Mr. Tayo Ogundipe, co-founder of SOLO, has reiterated that the Company’s partnership with Airtel, leading telecommunications operator in Nigeria, will benefit content lovers across the country.
Ogundipe told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek in his office in Lagos that, aside the Airtel partnership, they are looking out for other means to ensure users of their devices have unlimited access to digital contents.
SOLO, a device manufacturing and end-to-end digital content company, recently joined forces with Airtel to release the SOLO S355.
The dual-core, 3.5 inch screen phone has 4GB of internal storage, 512 MB of RAM and a memory card slot expandable up to 32GB. It also has a front-facing camera and a 3 megapixel rear camera.
The SOLO S335 comes red, black and white, and has dual sim slots. One of them is locked to Airtel Nigeria, leaving the other free to use with other networks.
Like all SOLO devices, the S335 offers users access to over 20 million songs via the built-in SOLO Music platform for free.
Ogundipe told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek that, “There are ranges of areas we are looking for partnership. We are one of the few start-ups in the mobile space that has partnership with key operators. To us, operator-partnership is very critical, because their economic interest and that of SOLO is seemingly aligned.
“What we are doing in the area of content and services play off on the investment the investors have made on their 3G networks and they need to monetize the investment to have return-on-investment (RoI). To achieve that, they need to get the consumer to embrace the network, which creates way for the content providers to come in. Therefore, our strategy makes a lot of sense to the operators.
Still on the SOLO/Airtel partnership, he said, “It is 3-1/2’ product that retails not more than N9,000 with unlimited SOLO music. In fact, there are up to 20million music therein, for free. It has incredible data plan of 500MB monthly for the next 12 months. It is unbelievable. That is the kind of partnership we are talking about. Airtel is definitely one of the top players in the Nigerian telecoms space; we are leveraging that to reach the subscribers.
“That tells you something about SOLO; we are a new company, and a big Company like Airtel wants to do business with us. They believe in the bigger picture of our vision. Anybody can start doing something, but when you tie it to the interest of the partner, it does a lot better.
“There are other ones, we will be announcing soon”.
He said that they will leverage partners a lot, and will not allow the Nollywood slip from their hands in the way of content productions.