Insurgency, fraud pose risks for credible Nigerian election

Nigeria has made an effort to clean up voter registration for elections next February, but holding a credible poll is a daunting prospect amid chaotic distribution of ballot cards and an Islamist insurgency that could disenfranchise millions.

Nigeria’s last presidential poll in 2011 was deemed the cleanest to date in Africa’s most populous nation, but since previous elections had been characterised by ballot box snatching, intimidation of voters by armed thugs and completely made up results, this was a modest achievement.

The election will test whether Africa’s biggest economy can improve its patchy record on democracy.

“Looking at overt, simple forms of election manipulation, in 2011, there was a decrease and we think … that trajectory is going to continue,” Thomas Hansen of Control Risks says.

Yet questions remain over whether the coming elections will actually continue that trajectory.

The race largely between President Goodluck Jonathan and former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari on Feb. 14 is expected to be Nigeria’s most closely fought since the end of military rule in 1999, which will encourage both to play dirty.

A violent Islamist Boko Haram insurgency that has killed thousands will make voting almost impossible in swathes of the northeast, possibly disenfranchising millions.

New technology, such as biometric I.D. card readers, should make ballot box stuffing harder. But glitches have caused hundreds of thousands of voters to be struck out.

TEST FOR NIGERIA

The election must be seen as credible to avoid violence by the losing side. In 2011, 800 people were killed after Buhari lost to Jonathan.

The growing polarisation of Nigeria between the largely Muslim north and majority Christian parts of the south, and ugly rhetoric on both sides, send ominous signals.

“The demonisation of the opponent, the threats of violence, the accusations of plans to rig the election, the whipping up of ethnic and religious sentiments. The clouds are indeed dark,” wrote Azuka Onwuka in The Punch daily this month.

When Jonathan ran in 2011, northern elites said he scrapped an unwritten deal to rotate power between north and south every two terms. Amid the heightened tension, parties could use minor irregularities as an excuse to whip up violence.

Three states in the northeast under a state of emergency will be too dangerous for most election observers.

There are more than a million Boko Haram displaced who cannot vote unless the law changes to allow them to do so away from home, a move Parliament is considering.

Borno electoral commissioner Tukur Saad said the state had registered 11 camps for refugees, but many more were unregistered in schools and mosques.

Since many displaced did not take their voting cards when they fled, they may be unable to vote.

“Creating polling units in camps does not mean people will not be disenfranchised,” said Idayat Hassan of the Abuja-based Centre for Democracy and Development. “How many will actually have identification of any form with them?”

Insecurity will prevent voting in many places. Most of Borno’s 1.76 million voters won’t be able to vote.

“It’s a very tricky situation … We may only be able to hold the vote for … 600,000 voters,” Saad told Reuters.

TECHNICAL ‘GLITCHES’

The electoral commission has culled duplicates and fake names from the register in order to issue biometric voter cards, in a bid to curb practices like ballot box stuffing.

But 11.5 million people were, in some cases wrongly, struck off the list this year, electoral commission (INEC) spokesman Kayode Idowu said, owing to data collection problems.

The total voter count fell to 58.9 million, from 70.4 million at the end of 2013. Voters wrongfully removed will have to queue up to re-register. Some won’t bother.

The fact that many were in strongholds of the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC), such as Lagos, rather than those of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), angered the opposition.

“I am worried this is the beginning of a plan to disenfranchise Lagosians,” Lagos state governor Babatunde Fashola, himself stuck off the list, said last month.

Another worry for election observers is whether the card readers will be deployed in time and if they will work.

INEC says it anticipates the inevitable failure of some readers so extras will be supplied. The readers will run on batteries to escape frequent power cuts.

Idowu said that if a machine fails and a replacement is unavailable, the election will be delayed in that area. That would draw out an already fraught process.

In the Niger Delta, Jonathan’s home region, a history of political thuggery looks set to continue.

Two security sources say large amounts of weapons are being imported into the region. In past polls, militias carved out areas where they controlled voting. That could happen again.

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Plunging oil sets up winners and losers amid economic turmoil

Plunging oil prices are not proving a sole negative for the Nigerian economy, as new investors prepare to capitalise on cheaper assets amid an economic turmoil that threatens to bankrupt at least five states.

