Sculley - no need for another. You are wrong my friend.
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That is the box they need to escape. It is a chasm. Besides that there are BIG hitec gaps in Africa - you can hardly scale, disrupt or innovate anything without technology. That's why Huawei is a permanent fixture in their board minutes. Safcom strategy docs are punctuated by Huawei this, IBM there, Oracle that. It seems to me tech is core. It is regarded as a regional leader in ICT for Pete's sake.
Safaricom is not a tech company - it's more a telecom company like AT&T or Vodafone- and I think if Ndegwa concentrates on the core business he will just be fine - and so will the company. Voice is going down - data and m-pesa are going to be their salvation - and nicking Ethiopia would be the holy-grail. Now that they are not being shackled by Vodafone - Safaricom should try to expand to countries like South Sudan, Somalia and name them - using M-PESA are their launching pad. They have cash - and are paid handsome dividend - that money can be invested in snapping companies and regional expansion.
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I am not sure why you imagine Safaricom ought to do what Google or Facebook are doing. Those are bigger giants than Safaricom working the developed market. Safaricom apart from doing the telcom business have a good side business in M-Pesa - they need to milk that. You say they don't innovate - but look at Fuliza - in 3 months they had loaned out 100B kshs. Look at say DigiFarm - they are starting to get there.
Anyway my view is safaricom should become the infrastructure company - for telecom (5g), data(fiber) and financial services (expand M-PESA and eventually replace cash - they have scratched the surface here) - if they keep at this - I see them become 100B dollar company soon. Once money transition from cash to digital - safaricom will be assured of small bite in huge transactions volumes.
They need to nick Ethiopia - as top priority - merge with state telcom and concentrate on M-PESA there. I think Ndegwa Sucess will hinge on getting Ethiopia.
Pundit, we don't anymore have telco business in the strict sense... disruption is shaping up that industry and certain strategies wont work anymore. Premium Content and Cross Industry Alliances, Mergers and Acquisitions are the new normal. The AT&T and Vodafone that you quote are now unified businesses and are looking for consolidation up the value chain to survive. Content is king and if you don't control content you will be history. Robina has been telling this.... that is how Google has shaped up with Alphabet and Facebook has done similar to control the content value chain as well as dominate the space. You know who owns, whatsapp, youtube, vimeo etc.... You will see a huge drive at revenue optimization, optimization with no compromise; decreasing margins mean rationalization of operational cost. Digitization in customer support for improved efficiency, IOT, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (Robotics, Chatbots) etc. These and 5G are the trends that are shaping the industry.
Safcom wont go to South Sudan, or Somalia there is no value in going to a market where conditions are not favorable and Safcom can't compete in that kind of market. In Kenya, it has benefited immensely from state capture and a relatively easy environment. It has had an easy ride. Ethiopia would be good for them if they can get in, but they will need some bit of helping to get ahead. A bit of what they got here....buying into Ethiotel (state telco) and benefiting from some state protection otherwise if they were to go for an independent license and build from scratch, they won't hack it.
Let us be honest buying into Ethiotel or building a new network would require deep pockets. Safcom doesn't have that money and will require a big brother (Vodacom or Vodafone) to stand by it and syndicate some big greens. A couple of billion dollars for a 49% stake. Ethiopia remains one of the biggest market available globally for a new wave of investment. It is going to be competed for aggressively.
Telco operators are now mostly looking to "rent" the infrastructure that they operate on. This gives them flexibility to do other things and be innovative from a technological view. So today you have new providers who offer purely infrastructure co-location e.g. cell towers, fiber infrastructure, data centres, satellite infra etc... This is a new market that has opened up and some of the MNO's simply ceded/sold off their tower infrastructure to independent service providers and used that money on other ventures and emerging unique offerings. Soon we will also see the re-emergence of VNO's (virtual network operators) who own no infrastructure at all and concentrate on only some niche offerings e.g. mobile money (with voice as a freeby!) piggy-backing on someone else's infra...
So, in short, if you were the one advising Safcom and insisting to them that they are a telecom company....they will be receiving very bad advice! There is no demarcation between a tech company, a telecom company and a consolidated business with different lines of business!
Safaricom is not a tech company - it's more a telecom company like AT&T or Vodafone- and I think if Ndegwa concentrates on the core business he will just be fine - and so will the company. Voice is going down - data and m-pesa are going to be their salvation - and nicking Ethiopia would be the holy-grail. Now that they are not being shackled by Vodafone - Safaricom should try to expand to countries like South Sudan, Somalia and name them - using M-PESA are their launching pad. They have cash - and are paid handsome dividend - that money can be invested in snapping companies and regional expansion.
