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Local Content Plan will Boost Domestic OEMs – Onawola

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Bolarinwa Onawola, is chief operating officer, Brian Integrated Systems Limited, a 100% owned Nigerian company with a factory for the assemblage of high quality and reliable its branded desktops, laptops, netbooks and classmate computers.
It recently launched a Windows Tablet in partnership with Intel & Microsoft.
Onawola spoke to peter ugwu on Brian’s plan for mobile devices market, among other industry issues. 

OEMs in Nigeria
The main thing is that Nigerians are still after foreign brands, not minding that there are competitive brands developed locally by Nigerians.
That has been an undoing to the original equipment manufacturers. We should consider the fact that before those brands enter our markets; they usually look at their own market.
But we are not deterred by that. We are rolling out and it is our believe that the local content drive of the Ministry of Communication Technology, the policies, programmes and deliberate actions been taken will help push locally made IT equipment into the market.

OEMs and Low Standard Products
Nigerians should know that gone are the days any company would want to gamble with its fortunes. Recently, I was in a conference organized by the Standard Organization of Nigeria (SON), we were discussing issues relating to standards and how the gap can be bridged.
With what SON said, I think they are working towards ridding the market of fake standards. As a company you wouldn’t want to be caught napping; meeting the standard is a must, if you want to sustain your business in the contemporary business world.
SON was at our lab few days ago, to assess our products and processes and we got top rating for it. No doubt, there are still some sub-standard good in Nigeria, but the level such good penetration in the market is being checkmate.

Local Manufacturing
Presently, we assemble computer products. However, we are working towards building a world class factory in a short period, where we can manufacture the computer components in Nigeria.
 It will take the market by surprise; although there are others who could boost of that already, but we are looking at a plant that will drive employment generation in the country, and add value to the country’s economy too.
There are challenges why companies actually delay in setting up plants in the country. The issue of power is still there, multiple taxations, but what we are thinking is that partnership is a good idea for businesses to grow, however, for the countries that produce these products, how did they get started.
They started from somewhere; basically from research and development. We need to put more resources and drives towards research and development.
A wealthy country is not the one that consumes, rather the one that produces. In the case of Brian, that is what we intend to achieve. We want to produce locally, for us and others. Our drive is to start in Nigeria and take such Nigerian brand to other parts of Africa. For us to do that, we need to invest heavily in research. We have mentors we need to follow for guidance.

R&D in Nigeria
Let me start by reminding us that oil and gas market is pass through a phase that it might not rise to compete with IT on the global market.
How do I mean, IT now provides the currency for any nation to measure in the global competitive market. To diversify our economy means infusing IT into the facets of the economy. Unfortunately, we are not doing enough as regards R&D.
We are not there yet. Until we realize that no country succeeds consuming, we will not get there. It might be capital intensive, but we need to put in the capital now. Today is the right time to invest on developing the R &D for the sake of the future generation.

Software Industry
India today has not drip of oil, but the Software market is worth over $70 billion per annum. We need to wake up to the fact that the IT industry is a big industry. I see it as becoming bigger than the oil and gas, both in the global and local scenes.
While oil is dwindling, IT is just increasing. Of course, in the early 20th Century, you didn’t get to hear about students in the Universities studying building applications, but now they do. It is a step in the right direction, but all we need to do is that, not just the government, rather collective measures to encourage the youths.
We need specialized courses tailored into developing apps. Recently, I was in a commercial bus and besides me was a lady. Before she boarded, as the bus was approaching the bus stop she was penning something down. When she joined us, she continued. That got me thinking; I was able to understand that she was putting pen on paper regarding an application the team was working on; the processes to develop the apps. That tells you the resilience of an average Nigerian youth.
People are beginning to tap into that area of ICT sector. All we need to do as a nation is to encourage them. We have the human resources to achieve whatever we want to achieve in the sector.
We need to start experimenting theories we have heard all these years. It is unacceptable that a Computer Science graduate he might not know the rudiments of Computer Science. I think our school curriculum should be reviewed to the school curriculum to catch the youths at their prime age and tailor their minds to the happenings in the ecosystem.