From bankers to oil barons and profligate Nigerian state governors who refused to save for the proverbial rainy day, the 45 percent slump in crude oil this year presents opportunity as well as pitfalls.

“Nigerian oil assets are much cheaper now and present a good time to take positions,” said Diekola Onaolapo, CEO of Eczellon Capital, a Lagos based boutique investment bank, in a Dec.15 interview with BusinesDay.

While firms like Eczellon that just launched a $250 million Private Equity (P.E) fund targeting oil and gas deals are looking to buy beaten down assets, those who gorged up on debt to finance acquisitions when oil traded above $100 per barrel are having to restrategise.

Oando which financed the acquisition of Conoco Philips Nigerian assets for a consideration of $1.5 billion had total debt in its balance sheet of N351.71 billion ($2.093 billion), while debt to equity ratio, which measures the proportion of debt in the capital structure of a company was 163.38 percent, the highest among its peers.

Oando’s share price has lost -31.42 percent year to date, while Seplat, which raised $500 m in an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in April this year, at N576 per share, has lost -51.35 percent of its value since the shares started trading.

Both have underperformed the Nigerian benchmark equity gauge which has plunged by -26.22 percent in the period.

Oando has adopted hedging on future crude production, ensuring it is adequately protected over the next few years, if oil prices stay below ~$97/barrel, according to Ainojie ‘Alex’ Irune, Head Corporate Communications, Oando Plc.

“This effectively ensures the company receives income pegged approximately to the above price,” said Irune.

Seplat says it is expanding its horizon outside the production of oil and investing in gas projects which are less risky and volatile.

“The gas business is far more stable than the oil business. You don’t have the disruption like you have in oil,” said Austin Avuru, Chief executive officer of Seplat.

However, lower oil prices mean lower revenues, which could translate to strains in the credit repayment ability of some of the upstream oil companies.

This is where the bankers may feel some stress.

“The loans to the indigenous companies were mostly structured with an assumed oil price of $70-75/bl. In the event that oil prices test the break-even levels, a couple of banks expect these loans to get restructured,” said Adesoji Solake, Renaissance Capital’s SSA banking analyst, in a Dec 01 note.

Brent for February settlement was down $1.79 to $59.42 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange as of 11:31 a.m. local time yesterday.

Slumping oil prices which are seen trading below $50 next year by analysts, will further crimp the budgets of state governors who are particularly vulnerable.

Oil revenues accounts for up to 75 percent of the Federal budget, however in some states it goes as high as 97 percent.

If the decline of crude oil prices in the global market continues for another three months, states’ economies will collapse, warned Governor Babangida Aliyu of Niger State, at an event on Tuesday.

“Five states are close to bankruptcy and cannot pay salaries as we speak,” said Bismarck Rewane, CEO of Financial Derivatives Company, at the BusinesDay energy conference held in November.

While oil prices may rebound by the end of 2015 as lower prices take out U.S shale producers, there is still the distinct possibility of oil triggering a black swan event, such as a sovereign blow up, as the continued freefall of the Russian Rouble despite a surprise rate hikes signal.

Such an outcome would worsen Nigeria’s already lowered growth prospects for 2015.

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Why The billboard goes digital

When Jeremy Male rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange last Thursday, he became one of a handful of chief executives to have performed that ceremonial duty, marking a corporate milestone, twice in one year.

Male, who is British, had already stood on the dais in March, at the side of Leslie Moonves, head of CBS, as they celebrated the spin-off of billboard advertising group CBS Outdoor from its parent. Male was then six months into the post of CBS Outdoor’s CEO.

The second Wall Street appearance, complete with change in ticker symbol, finalised the transformation of CBS Outdoor into Outfront Media. It also caps a year in which Male has overseen the group not just shedding its name but adopting a new tax structure and cutting the last ties to CBS as he pursues ambitious growth.

When he arrived in New York from France’s JCDecaux, one of the leading outdoor advertising companies, to head the group, it was very much in the shadow of CBS, the US broadcaster best known as the home of David Letterman, Survivor and The Big Bang Theory. “Coming over to the US, with a British accent, I’d say ‘CBS Outdoor’ and people would say, ‘Oh, what show is that?’”