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This is Pundit's trial and error - with bets starked against them. There is affordable tech talent - for top $$ of course - out there. Why gamble with this Tusker dude? Nothing in his profile says think big.
Time will tell... Let us watch his early moves. If he simply slides into the job and takes a business as usual default setting, then we will know you were right on the money!
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There is lots of niche tech Safcom can do especially in Africa - i can name ten top of mind - without competing with Big Tech. The Googles or Alibabas are not bothered with Africa. Expanding to Ethiopia is obvious - but not so easy - they attempted DRC, TZ, India, Afghanistan and failed.
I am not sure why you imagine Safaricom ought to do what Google or Facebook are doing. Those are bigger giants than Safaricom working the developed market. Safaricom apart from doing the telcom business have a good side business in M-Pesa - they need to milk that. You say they don't innovate - but look at Fuliza - in 3 months they had loaned out 100B kshs. Look at say DigiFarm - they are starting to get there.
Anyway my view is safaricom should become the infrastructure company - for telecom (5g), data(fiber) and financial services (expand M-PESA and eventually replace cash - they have scratched the surface here) - if they keep at this - I see them become 100B dollar company soon. Once money transition from cash to digital - safaricom will be assured of small bite in huge transactions volumes.
They need to nick Ethiopia - as top priority - merge with state telcom and concentrate on M-PESA there. I think Ndegwa Sucess will hinge on getting Ethiopia.
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What stopping those tech talent from starting out their own safaricom...like you..with all your great ideas...in Africa where you say it's easy.
This is Pundit's trial and error - with bets starked against them. There is affordable tech talent - for top $$ of course - out there. Why gamble with this Tusker dude? Nothing in his profile says think big.
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What stop them from succeeding in TZ or DRC if they can hack Ethiopia. The reverse can apply to your question. The topic is Safaricom new pick for CEO - not Robina - grand as I am. Stick to the object.
The main reason Big Tech avoid Africa - is the size of the market. 3% of GWP - global GDP. Safcom after cracking the first startup hurdle - scaling national - has the experience, mucle, cred - to go tech. We are debating the best strategy - and best man for the job.
What stopping those tech talent from starting out their own safaricom...like you..with all your great ideas...in Africa where you say it's easy.
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Safaricom has never expanded out of kenya. Vodacom and vodafone have tried to sell M-pesa outside kenya.
What stop them from succeeding in TZ or DRC of they can hack Ethiopia. The reverse can apply to your question. The topic is Safaricom new pick for CEO - not Robina - grand as I am. Stick to the object.
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Safaricom is Vodafone Kenya. MJ lead the charge of scaling global. After Safcom - when Bob took over - he was named M-Pesa gloal ambassador - to continue the growth and expansion agenda he started at Safcom.
Safaricom has never expanded out of kenya. Vodacom and vodafone have tried to sell M-pesa outside kenya.
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att
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I don’t mind taking Pundit’s default setting in this instance :D 8)!
Mind you, it may be that the ones you refer to may not have applied. He could be the best among those that applied.
Needless to add, Safcom can pay top dollar. I think in the region of $100k per month and you can state a bonus on achievement of set targets.
This is Pundit's trial and error - with bets starked against them. There is affordable tech talent - for top $$ of course - out there. Why gamble with this Tusker dude? Nothing in his profile says think big.
Time will tell... Let us watch his early moves. If he simply slides into the job and takes a business as usual default setting, then we will know you were right on the money!
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Hey, that's ok. I don't mean Safcom should not go Ethiopia or be aggressive with M-pesa, FITH, etc. I just mean software and tech are gobbling up the universe - they say "everything is technology" - and i get that wisdom. It's foolhardy to say a company renowned for mobile pay technology - the biggest INNOVATION in the region - is not a tech company. That's the shackles that has held them back not Vodafone.
Once you accept Safcom is a tech company - the heart of this matter - you will see a Tusker expat is not the best pick. He could run the Google in Alphabetic though. As an uber marketer.
I don’t mind taking Pundit’s default setting in this instance :D 8)!
Mind you, it may be that the ones you refer to may not have applied. He could be the best among those that applied.
Needless to add, Safcom can pay top dollar. I think in the region of $100k per month and you can state a bonus on achievement of set targets.