Why Brian Tablet?
We wanted a device that is portable and everybody can recognize and go along with; a device that will give user comfort even while in office, because it suites their work.
Through that, it makes increases the productivity level of the users. It also enables people to play due to the fact it has a combination of work and pleasure. These happen even on the go.

Differentiating Brian Tab from Others
Apart from the fact that it supports users to be productive, there are salient features in it. The RAM is 2GB, the memory size is 32GB and expandable to 64GBs.
It comes with Bluetooth, keyboard, that makes the operating very easy. You might want to detach it or use it together with the magnetic keyboard and it stands.
With the HDMI, you do not need to move about with your projector. The tab is built that you can have a seamless presentation with it. All you need to do is connect the HDMI cord to an enabled HDMI television or device and it comes live.
Another salient feature we considered will building the tablet, we thought people will have the need to print any document developed or downloaded into the device, without necessarily transferring it to anywhere such as flash drive.
We were able to achieve that, you can be able to print from any printer through the device. We made provision for a port and the connecting cable; anything that has USB port will work perfectly with it.

Market Penetration Drives
Since Nigeria is our home, for now, we need to start from here. But I can tell you that we are looking beyond the shores of the country.
We are studying the African markets and will penetrate those markets as the needs rise. By then, we have seen the good news and how it works.
At the moment, we are not relenting in making sure it becomes a well known brand and device. And I can confirm to you that there is no part of the country we are not gaining ground. We are moving from both in the corporate, industry; penetrating educational institutions too.

Partnership with Intel & Microsoft
What we wanted is a sector that is IT driven. We are moving into schools to register our strong presence, because the educational institutions are working towards IT compatibility.
To achieve that, we need giants in the industry to work with. Intel and Microsoft are global brands that are relevant to what we are doing based on their operational principles.
So, we do not want the teachers be left out, because this is a generation where students are getting smarter due to the obvious reasons of availability of smart devices that are internet enabled.

E-Learning Pack
That is one of the peculiarities we are pursuing, e-learning. We have a locally tailored application called C-fox that can be used by teachers and students alike. It has recommended courses which makes it easier for users to teach or learn. 

Brian Initiatives in The Market
We started from the desktops to laptops and then now to Windows tablet. The name Brian is a known brand, because we started from the days of old with our branded laptops, desktops and we are following the dynamics of the market.
Now, everybody is going micro; they want something small they can go along with, not necessarily to large that they need to drop it somewhere to operate. That has impacted our current line of products. And we are looking at the peculiarities of this environment. For instance, the Windows Tablet, the battery life is eight hours.
Power is still an issue in our environment, and here is a device that you can be able to use when you want to use it. So, we have positioned the battery lifespan to last longer; you can work, go on break, and resume, with the device being there for you.

 


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EAIF Commits Additional US$30M to Support Indorama’s Expansion with Third Urea Plant in Nigeria

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The Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund (EAIF), a Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) company, has committed a US$30 million senior debt facility to Indorama, a leading producer and exporter of fertiliser.

The investment enables the construction of a new plant, port terminal, handling stations, and storage facilities in Nigeria, providing a major boost for the country’s agricultural sector, which is a crucial driver of the country and region’s economic growth.

EAIF acted as a co-lender within a broader debt financing package arranged by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), mobilising US$1.25 billion from a syndicate of impact investors, development finance solutions, and commercial banks.

EAIF’s investment increases the Fund’s lending to the company to $111 million, reflecting a joint-ambition to accelerate Indorama’s growth strategy and Nigeria’s aspirations for diversification and industrialisation.

The new funding unlocks fresh capital to enable the construction of a dedicated port terminal and state-of-the-art urea fertiliser plant, anticipating an increase in its current capacity from 2.8 million metric tons to 4.2 million metric tons per annum.

The expansion leverages the company’s strategic location as a freight-competitive supplier serving the needs of significant urea markets in the southern Atlantic, including Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as West Africa, South Africa and the USA.

The facility bolsters Indorama’s capacity, extending its complex beyond the current two urea fertiliser plants, which is well poised to meet the entire demand of the Nigerian market.

The third urea plant aims to maximise output to meet the food demands of growing populations as disruptions precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis affect food security around the globe.