Outfront’s reinvention comes as the out-of-home advertising sector – billboards, subway ads, bus shelters – is being reshaped by data, technology and the ubiquity of mobile devices, like the rest of the media industry.

It is also growing: global outdoor spending is projected to expand 4 per cent this year, and to maintain its 7 per cent share of the total advertising market over the next five years, according to Magna Global, Interpublic’s ad buying and research group.

Interest in outdoor is driven at least partly by operators converting their signs to more profitable digital displays, such as the often animated adverts illuminating Times Square and Piccadilly Circus like oversized television screens.

While just 1.5 per cent of Outfront’s inventory has been converted to digital signs, they already account for 10 per cent of its revenue. A single digital board can carry several ads a day and campaigns are cheaper and quicker to produce than traditional billboards. Male expects digital to reach 25 per cent of sales within three years, especially as the declining cost of electronic displays means advertisers can get more bang for their buck.

Additional digital inventory means Outfront can offer advertisers flexible and timely campaigns, including the ability to react fast to an event, such as flashing a message when a local team scores in a football game. “We’re not too far away from having an app where [marketers] could just say, ‘OK, I want this message on all of our screens across the world for a 10-second period’.”

Technology will enable billboard owners to use data to improve audience targeting, make campaigns interactive and connect outdoor messages to the other media people see, especially on the mobile phones carried by so many consumers wherever they go.

“What you can tell from the handsets that go past is where it started out, what it did, what websites it visited  . . . The data mobile devices capture is allowing us to add far more value to our locations,” says Male. Outfront has collaborated with Dash Labs, a mobile app maker, to collect demographics on drivers passing a billboard in Los Angeles.

Such data collection raises privacy concerns, but Male says it is collected in aggregated form without personally identifiable information, or taken from apps where consumers have opted to share location information.

“I don’t think it’s quite going to be Minority Report,” he says, referring to the film where ad displays target individuals, using their real names in real time. “But I do think being able to give that enriched audience data will add value for advertisers and therefore for us because what you’ll find is that each board has a personality of its own” – based on the types of people passing by.

The increasingly mobile-driven, fragmented media landscape offers a “fascinating” opportunity for Outfront, Male says. He acknowledges that “huge swaths of money” are going into digital advertising budgets that can narrow their target down to individuals.

But marketers still want to reach mass audiences too, and with traditional viewership for television shows fragmenting and declining, especially among younger people, Male says outdoor is poised to help reach huge groups of people with ads that cannot be fast-forwarded with a remote control. Commuters stuck in a traffic jam gaze up at big striking billboards; in cities such as London and San Francisco, pedestrians pass displays on bus shelters.

“We are one of the few media that, in a low-cost way, still has that one-to-many opportunity . . . We are reaching young, urban, affluent people on the streets, and they’re the people that advertisers want to reach. It’s no coincidence that brands such as Apple and Google are significant users of out-of-home.”

Apple spends some 10 per cent of its US marketing budget on outdoor ads, while the top 100 US advertisers together spend 2 per cent, he says. (The figure in Europe, is closer to 8 per cent.)

In his office on the 17th floor of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building, the tall, silver-haired Male looks relaxed for someone giving up one of the most recognisable brand names in US media. His purple tie matches the balloons festooning the entrance and the signs proclaiming Outfront’s new name and logo.

When he first arrived in New York, one part of his task of transforming the operation was clear: Moonves had announced at the start of 2013 that CBS Outdoor would be spun off as a real estate investment trust. Reits pay almost no corporate tax but must pay at least 90 per cent of their taxable income as dividends. The conversion into a Reit was completed in July.

The next decision – rebranding – was, Male says, necessary for the group’s increasingly digital future. In CBS, “you had this incredible brand that, in a way, we felt slightly parallel to. We knew we were never going to replace CBS as a consumer brand but we always felt we could go out and create a great new media brand.”

It was not the first time Male has taken on reshaping a company. In 1994, he made the leap from Germany’s Tchibo Coffee to outdoor advertising when he joined TDI, a US-based advertising group focusing on transportation that had just won the first private contract for London’s Underground and buses. Male was responsible for turning the London transport network’s in-house marketing division from “a civil service” operation into a competitive ad agency. Over six years, he built TDI’s UK and European business, before moving to JCDecaux, where he led the UK, northern Europe and Australia business.

