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Home Companies Company Profile

MainOne Cable: A decade-old journey to bridging the digital divide in West Africa

Abiola Odutola by Abiola Odutola
November 29, 2020
in Company Profile, Spotlight
MainOne Cable
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MainOne Cable Company Nigeria Limited recently celebrated 10 years in the business of bridging the digital divide in West Africa.

As the provider of the first privately owned, open access 7,000-kilometer undersea high capacity cable submarine connection in West Africa, MainOne continues to attract the interest of individuals, corporate bodies and government institutions across the continent.

READ: MainOne named Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Connectivity Provider for Nigeria

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However, MainOne was among six telecom operators recently mandated by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to submit their yearly financial statements, within 7 months after the end of their financial year.

The company, though celebrated, is not without its challenges, which its financial statements would make clearer. However as we await the submission of the statement, Nairametrics looks into MainOne in this week’s Company Profile to understand what makes it tick.

READ: Facebook is building $1 billion high speed internet across Africa

How it started

Funke Opeke returned to Nigeria in 2008, where she was faced with ridiculously poor internet connectivity, so she decided to do something about it.

She started Mainstreet Technologies, the developers of MainOne Cable in the same year, to serve as a service and network solutions provider, not only in Nigeria but in West Africa.

What is now recognized as one of Africa’s biggest cable companies started with all of Opeke’s savings as start-up capital. She encountered stiff challenges related to raising more capital to take care of the foundational works, feasibility studies, business plans, and technical plans. However, the company was able to pull through.

READ: MainOne commences construction of cable landing station in Abidjan

On April 28, 2008, Main Street Technologies awarded a turnkey supply contract for the MainOne Cable System to Tyco Telecommunications. After completing and commissioning the project, MainOne went live on July 22, 2010.

The company has since grown in leaps and bounds from its little beginnings. Its connections extend from Portugal to West Africa, with Cable Landings Stations along the route in Accra (Ghana) and later to other countries in Africa like Dakar (Senegal), Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire), and Lagos (Nigeria).

READ: Rack Centre to create West Africa’s largest data centre in $100m expansion

The Phase1 cable system spans 6,900 kilometres. Additional connectivity extending to Angola and South Africa occurred in the Phase2 of the project.

In 2015, the company started operations of MDXi, said to be Nigeria’s largest Tier III Data Center, and extended a submarine cable from Lagos to Cameroon.

READ: Facebook, MainOne romance to birth high speed internet for Ogun and Edo

Operations and unprecedented glitch

MainOne is in the business of providing telecommunication services and offers wholesale broadband services through a system of cable networks and fiber optic infrastructures.

With its services acclaimed to come at fair charges, MainOne Cable has in its clientele, telecommunication operators and providers, governments, large enterprises, and schools across 10 West African countries.

The company claims that its decision to provide its services at rates that are less than the current international bandwidth prices in the region is to encourage local content development via skills transfer of critical networking technologies and job creation, with the location of the network operational center (NOC) in Nigeria.

READ: Africa’s internet economy has the potential to reach 5.2% of the continent’s GDP by 2025 – Goggle/IFC

Main Street Technologies is also backed by influential investors such as the Africa Finance Corporation, the Pan-African Infrastructure Development Fund (PAIDF), and a couple of Nigerian banks.

In 2018, the company recorded a 74-minute glitch during a network upgrade that caused some Google global traffic to be misrouted through China. This temporary disruption attracted immediate reactions from critics, but the company assured that stringent processes had been put in place to prevent a repeat of such outage in the future. To its credit, there has been no other record of such.

READ: Nigerian passport holders have access to just 2.1% of the world’s GDP – Forbes

Financials

In an interview with Nairametrics in 2017, Opeke stated that the company was yet to attain profitability, but was making strategic investments that would pay off in the future. However, with the last publicly available statement being that of 2014, there is no way to ascertain what level of progress has been made in the last 6 years.

The 2014 financial statement was audited by KPMG Professional Services at the time when Babatunde Dada was still CFO. The report showed progressive growth in the company’s fortunes from 2011 to 2014. However, all of the company’s expenses went up, despite the various cost optimization programs implemented.

READ: N1.5trillion accumulated losses of NNPC, a serious going-concern risk – PWC, SIAO Partners

Profit before tax grew from N146.8 million in 2013 to N189.6 million in 2014, while total revenue grew from N1.1 billion in 2013 to N1.7 billion in 2014.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and other incidents also took their toll on the company’s finances. During the company’s 10 years celebration recently, Opeke pointed out that the cost of the company’s services had become slightly expensive due to power challenges and the currency volatility in the country.