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I swear this is not a dig at ours truly :D ... i don't even like this gay geek. Bill gates sounds alot like MJ from first-hand accounts I've heard - constantly yelling the f** word n all
My First BillG Review
by JOEL SPOLSKY
...
The next day was the big BillG review.
June 30, 1992.
In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. Instead of the 11 or 12 layers of management they have today, I reported to Mike Conte who reported to Chris Graham who reported to Pete Higgins, who reported to Mike Maples, who reported to Bill. About 6 layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors with their eight layers of management or whatever it was.
In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f***-count, the better.
Bill came in.
I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being.
He had my spec in his hand.
He had my spec in his hand!
He sat down and exchanged witty banter with an executive I did not know that made no sense to me. A few people laughed.
Bill turned to me.
I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!
He had read the first page of my spec and written little notes in the margin!
Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before.
He was asking questions. I was answering them. They were pretty easy, but I can’t for the life of me remember what they were, because I couldn’t stop noticing that he was flipping through the spec…
He was flipping through the spec! [Calm down, what are you a little girl?]
… and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.
He Read The Whole Thing! [OMG SQUEEE!]
The questions got harder and more detailed.
They seemed a little bit random. By now I was used to thinking of Bill as my buddy. He’s a nice guy! He read my spec! He probably just wants to ask me a few questions about the comments in the margins! I’ll open a bug in the bug tracker for each of his comments and makes sure it gets addressed, pronto!
Finally the killer question.
“I don’t know, you guys,” Bill said, “Is anyone really looking into all the details of how to do this? Like, all those date and time functions. Excel has so many date and time functions. Is Basic going to have the same functions? Will they all work the same way?”
“Yes,” I said, “except for January and February, 1900.”
Silence.
The f*** counter and my boss exchanged astonished glances. How did I know that? January and February WHAT?
“OK. Well, good work,” said Bill. He took his marked up copy of the spec
…wait! I wanted that…
and left.
“Four,” announced the f*** counter, and everyone said, “wow, that’s the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age.” He was, you know, 36.
Later I had it explained to me. “Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before.”
“Can you imagine if John Sculley had been in that meeting?” someone asked. “‘What’s a date function?’ Sculley would have asked.”
John Sculley was the MBA-type running Apple into the ground.
It was a good point. Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.
Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.
“It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.
...
Read the whole story for a good tech laugh --
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/
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When did Safaricom turn from telecom selling airtime to software company
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:) :) i see what you did there Robina.... you have so much loathing for the Pepsi guy, you want to pop him everywhere; that was referring to Jim Manzi not John Sculley. A good read!
Let's be honest the MBA business type guys created value for these companies. John Sculley was brought in to steady Apple which was bankrupt at that point; Steve Jobs at this point was up shit creek, didn't know what to do to rescue the business. The Sculley types simply over stayed their welcome and forgot about innovation once the turn-around had happened. They should have gone back to basics of what the business was about, moved on or listened a little more to the techies. But they grew big egos!
Mind you also that Steve Jobs wasn't really a techie but rather a calligrapher. He turned his passion into billions.
The tragedy is that Safcom will not transform unless it has some real competition at its doorstep and is shaken and woken from its complacency. The various players in the Fintech space need to create a competing app platform/ecosystem that competes with Mpesa for similar services and nibble away at its market dominance. Then they will jolted from their reverie. For now, they will continue on auto-pilot, after all they are minting billions (for now) and in huge margins unheard off in any of the other Vodafone subsidiaries across the world.
Quite frankly, a techie CEO for Safcom would only make sense if you create a holding entity and assign techie managers (domain experts) to the various business units while the holding company looks at the business side of the whole and ensures that the various entities/units are delivering on revenue and bottom line targets. Until such time, you will need a business guy at the helm who ensures that his various unit leaders have competence in the assigned responsibilities. IS the Board/Vodacom/Vodafone interested in making Safcom the predominant technology (yes Pundit, technology, not telecom) behemoth in Africa outside South Africa?? Would they? I doubt they have even imagined this leave alone entertained the thought!
I swear this is not a dig at ours truly :D ... i don't even like this gay geek. Bill gates sounds alot like MJ from first-hand accounts I've heard - constantly yelling the f** word n all
My First BillG Review
by JOEL SPOLSKY
...
The next day was the big BillG review.
June 30, 1992.
In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. Instead of the 11 or 12 layers of management they have today, I reported to Mike Conte who reported to Chris Graham who reported to Pete Higgins, who reported to Mike Maples, who reported to Bill. About 6 layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors with their eight layers of management or whatever it was.