Amid the corporate changes of recent months, Male also bought the US’s largest private portfolio of billboards from Van Wagner, including boards in New York’s Times Square and Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip. Overall, Outfront’s aim is to become the top billboard own¬er in the US’s 25 biggest markets. Male says it is still pursuing acquisitions to round out its holdings.

Along with the new name, the company is signalling its ambitions with a new in-house creative studio and a consumer insight service to help brands design their outdoor campaigns.

“That’s absolutely where we wanted to position the brand, which is a new market-leading brand that is associated with media. We’re now Outfront rather than outdoor or out-of-home.”

Second opinion: Insider on an outsider

As CEO of Omnicom’s Outdoor Media Group, North America’s largest buyer of outdoor advertising, Dave Yacullo advises marketers on billboard space.

He says Male “brings this track record of leadership and results in Europe and abroad” from his time at JCDecaux and TDI. But at the same time, “he hasn’t come in with the mindset of, ‘we had this great success over in Europe and we will just apply what works to the US’. He really understands the nuances of the market.”

Read More

Why The billboard goes digital

When Jeremy Male rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange last Thursday, he became one of a handful of chief executives to have performed that ceremonial duty, marking a corporate milestone, twice in one year.

Male, who is British, had already stood on the dais in March, at the side of Leslie Moonves, head of CBS, as they celebrated the spin-off of billboard advertising group CBS Outdoor from its parent. Male was then six months into the post of CBS Outdoor’s CEO.

The second Wall Street appearance, complete with change in ticker symbol, finalised the transformation of CBS Outdoor into Outfront Media. It also caps a year in which Male has overseen the group not just shedding its name but adopting a new tax structure and cutting the last ties to CBS as he pursues ambitious growth.

When he arrived in New York from France’s JCDecaux, one of the leading outdoor advertising companies, to head the group, it was very much in the shadow of CBS, the US broadcaster best known as the home of David Letterman, Survivor and The Big Bang Theory. “Coming over to the US, with a British accent, I’d say ‘CBS Outdoor’ and people would say, ‘Oh, what show is that?’”

Outfront’s reinvention comes as the out-of-home advertising sector – billboards, subway ads, bus shelters – is being reshaped by data, technology and the ubiquity of mobile devices, like the rest of the media industry.

It is also growing: global outdoor spending is projected to expand 4 per cent this year, and to maintain its 7 per cent share of the total advertising market over the next five years, according to Magna Global, Interpublic’s ad buying and research group.

Interest in outdoor is driven at least partly by operators converting their signs to more profitable digital displays, such as the often animated adverts illuminating Times Square and Piccadilly Circus like oversized television screens.

While just 1.5 per cent of Outfront’s inventory has been converted to digital signs, they already account for 10 per cent of its revenue. A single digital board can carry several ads a day and campaigns are cheaper and quicker to produce than traditional billboards. Male expects digital to reach 25 per cent of sales within three years, especially as the declining cost of electronic displays means advertisers can get more bang for their buck.

Additional digital inventory means Outfront can offer advertisers flexible and timely campaigns, including the ability to react fast to an event, such as flashing a message when a local team scores in a football game. “We’re not too far away from having an app where [marketers] could just say, ‘OK, I want this message on all of our screens across the world for a 10-second period’.”

Technology will enable billboard owners to use data to improve audience targeting, make campaigns interactive and connect outdoor messages to the other media people see, especially on the mobile phones carried by so many consumers wherever they go.

“What you can tell from the handsets that go past is where it started out, what it did, what websites it visited  . . . The data mobile devices capture is allowing us to add far more value to our locations,” says Male. Outfront has collaborated with Dash Labs, a mobile app maker, to collect demographics on drivers passing a billboard in Los Angeles.

Such data collection raises privacy concerns, but Male says it is collected in aggregated form without personally identifiable information, or taken from apps where consumers have opted to share location information.

