Skip to main content

Apple buys a Nigerian-owned ICT firm for $1 billion



UNITED States of America’s most celebrated brand, Apple, has bought Nigeria’s Chinedu Echeruo’s HopStop.com. According to The Wall Street Journal’s publication, AllThingsDigital, it informed that though the term of the deal has not been disclosed officially, but HopStop has been compared to Israel’s Waze, which was recently acquired by Google for $1 billion.
Founded in 2005, HopStop.com makes mobile applications for both iOS and Android that covers over 300 cities and that helps people get directions or find nearby subway stations and bus stops.
Echeruo, formerly an analyst at investment banks and hedge funds, who founded HopStop, is now chairman of the Board for the app firm.
The move, according to market intelligence, is seen as Apple’s plan to bolster its map offering especially given Google’s recent acquisition of Waze.
A serial entrepreneur, Echeruo, grew up in Eastern Nigeria and attended Kings College, Lagos.
He attended Syracuse University and the Harvard Business School in the United States and founded HopStop.com after working for several years in the Mergers and Acquisitions and Leveraged Finance groups of J.P Morgan Chase where he was involved in a broad range of M&A, financing and private equity transactions.
He also worked at AM Investment Partners, a $500 million volatility-driven convertible bond arbitrage hedge fund.
He founded and raised nearly $8 million for his two U.S. based Internet companies: Hopstop.com and Tripology.com. Tripology.com was acquired in 2010 by American travel and navigation information company, Rand McNally.
True to form, Echeruo is working on yet another venture but this time, focused on small businesses in Africa. According to him, “there is no reason why every entrepreneur should have to reinvent the wheel every single time in all the countries in Africa.
My idea is to essentially have one place where a budding entrepreneur can access a template for starting a business, and then customise it to suit their own situation; essentially, a business-in-a-box. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, online services, and personal computers.
Its best-known hardware products are the Mac line of computers, the iPod media player, the iPhone smartphone, the iPad tablet computer, and the Apple Watch smartwatch. Its online services include iCloud, the iTunes Store, and the App Store.
Apple’s consumer software includes the OS X and iOS operating systems, the iTunes media browser, the Safari web browser, and the iLife and iWork creativity and productivity suites.
Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne on April 1, 1976, to develop and sell personal computers.
It was incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc. on January 3, 1977, and was renamed as Apple Inc. on January 9, 2007, to reflect its shifted focus towards consumer electronics. Apple joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average on March 19, 2015.
Apple is the world’s second-largest information technology company by revenue after Samsung Electronics, world’s largest technology company by Total Assets and the world’s third-largest mobile phone maker.
On November 25, 2014, in addition to being the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalisation, Apple became the first U.S. company to be valued at over $700 billion.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Which of these business Africans inspires you most and why?

                           Aliko Dangote                                                         Michael Adenuga                                  Isabel Dos Santos                                                       Tony Elumelu                               Nicky Oppenheimer                                                  Siza  Mzimela Folorunsho...
4 comments
Read more

Building a profitable green economy in Africa

Viewed from a dramatic granite formation jutting above the town, the central Ugandan settlement of Soroti doesn’t amount to much. A series of low-rise rectangular buildings, drifting off into a featureless hinterland, it appears a regional administrative and commercial centre of little importance. Yet in December, European Union and Ugandan diplomats, wielding commemorative spears and greeted by brightly attired locals, gathered to cut the ribbon on a development that could put this backwater firmly on the map. Soroti’s vast solar plant is the largest of its kind in  East Africa , a sprawling site of over 32,000 photovoltaic panels that will add an initial 10MW of electricity generating capacity to the local area. Backed by development funds from European taxpayers and foreign private capital, the $19m project aims to power up to 40,000 homes, schools and hospitals, while kick-starting regional economic growth and delivering profits to its commercial backers. It is on...
Post a Comment
Read more

How This South African entrepreneur turned his business from failure to box-office hits

Triggerfish Animation Studios is a South African film and entertainment animation company which produced the award-winning feature films  Adventures in Zambezia  and  Khumba . It has also recently created the animation for Roald Dahl’s  Revolting Rhymes  TV series, which premiered on BBC at the end of last year. Triggerfish is now working on its next film,  Seal Team , which is set off the coast of Cape Town. This animation follows the story of a seal and a team of misfits who decide to fight back against the sharks who dominate the waters.   But the company’s journey to success has been far from easy and Stuart Forrest, the man behind the business, has seen Triggerfish through many challenging times – including liquidation. At yesterday’s launch of the 2017 Sanlam and Business Partners Entrepreneur of the Year award in Cape Town, he shared this experience with an audience. Starting from the bottom Forrest is not the original owner of Trig...
Post a Comment
Read more