Nigerian Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) who featured at the BusinessDay CEO Forum on Thursday said rethinking business models based on emerging trends in customer behaviour, technology, regulation and tastes was critical in navigating the murky and increasingly volatile business terrain in Africa’s largest economy.
Nigerian businesses have been hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic-induced economic slump and are struggling to make sales to consumers who have been hard hit by rising inflation and lower purchasing power. The economy contracted by a record 6.1 percent in the second quarter of 2020, the worst in a decade and is on course for a second recession in five years when the NBS publishes GDP data next Monday.
Panellists at BusinessDay’s 2020 CEO forum, which include Esigie Aguele, co-founder and CEO at VerifyMe Nigeria, Teni Adesanya, Executive Chairman at Oxford Group Nigeria and Wole Abu, CEO of Pan African Towers, narrated how the economic challenges in Nigeria had pushed them to build new business models from scratch.
Esigie Aguele said solving the problem behind Nigeria’s credibility gap, which was delivered out of passion and opportunity, was critical in his firm’s survival.
“For us, it is more than just rethinking the business model, it is also about rethinking the technology,” Aguele said.
Aguele noted that his firm took a road less travelled in 2017 by delivering infrastructure layers for trusted identity to practice micro lending space, which definitely put the firm in a great position.
“As a result of this initiative, today, 30 percent of Nigerians banks use our services, five of the top 10 insurances firms use us for onboarding, we do about 100,000 verification a week,” Aguele said.
Rethinking the business model is critical, which was why the firm “looked at the landscape and discovered that being able to deliver a trusted identity was not just a domestic problem but also internationally across every transaction in all major sectors of the economy,” he said.
Concerning doing things differently, Teni Adesanya of Oxford Group Nigeria, said one of the main things his firm did when they entered real estate business in 2016 was filling the knowledge gap by enlightening people, which put his firm at a competitive edge above others.
He also noted that one of the most critical things for the firm was retaining good and trusted employees despite the huge investment in training.
“In early 2017, I decided to start setting up platform for anyone who graduated from the inhouse training school my making them associates and managing directors,” Adesanya said at the panel, titled “When the Shortest Distance isn’t a Straight Line: Takeaways from CEOs who reinvented their business models.”
As a result of this initiatives, Adesanya said the firm now have over 6000 associates and managing directors but still under the group company.
Wole Abu, CEO of Pan African Towers, said the one of the biggest costs his firm faced was the cost of power, which was why “we needed to find a way to solving the problem by focusing on renewable energy.
“We made a conscious decision to make sure to change all of our sources of power to renewable energy.”
The pane, moderated by BusinessDay’s CEO, Ogho Okiti, advised most CEOs to reimagined how their industry should deliver value based on developments in the competitive landscape, and new technology.
The panel also advised firms to recreate bold new futures based on sustainability concerns and stakeholder attitudes.
Recall, bike-hailing startups such as Gokada, OPay and MaxNG, have had to rethink their business models and transit to logistic business, after Lagos State government announced a restriction on their operations.