“I don’t think it’s quite going to be Minority Report,” he says, referring to the film where ad displays target individuals, using their real names in real time. “But I do think being able to give that enriched audience data will add value for advertisers and therefore for us because what you’ll find is that each board has a personality of its own” – based on the types of people passing by.

The increasingly mobile-driven, fragmented media landscape offers a “fascinating” opportunity for Outfront, Male says. He acknowledges that “huge swaths of money” are going into digital advertising budgets that can narrow their target down to individuals.

But marketers still want to reach mass audiences too, and with traditional viewership for television shows fragmenting and declining, especially among younger people, Male says outdoor is poised to help reach huge groups of people with ads that cannot be fast-forwarded with a remote control. Commuters stuck in a traffic jam gaze up at big striking billboards; in cities such as London and San Francisco, pedestrians pass displays on bus shelters.

“We are one of the few media that, in a low-cost way, still has that one-to-many opportunity . . . We are reaching young, urban, affluent people on the streets, and they’re the people that advertisers want to reach. It’s no coincidence that brands such as Apple and Google are significant users of out-of-home.”

Apple spends some 10 per cent of its US marketing budget on outdoor ads, while the top 100 US advertisers together spend 2 per cent, he says. (The figure in Europe, is closer to 8 per cent.)

In his office on the 17th floor of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building, the tall, silver-haired Male looks relaxed for someone giving up one of the most recognisable brand names in US media. His purple tie matches the balloons festooning the entrance and the signs proclaiming Outfront’s new name and logo.

When he first arrived in New York, one part of his task of transforming the operation was clear: Moonves had announced at the start of 2013 that CBS Outdoor would be spun off as a real estate investment trust. Reits pay almost no corporate tax but must pay at least 90 per cent of their taxable income as dividends. The conversion into a Reit was completed in July.

The next decision – rebranding – was, Male says, necessary for the group’s increasingly digital future. In CBS, “you had this incredible brand that, in a way, we felt slightly parallel to. We knew we were never going to replace CBS as a consumer brand but we always felt we could go out and create a great new media brand.”

It was not the first time Male has taken on reshaping a company. In 1994, he made the leap from Germany’s Tchibo Coffee to outdoor advertising when he joined TDI, a US-based advertising group focusing on transportation that had just won the first private contract for London’s Underground and buses. Male was responsible for turning the London transport network’s in-house marketing division from “a civil service” operation into a competitive ad agency. Over six years, he built TDI’s UK and European business, before moving to JCDecaux, where he led the UK, northern Europe and Australia business.

Amid the corporate changes of recent months, Male also bought the US’s largest private portfolio of billboards from Van Wagner, including boards in New York’s Times Square and Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip. Overall, Outfront’s aim is to become the top billboard own¬er in the US’s 25 biggest markets. Male says it is still pursuing acquisitions to round out its holdings.

Along with the new name, the company is signalling its ambitions with a new in-house creative studio and a consumer insight service to help brands design their outdoor campaigns.

“That’s absolutely where we wanted to position the brand, which is a new market-leading brand that is associated with media. We’re now Outfront rather than outdoor or out-of-home.”

Second opinion: Insider on an outsider

As CEO of Omnicom’s Outdoor Media Group, North America’s largest buyer of outdoor advertising, Dave Yacullo advises marketers on billboard space.

He says Male “brings this track record of leadership and results in Europe and abroad” from his time at JCDecaux and TDI. But at the same time, “he hasn’t come in with the mindset of, ‘we had this great success over in Europe and we will just apply what works to the US’. He really understands the nuances of the market.”

Read More

Why The billboard goes digital

When Jeremy Male rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange last Thursday, he became one of a handful of chief executives to have performed that ceremonial duty, marking a corporate milestone, twice in one year.

Male, who is British, had already stood on the dais in March, at the side of Leslie Moonves, head of CBS, as they celebrated the spin-off of billboard advertising group CBS Outdoor from its parent. Male was then six months into the post of CBS Outdoor’s CEO.

The second Wall Street appearance, complete with change in ticker symbol, finalised the transformation of CBS Outdoor into Outfront Media. It also caps a year in which Male has overseen the group not just shedding its name but adopting a new tax structure and cutting the last ties to CBS as he pursues ambitious growth.

