Still buffering... profits

Conference season has kicked off in Lagos! 

The big investors (there’s over $1.5 billion in assets in the room) are in town for the 21st annual African Private Equity and Venture Capital Association. 

Yesterday, a press conference was held so reporters could ask investors like Kola Aina of Venture Platform, Sola Lawson of AIIM, and Genevieve Sangudi of Alterra Capital questions. Some of the most important questions were about investing in African artificial intelligence (AI) startups and the growing role of secondaries, when investors buy and sell shares in startups from other investors. 

Kola Aina told reporters that his firm is actively investing in AI startups and using AI to pick startups. Because AI in Africa is like the internet in 1995 to Aina, his firm has been helping startups ensure they are AI-enabled to stay competitive. 

Sola Lawson, on the other hand, is exploring the opportunities that exist in providing solutions to AI’s infrastructure needs, especially computing power and data. He thinks that African countries with abundant land, cheaper power, and improving connectivity can provide data centres. 

Investors selling shares to each other can be a good thing, but when it becomes the only thing that provides exits, it becomes a bad thing for an ecosystem. According to Aina, investors are adapting to Africa’s reliance on secondaries by selling small stakes early to show liquidity and holding onto their positions to capture a bigger upside later. 

Alterra Capital has had eight exits over the last two years, returning hundreds of millions of dollars to limited partners, so it probably makes sense to listen to Sangudi’s advice. She wants investors to build companies that generate cash flow during the holding period and not just rely on a big sale at the end. 

There’s a lot more that’s happening today as the conference officially starts. Muktar Oladunmade, our reporter on the scene, will be on the ground listening and reporting on the conference for those of you not present here in Lagos. For the Lagosians, see you guys at our mixer tonight!

OmniRetail—Africa’s fastest-growing company by the Financial Times in 2024—just raised $20 million in Series A funding to fuel its expansion across Nigeria, Ghana, and Ivory Coast.

The round came with a few firsts. It was co-led by Norfund, Norway’s development finance institution (making its first-ever direct equity investment in an African startup), and Lagos-based Timon Capital. Other familiar faces like Ventures Platform, Aruwa Capital, and Goodwell Investments (via Alitheia Capital) also got in.

But the biggest surprise? Nigeria’s 64-year-old food giant, Flour Mills, joined the party too.

If you’re wondering what a legacy fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brand is doing in a tech funding round, be on the lookout for the full story on our site. (Spoiler: It actually makes a lot of sense.)

Even at first glance, the move is telling. Flour Mills isn’t just betting on returns, it’s getting closer to the future of distribution.

In emerging markets, distribution is king. Manufacturing consumer goods is only half the battle; getting products into small stores, kiosks, and rural shops at scale is the real moat. OmniRetail already digitises and organises the chaotic, fragmented distribution network that companies like Flour Mills have struggled to manage for decades.

By investing, Flour Mills ensures it has early influence, maybe even preferential access to a tech-enabled retail channel that could soon become the dominant path to market.

With the new cash, OmniRetail plans to grow its retailer base, push into new product categories like personal care, home care, and cold storage, and beef up Omnipay, its embedded finance arm. It’s also investing in better infrastructure, sharpening its credit underwriting tools, and strengthening its partnership game with debt providers—all while snapping up strategic acquisitions, like the 2024 deal for Traction Apps.

If you’re just catching up: OmniRetail’s B2B e-commerce play revolves around three products—Omnibiz for retailers, Mplify for distributors, and Omnipay to keep the money moving. In 2023, the company processed $810 million in transactions and currently disburses $12 million monthly in inventory credit through Omnipay.

Profitable? Check. Shaking up Africa’s B2B e-commerce market? Check. $20 million in the bank? Big check. 

If OmniRetail had a motto right now, it’d probably be: “get ready to be sick of me.”

MTN Nigeria might not be your favourite telecom operator with its spotty service, but retail investors are not letting that bother them. They're snapping up MTN Nigeria shares, betting on a turnaround and the telco’s return to profitability by Q1 2025.

In 2024, MTN Nigeria lost ₦400 billion ($249 million) in revenue and ceded its crown as the top money-maker for its Group company. Since then, a few events have shifted the telecom operator’s fortunes: first, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the country's communications regulator, approved a 50% telecom tariff hike in January, driving up the prices of data and other services like SMS and voice calls. Second, the company is preparing a secondary share offer to retail investors to dilute the Group’s ownership.

MTN controls more than 50% of Nigeria's mobile network market, giving it a massive customer base to sell data and airtime. In 2024, voice, data, and SMS made up over 85% of its revenue. 

While MTN Nigeria was profitable in Q4 2024, it still closed the year with a ₦400.44 billion ($249 million) loss after tax. Now, with the tariff hike, retail investors are anticipating a positive result when the telecom operator announces its Q1 2025 results on April 29.

In the first ten days of April 2025, MTN’s stock price stayed flat, but since reports of a planned secondary sale surfaced on April 10, its prices have swung erratically. 

On April 25, retail investors bought nearly 33 million shares—the highest single-day volume in months—pushing the price up 4.23% to ₦255.50 ($0.16) at the close of trading on Friday, signalling that investors are bullish.

Yet, MTN must deliver green numbers this week—or risk losing investor confidence.

Ethio Telecom, Ethiopia’s state-owned telecom giant, is getting serious about its financial services ambitions. It wants to provide one-stop access to multiple ranges of financial services for Ethiopians, adapting Safaricom's playbook—a little unnerving considering that Safaricom operates in Ethiopia, too.

On Monday, it partnered with Siinqee Bank to launch mobile savings, microloans, salary-backed loans, and device financing—all available through “telebirr,” its digital wallet that already has over 52.5 million users.

It’s a timely play. Ethiopia is still one of Africa’s largest untapped markets for mobile money, despite the soaring success of services like M-Pesa elsewhere. Less than 40% of Ethiopia’s population has access to a mobile phone, and even fewer have smartphones. Banking penetration is even lower, particularly outside major cities.

Through small loan offerings and financing cheap smartphones, Ethio Telecom and Siinqee Bank are trying to close two stubborn gaps at once: digital access and financial inclusion. Device financing—the promise to distribute up to two million smartphones a year—is arguably the bigger deal here. You can't use mobile money without a mobile phone. And you can't grow a digital economy without devices in people’s hands.

It also benefits Ethio Telecom directly. More smartphones mean more mobile data users. More mobile data users mean more revenue from airtime, apps, and payments flowing through telebirr. 

The bigger context: Ethiopia’s government is pushing to open up its telecom and financial sectors after years of tightly controlling them. Ethio Telecom, facing competition from newcomers like Safaricom Ethiopia, needs to lock in customers before rivals steal the market. Partnering with a bank and giving people both financial services and phones is one way to do it. Ut’s not just about loans. It's about defending turf. 

Over to Safaricom Ethiopia; will the telecom subsidiary—which has previously complained about unfair competition from Ethio Telecom—bite?