Nicholas Okoye is the managing director of Anabel Mobile Group, a mobile platform, mobile technology and mobile device manufacturing company. He worked in the United States as a stock broker and as a financial adviser/financial consultant before relocating to Nigeria. In Nigeria, he was the head of strategy at the Nigeria Stock Exchange where he helped to redesign the strategy for mobilizing investment in Nigeria. From there, he joined the National Corporation of Nigeria Plc as operating officer and was the acting managing director of Nitel for about 2 months. Okoye later look some courses at London Business School after which he set up Anabel Mobile Group. He spoke to chike onwuegbuchi

Role of Anabel in the Nigerian Economy
Anabel is a mobile platform, mobile technology and mobile device manufacturing company. We have invested in providing solution for the citizens, government, for business to be able to take advantage of the revolution in mobile technology. We have done this in three ways, one is that we have designed and manufactured cutting edge devices which are smart devices using smart applications, and they are devices that are data enabled, which means you can connect to the internet via Wi-fi connectivity and you can share documents using the device.
The device has four levels of connectivity, one being the voice connectivity, the second one being the Bluetooth, the third one, the bing, so you can bing documents between phones in very short distance while the fourth one is the Wi-fi internet. Even if there is no GSM service, you can use the Wi-fi to make voice calls or use Wi-fi to connect to the internet and browse or share documents.
                        The fifth one is GPRS, an edge which again is provided by the networks. Those are the kind of devices that we specialize on. To really enhance the use of devices, we have realized that innovation needs to come in for Nigerian users to be able to interact with one another, and we have chosen therefore to be the market leader and the innovator in creating mobile mobility platform, so that we can bring people together for them to communicate using our platform and linking devices together on our mobility platforms. We are working with organizations, for instance, an organization might choose to link all its files together on one platform. People can chat among themselves, communicate, share documents and instant message each other, working within an environment, so that becomes closed Virtual Private Network. Those are the kind of network and platform Anabel specializes on and we have provided that as our niche in the Nigerian economy. In addition to that, we are able to support companies, institutions with mobility campaigns for a company that might choose to run a campaign for its customers. For instance, a bank or a manufacturing firm selling sweet, rice, noodles and what have you, wants to reach its customers directly, and do not want to put an advert in the newspaper or on radio or TV, they can come to us and we create a mobility campaign which goes directly to customers using our mobility platforms. That is an area that is very exciting; we are doing it for political parties, companies and so on. We also allow for mobile cameras, we are building mobile cameras platforms and getting groups in different parts of the country to come together under our mobile cameras initiative to interact and do business. Those are the areas where we have created a niche and those are the places we believe we will enhance and serve the Nigerian economy.
Does the Application Require Specialized Handsets?
A lot of them require our specialized handsets. However, we have developed the application to also work on Nokia Symbian, which is Nokia’s operating system. We have also developed it to work on Google’s Android and it is not going to be exclusive. However, because we are a technology company, we are saying we can develop for other devices as well, so if you want to buy the software, we can sell that and if you want the software with the device, we can provide that as well.
Relationship with Anabel USA
We first started in the United States of America. I still have a team of designers and innovators in the US supporting whatever innovation we are doing here in Nigeria, but we felt that we must start business in Nigeria as the mobile world is changing very fast. I felt there is need to bring those innovations to Nigeria and through Nigeria penetrate into the rest of Africa before we take on markets in the US and UK. Again, it is still our company, based in Washington DC. But, we have chosen to come here first, rough it out, get learning experience in Nigeria, help Nigeria to tap to the rest of the world as far as mobile innovation, mobile applications are concerned and then we will be able to take that and branch out to the rest of Africa and hopefully the rest of the world.
Anabel Entertainment
The search for princess Anabel is a reality show/ beauty pageant which we expect to come up at the end of the year to the first quarter of next year. It is expected to choose a beautiful princess who will come out from Nigeria. We will go to every corners of the country to find a girl who is beautiful, enchanting, educated, intelligent, sophisticated that we can showcase to the rest of the world. The African woman and her image should be that of an intelligent, well rounded young woman who understands style, beauty, fashion and can rub shoulders with the best in the world. Once we finished with that competition, we will take her to the international community, take her on speaking tour of Europe and the United states and give her an opportunity to redefine the image of Nigerian women.
