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The digital generation
It is also not simply a matter of cost; there is now a generation of Kenyans who demand expediency over all else. “The largest newspaper [in Kenya] sells around 200,000 copies. That’s all – 200,000. They have a readership of about a million. When you look at breaking news on SMSes, they are reaching somewhere close to 6 million people. And the cost of some of those SMSes that people are receiving is twice the cost of that newspaper.”
According to Suraj Moraje, principal in the Johannesburg office of consultancy McKinsey & Co, the size of the opportunity can be illustrated with a simple example.
“If you look at the scale of content companies in the West and compare them with high-tech and telecom companies, you find that they are almost the same scale. In many cases, the media companies are bigger,” he says. “If you do the same analysis for a lot of the emerging markets, you find that the media companies today are much smaller than the high tech and telecoms companies. This is both sort of an issue and an opportunity.” The issue is that it demonstrates a lack of organisation in the media, but the opportunity is for a melding of technology and content, to the benefit of whosoever best manages the revenue model.
While talking, Mr Mucheru toys with his iPhone. The Apple handset has been credited with reinventing the mobile web in western markets. Now offered by Orange in Kenya, the device appears on billboards and pavements across Nairobi and is a visible symbol of the rapid pace of development in the country.
However, even before it was released, stories abounded of local developers who used iPhone simulators to produce applications for the global marketplace. iTunes, through which applications for the device are sold, is global and makes no distinction for where the software is created. Popularity is the metric by which they are ranked. Can these cottage industries ever expand to fill the gap between content and demand? And if they do, where are the commercial opportunities for Google and Microsoft?
“There are enough applications out there that have proven they have value at a micro scale,” Mr Moraje says. “The problem is looking for the company that can bring the scale to really make it explode. One could say that the benefits that a larger company has is that they can scale this up across countries, across continents, across languages like nobody else can.”
One potentially controversial area that both Google and Microsoft may find themselves involved in, in order to facilitate this scaling, is infrastructure.
A major block on the availability of affordable access, getting bandwidth to Africans is key to growing the markets, even if it is outside of either company’s existing comfort zones and risks putting them in competition with other members of their ecosystem. Google has already invested in a satellite project, and Mr Mucheru has experience in infrastructure from his past career at Wananchi.
Mr Diarra, too, has made the case for Microsoft’s involvement. “We would like the growth of connectivity to be flattened for Africa,” he says.
“The whole industry would benefit. It will not just be Microsoft, it will be Google, it will benefit everybody if Africa has access to technology at a relatively low price. That will free up money in Africa to buy machines, and to be able to do more with the bandwidth time that we have available, so that they will then develop the use of technology to another level, which will be beneficial to all of us.”