When he arrived in New York from France’s JCDecaux, one of the leading outdoor advertising companies, to head the group, it was very much in the shadow of CBS, the US broadcaster best known as the home of David Letterman, Survivor and The Big Bang Theory. “Coming over to the US, with a British accent, I’d say ‘CBS Outdoor’ and people would say, ‘Oh, what show is that?’”

Outfront’s reinvention comes as the out-of-home advertising sector – billboards, subway ads, bus shelters – is being reshaped by data, technology and the ubiquity of mobile devices, like the rest of the media industry.

It is also growing: global outdoor spending is projected to expand 4 per cent this year, and to maintain its 7 per cent share of the total advertising market over the next five years, according to Magna Global, Interpublic’s ad buying and research group.

Interest in outdoor is driven at least partly by operators converting their signs to more profitable digital displays, such as the often animated adverts illuminating Times Square and Piccadilly Circus like oversized television screens.

While just 1.5 per cent of Outfront’s inventory has been converted to digital signs, they already account for 10 per cent of its revenue. A single digital board can carry several ads a day and campaigns are cheaper and quicker to produce than traditional billboards. Male expects digital to reach 25 per cent of sales within three years, especially as the declining cost of electronic displays means advertisers can get more bang for their buck.

Additional digital inventory means Outfront can offer advertisers flexible and timely campaigns, including the ability to react fast to an event, such as flashing a message when a local team scores in a football game. “We’re not too far away from having an app where [marketers] could just say, ‘OK, I want this message on all of our screens across the world for a 10-second period’.”

Technology will enable billboard owners to use data to improve audience targeting, make campaigns interactive and connect outdoor messages to the other media people see, especially on the mobile phones carried by so many consumers wherever they go.

“What you can tell from the handsets that go past is where it started out, what it did, what websites it visited  . . . The data mobile devices capture is allowing us to add far more value to our locations,” says Male. Outfront has collaborated with Dash Labs, a mobile app maker, to collect demographics on drivers passing a billboard in Los Angeles.

Such data collection raises privacy concerns, but Male says it is collected in aggregated form without personally identifiable information, or taken from apps where consumers have opted to share location information.

“I don’t think it’s quite going to be Minority Report,” he says, referring to the film where ad displays target individuals, using their real names in real time. “But I do think being able to give that enriched audience data will add value for advertisers and therefore for us because what you’ll find is that each board has a personality of its own” – based on the types of people passing by.

The increasingly mobile-driven, fragmented media landscape offers a “fascinating” opportunity for Outfront, Male says. He acknowledges that “huge swaths of money” are going into digital advertising budgets that can narrow their target down to individuals.

But marketers still want to reach mass audiences too, and with traditional viewership for television shows fragmenting and declining, especially among younger people, Male says outdoor is poised to help reach huge groups of people with ads that cannot be fast-forwarded with a remote control. Commuters stuck in a traffic jam gaze up at big striking billboards; in cities such as London and San Francisco, pedestrians pass displays on bus shelters.

“We are one of the few media that, in a low-cost way, still has that one-to-many opportunity . . . We are reaching young, urban, affluent people on the streets, and they’re the people that advertisers want to reach. It’s no coincidence that brands such as Apple and Google are significant users of out-of-home.”

Apple spends some 10 per cent of its US marketing budget on outdoor ads, while the top 100 US advertisers together spend 2 per cent, he says. (The figure in Europe, is closer to 8 per cent.)

In his office on the 17th floor of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building, the tall, silver-haired Male looks relaxed for someone giving up one of the most recognisable brand names in US media. His purple tie matches the balloons festooning the entrance and the signs proclaiming Outfront’s new name and logo.

When he first arrived in New York, one part of his task of transforming the operation was clear: Moonves had announced at the start of 2013 that CBS Outdoor would be spun off as a real estate investment trust. Reits pay almost no corporate tax but must pay at least 90 per cent of their taxable income as dividends. The conversion into a Reit was completed in July.

The next decision – rebranding – was, Male says, necessary for the group’s increasingly digital future. In CBS, “you had this incredible brand that, in a way, we felt slightly parallel to. We knew we were never going to replace CBS as a consumer brand but we always felt we could go out and create a great new media brand.”