Affordability of Anabel Devices
We have a wide range of devices that are very affordable. All our devices are data enabled devices that can connect to the internet. Even as you connect to the internet, we have devices that are as low as N7, 000 to N8, 000 and are internet enabled devices and then as high as N70,000, N80, 000 and N100, 000 depending on the budget of the individual and the company. If your budget is constrained and you want a device that can connect to the internet, we give you the budget friendly device.  If you want to carry sophisticated application as if you are carrying your computer in your pocket, then you can go for the high end device which can do everything a laptop can, which means that your laptop really is in your pocket.
Support
We are extremely committed to support and services, so we have an ultra modern support centre in Lagos and Abuja and we hope to open in different parts of the country. For our software application, which we will start launching by the last quarter of this year, we will be giving a 24- hour unlimited support, which means that when we are working with you, we are working with you forever. For the hardware, we give one year warranty, from that one year period you can always come back and we can sort out whatever challenges you have. Even after that, you can still come back and you might be charged but we are continuously servicing and supporting our customers.
Coping with Operating Environment Challenges
I think the major challenge is not really getting people to change because people realize that information and communication technology is the future and Nigerians have realized that our major constraint has been infrastructure and infrastructure is coming on. You can see that MainOne has launched and I believe Glo1 will soon launch, so we are getting connected to rest of the world. A lot of bandwidth will be available in Nigeria over the next few months, so infrastructure is being addressed. Our challenge is power but a bigger part of the challenge is education. I believe very strongly that Nigerians’ problem is education not power. Power is just a part of the challenge. If we don’t have an educated workforce, an educated population, we cannot compete with the rest of the world and we will keep lagging behind. If you go and talk to the recent graduate coming out of school, they don’t know anything. It is a big challenge getting educated people, people who understand where we are going in order to take advantage of opportunities available in the market place. Nigeria’s challenge is education and if our leaders don’t address it, we are doom bound because right now, we have a poorly educated workforce, with a very poorly educated young people coming out of school. Some of them cannot write letters, some cannot speak English, this is very sad. I think as the government is declaring an emergency on power, we should also have an emergency on education. I am very passionate about that because I have seen the rot that is in the system, our young people are not well educated at all. Having said that, I believe the new economy will be driven by information and communications technology, there is no question about it. Go and check companies that have been most successful around the world, it has been companies that have geared towards information and communication technology. The richest people in the world are people who have anchored their businesses or their innovations on ICT. It is not the oil and gas merchants. Go and check the Fortune 500 and Forbes 400, you will see that most of the rich people in the world are not oil and gas people. They are people who invented software. People like Bill Gate, people like Paul Allen, People like Steve Jobs of Apple, these are the people who are running the world as far as successful entrepreneurs are concerned. The future does not lie in oil and gas, it lies in technology and that is what I think the young people should embrace, I also want to encourage parents to get their children to study mathematics, study ICT, these are courses that are going to drive the future of the world economy.
Grey Markets
We have experienced that, it is a big problem in Nigeria and I think it behooves on both the Nigeria Copyright Commission and Consumer protection agency to step up to their responsibilities. We are adhering to all the rules; we have been certified by the Nigerian Communication Commission. Our devices have been certified by the Standard Organization of Nigeria. We follow all the rules, we get all the certificates, we pay all the fees and somebody who does not do any of those will just come in and start selling at half the price and then you will think that is the price; meanwhile, you have not subjected yourself to any of the rigorous inspections, government fees and so on that those of us who have been operating legally have been subjected to. So it is very difficult to do business in an environment like that. It behooves on government to protect those of us who have chosen to follow the rules, and who have chosen to subject to the rigorous type approvals from the Nigerian Communication Commission, from the Standard Organization of Nigeria and so on that we should be protected from grey market. We believe that if you do periodic rates- let those who are selling at lower prices prove that they have been tested. Sometimes, you buy a device and it does not last you one week and is giving some of the brand names a bad name. But because of the price, consumers will buy, they are attracted by the low cost and those things will not last up to two weeks. It is better for you to pay a N100 extra and have a device that will last you five years with one year warranty than buying something N100 or N200 cheaper and it will last for a week and by the next week you will need to buy another one. We need to educate consumers but the government also has a role to play.
Vision
In the next 5 years, Anabel Group will be a dominant player in Africa, with eyes on the rest of the world. Anabel has positioned itself as a leading light in the mobile application, mobile telephone, smart devices and mobile platforms. Over the next five years, we would have created a sophisticated mobile platform across the length and breath of Nigeria in various areas of endeavours, be it health, education, commerce and business, investment and so on. We know that we would be able to enhance the lives of Nigerians with those platforms, with these innovations which we are driving the market with.