NaijaTalkTalk- Solo’s partners with Airtel and Ren Money to change game?

Solo

Solo, a Nigerian smartphone OEM mostly known for its eponymously named Android devices  at its core, it is actually a mobile content and services company using smartphones as a delivery mechanism.
Of course, they couldn’t do better than the market where smartphone sales were concerned and seemed to have gone off the radar for the past two years. It turns out that in that time, they’ve been working a new angle to the market. At an average price that hovers around the N50,000 mark, reasonably specced smartphones are out of the reach of most Nigerians. But what if you partnered with a telco to distribute “free” devices to qualified individuals, on the condition that they pay a monthly fee via airtime recharge over 12 months?

That is precisely what Solo is doing with Airtel Nigeria.  For an initial deposit of N4,120, Airtel subscribers who qualify (they have an internal heuristic) can procure a Solo Aspire M device. The only condition is that they make subsequent payments of the same amount for the next 11 months, via airtime recharge. What is more, the monthly payment comes with 1GB browsing data, 60 minutes of talk, 60 free SMS, and an unlimited social media app bundle that is essentially free access to Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and BBM.

The Solo Aspire M’s specs itself won’t blow anyone reading this away  our audience data tells me you most likely own an even more capable device already. But for feature phone upgrade hopefuls, the cash-strapped and increasingly narrowing middle class, and even the madam/oga that cracked their Samsung Galaxy S7 screen last week and might not be inclined to cough out money that can buy a car to replace it right away, it’s perfect.

The business case looks rather compelling. Nigeria’s monthly mobile ARPU is somewhere between 4 – 6 USD, or in the general vicinity N2,000. Whether a lot of people will be happy to spend twice that a month in exchange for not having to pay the full price of the device remains to be seen. But as long as Solo delivers the goods, I can see companies signing up their junior staff, parents acquiring for their kids, and grown-up kids acquiring for their parents and grandparents in rural areas. Not only does the monthly payment spread out the expense hit, it also ensures that the device will remain useful to its user for as long as the payment is made. And what happens if the user doesn’t pay the monthly fee? Well, the device comes with software that locks the device and renders it unusable, till the owner pays up. Solo’s CEO, Tayo Ogundipe, tells me that Nigeria’s computer village boys in Ikeja who have had the device for months are yet to crack or flash it successfully. Rather than crack, the phone is more likely to brick, after intense pressure. This also makes the phone quite useless to thieves as well.

The entire enterprise has quite a few moving parts. The security and DRM software is made by a Finnish partner. On the credit side of the equation, Airtel and Solo are working with Ren Money to pre-qualify and onboard new users. But if everything goes well, Solo and partners might be on to something really interesting. Could this, with other telcos (and other device OEMs?) on board, become a model that drives significant smartphone adoption across the continent? The public launch is today, and I hope it goes well from there.