Nigeria @ Outskirts of $360Bn VAS Market

Nigeria is still at the outskirts of mobile value-added services (VAS), currently the most sought after services worldwide and with more than $360 billion honeypot, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek can report.

And as the global VAS market segment is catching fire, the local market is hobbled by technology access; cost; and time to market.

Lack of paid monetization for content and discovery challenges, and cost of acquiring new users have also served to worsen situation.

As a result, the local market is thought to be worth only $1billion and basically rudimentary with ringtones, SMS updates and Nollywood.

Modern VAS such as mHealth, mEducation, mFun are yet to kick off properly.

But some local companies like Rancard Solutions Limited, a provider of cloud based software for mobile content discovery and delivery focused on Africa is seeing opportunities in midst of challenges.

Ehizogie Binitie, co-founder/chief product officer at Rancard Solutions Limited, explained that though going mobile is hard, building capabilities will truly unlock the mobile opportunity.

“It is not such an uphill battle to get your ideas to market and so we are lowering barriers, we are increasing access and we are providing tools for people who have great ideas to make money from,” he explained

Binitie said: “The great thing about being in the cloud is that it costs nothing to get on board. It is absolutely at zero cost.  We do not want people who have great ideas to be limited by what they do not have. We want to take what they have and give them what they do not have. What Nigerians need to know is that they can compete globally and Rancard is one example of a company that believes this and is doing that. If you keep lowering barriers to creating great ideas, there will be higher innovations which ultimately command higher revenue.”

Rancard helps operators and content providers maximize the mobile opportunity by enabling relevant content discovery, delivery and monetization.

Since launch in 2001, Rancard has established itself as a trusted provider of cloud-based mobile software and services which Africa’s mobile operators are increasingly turning to.

As voice-based average revenue per user declines, mobile operators are increasingly using Rancard’s content discovery platform to profitably increase data revenues by delivering targeted content to their subscribers.

The company has developed a cloud-based social recommendations engine called ‘Rendezvous’, which maps connections among mobile users and then uses this mapping of shared interests as a basis for recommending content to consumers.