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| Muonir Boukali | credits: |
Muonir Boukali is the Public Relations Manager for Tecno in Africa. In this interview with STANLEY OPARA, he speaks on the potential of the Nigerian mobile phone market and the challenges confronting phone makers, among other issues.
What is your description of the Nigerian telecoms market compared to other markets in Africa?
From TECNO’s point of view, the Nigerian market is the biggest actually; Nigeria has the biggest population size in Africa. For us, it is one of the most important markets because we have had our presence in Nigeria for a very long time. It’s our first market in Africa, so we have done a lot of things in Nigeria already and we have more plans for the Nigerian market.
Comparing the Nigerian market to South Africa, are there differences and similarities?
Yes, there are similarities and differences. Similarities are the ones you can find in every African market. In the African market, smartphones are growing very fast; it is something new and growing fast. Before, you can find only feature phones but now people get more and more interested in smart phones. So in Nigeria the smart phone is very strong, it is growing very fast. It is one of the peculiarities of the Nigerian market. People use more smartphones, and they know how to use them really. So, our target is the smartphones market.
How do you see the Nigerian market in the next two or three years?
Actually we always make some provisions for years ahead. And for this year we have made some provisions, but the provisions we made were wrong. The market is growing faster than we expected. It’s growing very fast and the market share is very big.
Why is the feature phones segment not growing in the way that it should compared to smartphones?
This is because there is an economic revolution. Before now, smartphones were not affordable, but now it is and people understand why the smartphone is useful. Before, it was very expensive. Now smartphones are cheaper and could be integrated into people’s social life.
Would you say the Tecno brand has performed well in Nigeria?
Actually the Tecno brand has done very well because according to experts, Tecno Company is the fastest growing brand among telecoms company in Africa and the Nigerian market. So, it is growing very fast every year. And for distributors and dealers they are asking for more because they sell very well.
What plan do you have for the Nigerian market as far as products and services are concerned?
For products, we are going to launch many types of smartphones. We are going to launch high technology smartphones with high tech screens. We have plans for tablets; and we will be doing some TV screens. For services we are going to improve our after-sales-service. Now we have some good feedbacks from customers but we are going to improve on them and make them better this year and beyond.
Talking about the Nigerian market, what are those constraints you have seen?
You know the Nigerian market is growing fast and you can never know how fast it would go. So, it is hard to define what is the quantity we need for the next month, or even next year. So, this is one of the challenges.
The other challenge is that the smartphone market is new. We have to adapt and find some unique selling points to customers. We have to be close to them to know what they need. We do not want to be wrong doing this. This is another challenge we have here.
Counterfeiting of products is one common phenomenon in this market. Does this affect Tecno?
It is also affecting Tecno in many African countries. We work closely with the government to fight against counterfeits because all governments have their main target. They want to fight counterfeiting because by letting the counterfeiting products arrive in their country they lose money since people who do that do not pay taxes.
We work closely with them to fight counterfeiting. We do communicate with customers to make them understand what the counterfeited and real products look like. They can also get the information on our website.
People can also call our after sales service and ask if you have any problem. We know product counterfeiting is a big problem, but in two or three years time, it would not be a problem for Tecno because our product is going to be more secured and safe, with clear quality features.
We are already working on it. We have many security features on the phone so that people can readily guess this is a Tecno product or not. But we can always improve on this.
So far, have you been able to secure the arrest or prosecution of any kingpin or group trying to imitate your product?
We have found so many but it’s not our role to catch them. We can’t do anything actually. It’s the government’s responsibility. We can only tell customers what the right products are. One thing I must say is that such phones are dangerous to health because their makers do not respect safety. The sound could be too strong and they get hot very fast.
As per investments, what should Nigeria expect from you this year?
I can say that the Nigerian market is the main market in the whole of Africa. For sure, the biggest investment for Tecno is in Nigeria. We have invested already and next year we would invest much more – maybe two times more.
Comparing the Nigerian market to that in developed economies, can Nigeria still be termed a very big phone market?
Nigeria’s population is one of the biggest in the world. For us, the Nigerian market is important.
We are building an office close to the Computer Village in Ikeja. It will be finished by the end of this year. By this, you can understand that we want to stay here for a long time. We already have some members of staff here, are we are still creating jobs for the Nigerian people.
Any plans to build a plant in Nigeria?
We plan to have a manufacturing plant in Nigeria for next year. Like I said, we will have an office here, and a manufacturing plant for a part of the phone, so that we can have the main factory in China and Hong Kong, the research and development arm in France, and the operations in Dubai.
In Nigeria we have more people in rural areas than in the urban areas. What are your plans to reach these hinterlands?
For us, the strategy is to first get the urban areas because it is easier marketing there. We already have Lagos and many other cities. We have some local people who take care of the rural markets. We don’t concentrate now on the rural areas, but we might do so in the future. We need to see how the population is growing; but now we are concentrating in urban areas and then may be next year or a year after we would spread.
You talked about your investment in phones, tablets and TV. Aside these three lines of products, are you looking at any other technologies/products?
For Tecno, the target is phones; so, we concentrate just on phones. But we don’t want to spread too much because we have one target, which is to make the best phones we can at the best affordable price.
So, we put all our energy on the phones. For us the tablet coming is going to be like a track to see how the market reacts; if the market reaction is good, we can shift to the tablet. For us now, it is smartphones. We have all our experts in France, South of China and Dubai concentrated on smartphones. Some people are doing their research on tablets; may be in June/July we would have some tablets coming.
Source: Punch
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