Our mission is to ensure all African homes enjoy digital life —Elegbede, Director, Brands and Marketing, StarTimes

In this interview with Akin Adewakun, the Director Brands and Marketing, StarTimes, Mr. Qasim Elegbede, bares his mind on raging issues in the Nigeria’s Pay TV market, while assuring of the brand’s commitment to providing digital broadcast to Nigerians, without leaving holes in their pockets.

Why we  won’t review our subscription rates, upwards

At StarTimes we guard jealously our vision and mission. The vision is to become one of the most influential media groups in the world and the mission is to ensure that all African homes, enjoy digital life.

If you want somebody to enjoy something, you don’t make it difficult for that person to access such thing. In that case, how do you make Pay TV difficult? It is through subscription. So it is our goal to ensure that African homes get to enjoy pay tv without digging a gaping hole in their pockets. And we have been able to achieve this because we are run by locals.  Yes, it is a China-Nigeria partnership,  and all that, but we still have  the locals at strategic and high positions where we can influence things. Before the advent of StarTimes, pay tv was the exclusive preserve of the affluent, the elite. But when StarTimes came, we disrupted the market and ensure pay tv became what ordinary citizens could aspire to have and they  are were having it. We were able to break the monopoly by making the price truly affordable. That forced the hands of the first comers. They too had to respond.

It was like a repeat of the telecoms history in Nigeria, when some brands came and said per second billing was impossible until a Nigerian telecommunication company came and everybody had to fall in line.

Normal

What StarTimes has done. I think it would be insensitive on our part to increase our subscription rates at this time of the year, when parents pay through their nose for school fees. We are talking of new sessions. You have to buy books, pay school fees and make sundry payments. It is definitely not the right time for any right-thinking brand or anybody who empathises with Nigeria to think of increasing the price, and under what guise?

Market response to our offerings in the past eight years

If there is no market, do you think we are still going to be here? If our customers, our  subscribers are not enjoying us, do you think we will still be here, waxing stronger and stronger? No business is a charity organisation, neither are we. We feel our subscribers and they feel us. Everyday we sell decoders. We can lay claim to the fact that it is StarTimes that is taking the average Nigerian enjoy digital life, without digging holes into his pocket. So it’s mission accomplished. And talking about market, we are okay. We keep improving everyday. It may interest you to know that all the antennae service providers, to use the layman’s language, we cover Nigeria like nobody else. We are in the 36 states of the country. You can do your check, nobody, among our competitors can boast of such credential. So, if we are not generally accepted, such expansion would have been impossible.

We are ready are ready for Digital Switch Over, even if it starts today. It’s unfortunate that we  have not embraced DSO (Digital Switch Over) in Nigeria. But ultimately, we are going to do that. Outside Nigeria it’s difficult to see analogue anywhere. But, at StarTimes, we are ready. Today, if Nigeria says it is switching to digital, completely, anybody who has StarTimes decoder is already digitalised. And it’s not only decoder, we have TV sets that have in-built StarTimes decoders.

So if you have such TV, you are already DSO compliant. This is one thing no competitor can boast of in this country. All you have to do is to buy a StarTimes decoder or a StarTimes TV, which works like any other tv with an addition of having a StarTimes decoder, and you can plug in anything else in that TV. We pride ourselves in innovation, which is one of our culture; diligence, innovation, integrity. It was our innovation that crashed the pay tv market. It was our innovation that made Nigerians watched the World Cup from the comfort of their homes. It was also our innovation that made us produce TV sets with in-built StarTimes decoder. So we are actually ready.

•  Price review, our way of giving more Nigerians access to digital television —StarTimes

Nothing like ‘conspiracy theory’  in the nation’s paytv market

The chances of  new entrants in a market, have to be weighed. Is it high or low? That usually determines the number of new entrants you will have in the market. Besides, it is not only in pay tv that new entrants fizzle out. I happened to work almost 20 years in print, and you also are a print person. How many newspapers came after Nigerian Tribune and did not survive? I remember very well in 1994 when Nigeria first qualified for World Cup, we had a plethora of sports papers, springing up right, left and centre, but how many of them survived?

Survival of a business is down to management of that business, it has nothing to do with conspiracy. If there was any conspiracy, how come StarTimes survived? If there was any conspiracy, how come Kwese survived? So who is conspiring against who? For a capital intensive business such as ours, it may be difficult for somebody who doesn’t plan well to survive. Forget about any conspiracy, it’s about the organisational structure and the management acumen of those  pay tv companies that failed to survive. So let’s remove that notion. There is no conspiracy, if there was conspiracy, when the competition increased their rates, we too should have done that. That tells you we are neither friends nor foes.

The nation’s  pay tv market as a red ocean

The advent of StarTimes into the market  has made it fantastically interesting. I won’t see it as tough. I’ll rather describe it as a red ocean, because there is no business that is not tough. Is print  media not tough? I knew Tribune when it was built. It was in front of my house at Imalefalafia. I saw the way they started. I’m talking of decades ago. But since then and now, is Tribune not waxing stronger?

Is the paper not doing well? A lot of newspapers had come and gone during this period. So it’s a red ocean, and in such situation,  the ultimate winners are always the consumers because everybody wants to try and please them.

Nigeria’s huge population makes it the biggest market for pay tv

Well Nigeria remains our biggest market in Africa. Any Pay TV operator would tell you Nigeria is its biggest market because of her population. When you have such number and you play your game right, you can not, but dominate the market.