In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f***-count, the better.
Bill came in.
I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being.
He had my spec in his hand.
He had my spec in his hand!
He sat down and exchanged witty banter with an executive I did not know that made no sense to me. A few people laughed.
Bill turned to me.
I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!
He had read the first page of my spec and written little notes in the margin!
Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before.
He was asking questions. I was answering them. They were pretty easy, but I can’t for the life of me remember what they were, because I couldn’t stop noticing that he was flipping through the spec…
He was flipping through the spec! [Calm down, what are you a little girl?]
… and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.
He Read The Whole Thing! [OMG SQUEEE!]
The questions got harder and more detailed.
They seemed a little bit random. By now I was used to thinking of Bill as my buddy. He’s a nice guy! He read my spec! He probably just wants to ask me a few questions about the comments in the margins! I’ll open a bug in the bug tracker for each of his comments and makes sure it gets addressed, pronto!
Finally the killer question.
“I don’t know, you guys,” Bill said, “Is anyone really looking into all the details of how to do this? Like, all those date and time functions. Excel has so many date and time functions. Is Basic going to have the same functions? Will they all work the same way?”
“Yes,” I said, “except for January and February, 1900.”
Silence.
The f*** counter and my boss exchanged astonished glances. How did I know that? January and February WHAT?
“OK. Well, good work,” said Bill. He took his marked up copy of the spec
…wait! I wanted that…
and left.
“Four,” announced the f*** counter, and everyone said, “wow, that’s the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age.” He was, you know, 36.
Later I had it explained to me. “Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before.”
“Can you imagine if John Sculley had been in that meeting?” someone asked. “‘What’s a date function?’ Sculley would have asked.”
John Sculley was the MBA-type running Apple into the ground.
It was a good point. Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.
Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.
“It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.
...
Read the whole story for a good tech laugh --
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/
-
It called analogy
When did Safaricom turn from telecom selling airtime to software company
-
Good. At least you don't punch above your paygrade like ours truly. I don't personally "loathe" Sculley or Collymore or Ndegwa - anymore than I loathe Uhuru. Pepsi dude did it long before my arrival on the scene. It's an impersonal assessment. I think Collymore was Sculley enough - he milked the bejesus outa M-pesa - another sales and PR guy is overstretching. There were ZERO innovations during Collymore tenure - unless you consider tariffs, bundles and predatory shylock as innovation. That's why only 12 yo M-pesa is ripe to scale to Ethiopia :( - nothing worth mentioning in that preceding window.
Very true what you say about Safcom - they will be complacent until shaken. Hopefully not by a fatal blow. Mucheru and CA - if they broke them up or declared a monopoly - would be friendly fire that can save them. Ideally as you suggest they could go Alphabet and let Tusker guy run M-pesa - while the startups attempt meaningful things - but that's a big IF am afraid. No hope of local disruption either - what with Pundit types all over the place. :) Safcom will not survive Big Tech or real competition in the current state.
I hope we will not be here to grace the funeral.
:) :) i see what you did there Robina.... you have so much loathing for the Pepsi guy, you want to pop him everywhere; that was referring to Jim Manzi not John Sculley. A good read!
Let's be honest the MBA business type guys created value for these companies. John Sculley was brought in to steady Apple which was bankrupt at that point; Steve Jobs at this point was up shit creek, didn't know what to do to rescue the business. The Sculley types simply over stayed their welcome and forgot about innovation once the turn-around had happened. They should have gone back to basics of what the business was about, moved on or listened a little more to the techies. But they grew big egos!
Mind you also that Steve Jobs wasn't really a techie but rather a calligrapher. He turned his passion into billions.
The tragedy is that Safcom will not transform unless it has some real competition at its doorstep and is shaken and woken from its complacency. The various players in the Fintech space need to create a competing app platform/ecosystem that competes with Mpesa for similar services and nibble away at its market dominance. Then they will jolted from their reverie. For now, they will continue on auto-pilot, after all they are minting billions (for now) and in huge margins unheard off in any of the other Vodafone subsidiaries across the world.
Quite frankly, a techie CEO for Safcom would only make sense if you create a holding entity and assign techie managers (domain experts) to the various business units while the holding company looks at the business side of the whole and ensures that the various entities/units are delivering on revenue and bottom line targets. Until such time, you will need a business guy at the helm who ensures that his various unit leaders have competence in the assigned responsibilities. IS the Board/Vodacom/Vodafone interested in making Safcom the predominant technology (yes Pundit, technology, not telecom) behemoth in Africa outside South Africa?? Would they? I doubt they have even imagined this leave alone entertained the thought!