Global crop production is reliant on the international supply of fertiliser. The landmark project is expected to position Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, as a leading producer of urea among the top 10 producers worldwide.

Contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 9 on Decent Work and Economic Growth, and Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure, EAIF’s loan forms part of the Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) objective for new infrastructure to drive action on climate and nature.

The construction of the port terminal and third plant is set to begin in 2024, with commercial operations expected to commence in 2026. During the construction phase, it is estimated that over 500 jobs will be generated, further contributing to economic development in Nigeria and beyond.

Commenting on the transaction, Olivia Carballo, Managing Director, Emerging Market, Fixed Income at Ninety One, the fund manager of the EAIF, said: “Our continued support for Indorama demonstrates EAIF’s commitment to harnessing the region’s significant economic prospects.

Africa’s potential for industrialisation is tremendous, and this landmark project is a testament to Nigeria’s enhanced ability to produce and export competitively priced, high-quality fertiliser to farmers in regional and international markets, which will remain a priority for years to come.”

Munish Jindal, CEO, Indorama, said: “Indorama will utilise state-of-the-art technology and adhere to stringent environmental standards to ensure optimal efficiency, product quality and sustainability.

We believe that the establishment of this fertiliser will position Nigeria as a key player in the global agricultural market. We are committed to maximising the potential of this project to benefit farmers, communities, and stakeholders across the value chain.

The involvement of esteemed lenders like the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund will not only help Nigeria’s in becoming one of the largest exporter of the fertilisers in the region but will also address the issues of global food security. We extend our sincere appreciation to all our partners, lenders, and stakeholders for their unwavering support and dedication to our shared vision.”

Sérgio Pimenta, IFC Vice President for Africa, said: “Reliable access to high quality fertiliser is essential for food production and food security around the world. IFC’s investment in Indorama, along with African, Asian, European, and American partners, signals our joint commitment to support the agriculture sector, Nigeria’s economy, and the expansion of Indorama, an important supplier in the global food chain.”


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Lifi.net Achieves 500mbps Speed to Rank among Fastest Internet Providers in Nigeria

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Lifi.net, a fast-growing internet service provider, has attained internet speed that is many times faster than the documented average internet speed in Nigeria as at January 2024.

Lifi.net Image

Latest disclosure by LIfi.net shows that the company now delivers up to 500 megabits per seconds (mbps) internet speed in unlimited services provided to homes and offices. This is higher than the country’s average internet speed of 26.74mbps.

As internet subscriber base increases in Nigeria and hit 161.68 million in January, the quality of internet service provided by operators to their users still constitutes concerns as 2G network which has limited speed dominates the space by covering 57.78%.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) revealed through its latest data that while 3G is responsible for 9.36% of internet users in the country, 4G covers 31.75% of internet access and 5G internet only serves 1.11% of internet users in the country.

This combination explains why Nigeria ranked 93rd on the global mobile internet speed test out of 144 countries tested by Ookla, a U.S-based internet speed analysis firm, in January, putting the country’s median internet speed at 26.74 megabits per second (mbps).

However, Lifi.net (NT/007/22), a licensee of NCC, is among few Internet service providers (ISPs) that deliver fastest internet speed in Nigeria with up 350mbps for homes and 2500mbps for offices while assisting new ISPs with speeds over 5000mbps at the data centre and delivering the capacity to their various hubs at no extra cost.

“For over five years Lifi.net has been a leading network company, providing quality internet solutions at the speed of light and at affordable rates. We have highly technical and hard-working personnel and partners. We are very skilled at managing Cisco and Mikrotik Routers’ deployment, configurations, and integrations, fibre laying, and splicing,” says Abraham Oluwambe, Chief Operating Officer of Lifi.net.

He added that as operators attract more subscribers to their respective networks, they should equally place a premium on upgrading the quality of services to deliver broadband at the fastest internet speed possible.

“Our services are not only widespread but also affordable. We believe in making quality connectivity accessible to all. We understand the importance of budget-friendly solutions. Our cost-effective broadband plans ensure you get the best value for your investment without compromising on quality.

“While providing high-speed and reliable broadband connectivity, operators may choose the floor or the peak performance of its service. At Lifi.net, we always go for the latter,” he said.


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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