However, she said that the company was working towards deploying smarter policies to further realise its vision. She also noted that the company was in the process of winding down its foreign debt obligations and increasing exposure to Naira loans, to shield itself from the impact of the fluctuating exchange rates, since its customers paid for services in naira.

READ: Tizeti, MainOne extend partnership to expand highspeed WiFi services in Africa 

Management  

A decade after its establishment, Opeke still runs MainOne Cable as the Chief Executive Officer, while Anil Verma serves as the Chief Technical Officer.

Others are:

Solanke Abimbola, Chief Finance Officer; Tinuola Ipadeola, Head of Corporate Services and Development; Gbenga Adegbiji, Chief Operations Officer MDXi; Abayomi Adebanjo, General Counsel; and Olawale Fayose, Company Secretary.

READ: 28 million merchants to be granted crypto usage on PayPal

Heading the Board of Directors is Fola Adeola as Chairman, while Dapo Oshinusi, Taiwo Okeowo, Bennedikter Molokwu, Innocent Ike, Souleymane Keita, Banji Fehintola, Sipho Makhubela, George Olaka, Sandeep Fakun, and Praveen Beeharry, are all Directors.

With this calibre of talents and seasoned professionals on its management team, the mystery shrouding its financials becomes worrisome.

READ: SAHCO acquires eco-friendly electric tractors for its ramp operations

Recognitions

The over $400 million infrastructural investments in West Africa have made noticeable impacts across the economy and earned MainOne a number of recognitions and awards.

In 2019, MainOne was awarded the Datacloud Africa Award for Excellence in Data Center (Africa) and Africa Cloud Service Provider of the Year, Nigeria Business Leadership Award for Connectivity and Data Centre Service Provider of the Year, and BoICT Award for Best Tier III Data Centre in Nigeria – MDXi.

READ: Huawei ranks No.1 in 2019 Data Center Interconnect Market Share outside of North America

Others are NTITA Telecoms Wholesale Provider of the Year (2017), Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry Award for Excellence in Broadband Infrastructure (2016), Frost & Sullivan Best Practices winner for the Nigerian Data Center Customer Value Leaderships Award (2014), Ghana Telecoms Awards: Telecom Wholesale Carrier of the Year (2013), and Nigerian Telecoms Awards: Broadband Company of the Year (2011), African Telecom Hall of fame – Best Telecoms project of the year (2010), amongst others.

READ: Elon Musk surpasses Bill Gates’ wealth, now worth $128 billion

Bottom line

Besides acting in line with the new NCC policy, the Management of MainOne will have to do something about making the financial reports available to the public. Not only will this satisfy stakeholders’ curiosity, but it will also keep interested and potential investors abreast with the progress made so far and help them determine where assistance is required.


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Tags: FeaturedMain One CablePAIDFPan-African Infrastructure Development Fund
Abiola Odutola

Abiola Odutola

For further inquiries about this article, contact: Email: abiola.odutola@nairametrics.com Twitter: @AbiolaOdutola @nairametrics

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Comments 4

  1. Paul says:
    November 29, 2020 at 4:05 pm

    Ignorance is bliss… A privately owned company is under no obligation to make its financials public. It’s a thing of choice. Only publicly listed companies are mandated to publicise Thier financials because they have public shareholders.. This writer wreaks of ignorance when it comes to financials.. Take it from an ex auditor

    Reply
  2. Anonymous says:
    November 29, 2020 at 4:15 pm

    Does Nairametrics needs to be schooled that MainOne is a private limited company and not a PLC whose financial report should be made available to the public? With this blunder, Unfortunately, I’m beginning to doubt the quality of your reportage.

    Reply
  3. Gyles says:
    November 30, 2020 at 10:17 am

    Looking for corporate news and landed on this mess. This is a very nonsensical reporting and the story is all over the place. If you want to ask for a private company financials then ask straight up instead of using a cover of trying to be congratulatory. Besides last I checked, the company wasnt publicly quoted so why the request? Niarametrics needs to focus on its own business objectives otherwise irrelevance is calling. Website is suspect already.

    Reply
  4. Ibrahim says:
    December 3, 2020 at 8:19 am

    This looks like sponsored content to arm-twist MainOne. Did Abiola really write this? The byline has changed three times…

    Reply

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