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Wish Peter Ndegwa the best at Safaricom. He has a tall order there. :) :) :)
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Such a dwarf but he has exceeded expectations
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He is a small guy. I thought leadership is a reserve for tall guys
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Safcom says they prefer either their own greenfield license or jv with Ethiotel (as if there was any other choice), meaning they haven't quite decided how they want to proceed! If they dilly dally like this, they will miss out altogether. This is going to be very keenly competed for.
The price tag of $1b for the license fee sounds about half what the offers will be. Meantime, they will need to pump in quite a tidy sum for the infrastructure to achieve Ethiotel coverage; MJ is being a bit economical with the truth.
Ethiopia network outside Addis isn't much to talk about, just as "expansive" as it was for Safcom when they started rolling out. Patches of coverage in the main towns and sparse in-between. Infrastructure build-out is going to be bigger in scale than it was in Kenya. I would suggest tie-up with Ethiotel... that is what will give it the advantages it has had here in Kenya including state-capture to roll out Mpesa in Ethiopia, otherwise a fresh license won't give it the protectionism that it has enjoyed here.
See MJ's comments here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-01/safaricom-sees-1-billion-price-tag-for-ethiopian-license
Pundit, we don't anymore have telco business in the strict sense... disruption is shaping up that industry and certain strategies wont work anymore. Premium Content and Cross Industry Alliances, Mergers and Acquisitions are the new normal. The AT&T and Vodafone that you quote are now unified businesses and are looking for consolidation up the value chain to survive. Content is king and if you don't control content you will be history. Robina has been telling this.... that is how Google has shaped up with Alphabet and Facebook has done similar to control the content value chain as well as dominate the space. You know who owns, whatsapp, youtube, vimeo etc.... You will see a huge drive at revenue optimization, optimization with no compromise; decreasing margins mean rationalization of operational cost. Digitization in customer support for improved efficiency, IOT, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (Robotics, Chatbots) etc. These and 5G are the trends that are shaping the industry.
Safcom wont go to South Sudan, or Somalia there is no value in going to a market where conditions are not favorable and Safcom can't compete in that kind of market. In Kenya, it has benefited immensely from state capture and a relatively easy environment. It has had an easy ride. Ethiopia would be good for them if they can get in, but they will need some bit of helping to get ahead. A bit of what they got here....buying into Ethiotel (state telco) and benefiting from some state protection otherwise if they were to go for an independent license and build from scratch, they won't hack it.
Let us be honest buying into Ethiotel or building a new network would require deep pockets. Safcom doesn't have that money and will require a big brother (Vodacom or Vodafone) to stand by it and syndicate some big greens. A couple of billion dollars for a 49% stake. Ethiopia remains one of the biggest market available globally for a new wave of investment. It is going to be competed for aggressively.
Telco operators are now mostly looking to "rent" the infrastructure that they operate on. This gives them flexibility to do other things and be innovative from a technological view. So today you have new providers who offer purely infrastructure co-location e.g. cell towers, fiber infrastructure, data centres, satellite infra etc... This is a new market that has opened up and some of the MNO's simply ceded/sold off their tower infrastructure to independent service providers and used that money on other ventures and emerging unique offerings. Soon we will also see the re-emergence of VNO's (virtual network operators) who own no infrastructure at all and concentrate on only some niche offerings e.g. mobile money (with voice as a freeby!) piggy-backing on someone else's infra...
So, in short, if you were the one advising Safcom and insisting to them that they are a telecom company....they will be receiving very bad advice! There is no demarcation between a tech company, a telecom company and a consolidated business with different lines of business!
Safaricom is not a tech company - it's more a telecom company like AT&T or Vodafone- and I think if Ndegwa concentrates on the core business he will just be fine - and so will the company. Voice is going down - data and m-pesa are going to be their salvation - and nicking Ethiopia would be the holy-grail. Now that they are not being shackled by Vodafone - Safaricom should try to expand to countries like South Sudan, Somalia and name them - using M-PESA are their launching pad. They have cash - and are paid handsome dividend - that money can be invested in snapping companies and regional expansion.
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I still bet against the Tusker dwarf.
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Look like Vodacom & Safaricom will jointly bid..maybe Vodacom will do telecom and Safaricom the mpesa.They may have to break the bank to Wade off MTN and Orange and Vietnamese who want the Ethiopian pie also