Guardian

In spite of the vast marketing potentials of the Nigerian business environment, inadequate data solutions and a lack of sufficient on-line visibility are some drawbacks plaguing business owners. General Manager of V-Connect, Deepankar Rustagi, in this interview with NTIA USUKUMA speaks on how to shore up Nigeria’s business capacity through this untapped goldmine.

Tell us about V-Connect and why you started the firm?

V-CONNECT commenced operations two and a half years ago. The company was born out of the fact that people need information. We have seen situations where people have lost their lives because they lack information to the right hospital. There are times they couldn’t reach the police and there was robbery in the house and they didn’t have the numbers of the police. So, we started with the emergency numbers. We gave numbers where people could find blood bank, emergency numbers for police stations and fire brigade numbers. That was the primary idea why we started the V-Connect before we moved on to business contacts and addresses.

Presently, we have seven 700, 000 contacts of businesses operating in Nigeria, by far the largest single repertoire of contacts in Nigeria, and we are growing this by the day. If anybody is in a situation where they need information they can just log on and find the information.

We also have a call centre which runs 24 hours a week. We started that two and a half years back. At that time not many companies had  call centres aside the telecoms companies. So, people can equally call in to get any information. We set up the call centre because we wanted people to have  information. So, we started because we felt there was a lack of information and no contact on the internet. It is information about businesses, products and services.

What are your biggest challenges so far?

With the businesses, the biggest challenge we face is that most of the people own mobile phones. Ninety-nine per cent  of small businesses own mobile phones and in a situation where the contact person leaves that business, the phone numbers has to be updated. So, keeping the information is relevant for us. We make sure that we update this information periodically to provide correct information and that is a challenge from the business side.

From the user’s side, it is creating more awareness. In the last three years, the interest  usage has picked up remarkably. Three years back, some people had smart phones but not everyone was using data. Today people use BBM or Whatsap rather than SMS. Internet usage has even gone to a different level.

How do you make profit from this service?

We make money from helping small scale businesses promote themselves. We have small packages like N3, 000, N5, 000 and N10, 000 on how they can promote their services in their locality. The other way is corporate advertising. Companies that want to promote themselves on the website as a top rated site in Nigeria can use us; there is a lot of advertising space which can be utilised by different brands.

Can you put a figure to the value of businesses V-Connect has provided this year?

I would not be able to put a value in terms of monetary terms. For instance, there are  some people who are selling Ipad, others do flash (one of our products). The cost variation is very high but I can tell you that there are more than 1.3 million people making such searches a month. This encompasses various kinds of searches, from restaurants to spa services to printers to publishers, etc. There are people who come online to ask questions like, ‘how can  we reach the publisher of this newspaper?’ ‘where can I find a job?’ We see enquiries of all kind. It will be very difficult to put a value, but what we try to put in place is a returns on investment and mechanism for our businesses. We make sure they get three times of what they invest so that they feel the growth in what they have invested into the business.

To register on our site is free; to search for any information is free as well. If there are 700, 000 businesses registered free, as a prospective investor or as a body or government organisations that work with small and meduim scale businesses, there are so many resourceful things you can create from this.

We  also do calculations from our data, since we have substantial sample size. We can identify in Lagos which  businesses have grown in the last six months. As the numbers are growing we can talk about other opportunities coming up.

It seems your focus is on SMEs...

In every economy, small and medium scale businesses play a very important role in the growth of the economy. Yes, we are an oil dependent economy but small and medium scale businesses are important. If you compare in Ghana, the contribution of SME to the GDP is 55 per cent, in Kenya it is 62 per cent, and in South Africa it is much more than that. In Nigeria, it is less than 45 per cent though some people say it is not properly calculated. While in Africa on an  the average it is 50 per cent.

Another important factor is the employment rate. In a country like Ghana, 70 per cent of the people are employed by small and medium businesses while in Nigeria, it is just 27 per cent of the people that are employed by small and medium scale businesses. Yet we are considered one of the most enterprising people on earth. There are tools to run small and medium scale businesses and we also offer that.

You are working on information and data, which are critical to businesses. Has there been any security challenge on this?

I don’t think there are security challenges because it is publicly owned. I can walk into any store and get this information. Even if you go to India and you want to buy something, they wouldn’t ask you where you are from, because these things are publicly available. We don’t ask you for tax details or NET profit because those details are with the government. But about basic available information that helps them promote themselves which is most times available online. This poses no security challenge. Even an agency like SMEDAN that is involved in a lot of activities with small and medium businesses also has consolidated data of some businesses.

In just two and a half years, you already have 700, 000 businesses on your database. What next moving forward?

The volume of businesses in Nigeria is huge. SMEDAN data says we have 17 million businesses in Nigeria. V-Connect has only registered less than half of this so far. We register only businesses that have fixed structure; that is mandatory. We have registered businesses from Computer Village, Alaba International market, Agege market, Trade Fair, etc. Everyday, more than a thousand businesses  approach us to register on our site, which really shows the hunger. People are interested in promoting themselves and making their businesses work.

Besides, our systems are built to accommodate more businesses and we can still expand. So, as we grow we can expand our machines. We also want to provide state of the art facilities. The service we offer should be state of the art so that people don’t feel deprived of quality services.