One question I have been asking myself lately is: when will ICT companies which include those in the telecommunications industry start going public?
I wonder if we are thinking about this at all especially for organisations that meet the criteria and there are a handful of them out there. I am not advocating coercion here but I believe this is why government and policy makers should be alive to their responsibilities.
The quest to pen this down led me to visit Nasdaq.com, first to have an idea of what the market capitalisation of some of the biggest tech companies in the world and their likely impact on the US economy and the rest of the world.
The results were quite interesting; Apple Inc. leads with $825.3bn; followed by Alphabet Inc. (Google) with $651.58bn; then Microsoft Corporation with $563.5bn; Facebook Inc. follows with $492.67bn and next is Oracle with $203.77bn.
It’s not surprising that all the companies mentioned are all from the United States. However, the sixth company is Taiwanese known as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited. It first went public in 1997 and today has a market capitalisation of $189.4bn.
Imagine for a moment the impact of this single company on the Taiwanese economy. This is the same Taiwan that a lot of people associated with inferior products and poor finishing while I was growing up.
Despite how people thought of them as inferior, they kept at it and today a single company from that country has a market cap almost half the size of the Nigerian GDP.
Again, the focus of this piece is not exactly about comparisons but I needed to stress the power of visioning, focus and also why we should go out of our way to deliberately support certain ICT companies and start-ups so that they can become African giants.
We need to begin to live for the future and it should be a situation where the stocks of ICT companies can be bought and sold either locally or internationally. Beyond this, we also need to see good exits in this clime.
This is why a number of us cannot really wait for an organisation like Interswitch to go public because we believe that it would really prove that good deals and exits can also happen in this part of the world.
The telecommunications industry as a case study
Recently, the Federal Government made reference to the issue of getting the operators listed.
According to FG, “telecommunications companies operating in Nigeria must quickly conclude plans to get listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange or face regulatory penalties from their compliance failures.”
I honestly don’t agree it should be a case of threats because — Finish Reading on the Punch