It was not the first time Male has taken on reshaping a company. In 1994, he made the leap from Germany’s Tchibo Coffee to outdoor advertising when he joined TDI, a US-based advertising group focusing on transportation that had just won the first private contract for London’s Underground and buses. Male was responsible for turning the London transport network’s in-house marketing division from “a civil service” operation into a competitive ad agency. Over six years, he built TDI’s UK and European business, before moving to JCDecaux, where he led the UK, northern Europe and Australia business.

Amid the corporate changes of recent months, Male also bought the US’s largest private portfolio of billboards from Van Wagner, including boards in New York’s Times Square and Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip. Overall, Outfront’s aim is to become the top billboard own¬er in the US’s 25 biggest markets. Male says it is still pursuing acquisitions to round out its holdings.

Along with the new name, the company is signalling its ambitions with a new in-house creative studio and a consumer insight service to help brands design their outdoor campaigns.

“That’s absolutely where we wanted to position the brand, which is a new market-leading brand that is associated with media. We’re now Outfront rather than outdoor or out-of-home.”

Second opinion: Insider on an outsider

As CEO of Omnicom’s Outdoor Media Group, North America’s largest buyer of outdoor advertising, Dave Yacullo advises marketers on billboard space.

He says Male “brings this track record of leadership and results in Europe and abroad” from his time at JCDecaux and TDI. But at the same time, “he hasn’t come in with the mindset of, ‘we had this great success over in Europe and we will just apply what works to the US’. He really understands the nuances of the market.”

Read More

NLNG plans multi-billion naira dry dock in Lagos, shops for investors

Nigeria may soon be able to save huge foreign exchange through the construction of a dry dock for the maintenance of large ocean going vessels in Badagry Lagos State, as the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Limited has reached out to the investment community – representatives of banks and other financial institutions, promoting the potential for a new dockyard in the country.

This follows the conclusion of feasibility studies by Royal HaskoningDHV, an independent, international engineering and project management consultancy, headquartered in the Netherlands.

The thinking for the establishment of a dry dock in Nigeria is coming on the back of NLNG’s US$1.6 billion contract with shipbuilders, Samsung Heavy Industries and Hyundai Heavy Industries, for the building of six new vessels.

The volume of the fleet spurred the thinking of the need for maintainance locally.

Observers of Nigeria’s maritime sector have long lamented the absence of an operational dockyard to cater for very large crude carriers (VLCCs) and liquefied natural gas (LNG) carriers, as existing dockyards can only handle smaller vessels.

Lack of such a facility has meant that owners of large vessels in Nigeria and the West African region, have had to pay large sums of money to docking facilities located mainly in Asia, Europe and the Americas, which can accommodate such large vessels.

NLNG, leveraging on the agreement with the ship manufacturers, secured a number of lucrative opportunities beneficial to the Nigerian economy, including the training of about 600 young Nigerians in various aspects of ship-building, procurement of goods from Nigerian companies and the feasibility studies for building a dockyard.

Feasibility studies for citing the dry-dock were carried out in seven places—Badagry, Lekki FTZ, Ladol Island, Ogogoro Island, Olokola FTZ, Onne and Bonny, before consultants identified Badagry as the best-in-class location for the dockyard.

Babs Omotowa, NLNG’s managing director and chief executive officer, at the investment forum held at the proposed site for the dockyard in Badagry said: “This dry-dock, when completed, holds huge potential for the investment community. Our LNG vessels and very large crude carriers (VLCC) of other companies in the oil and gas and marine industries, which are currently maintained overseas, resulting in millions of dollars being spent overseas, will soon be maintained in-country with tangible value-adds for the Nigerian economy,”

The dry-dock is also planned to be operated and managed according to international standards, and when operational, will generate revenue and add jobs to the economy.

Captain Temi Okesanjo, Nigeria LNG’s General Manager, Shipping Division, speaking to investors at a forum to discuss the potential of the proposed dockyard, said: “I can confidently tell you that if we have a dockyard here, Nigeria LNG with its current 13 vessels in our fleet will be one of your patrons. When our company receives its six additional vessels from Samsung Heavy Industries and Hyundai Heavy Industries, those vessels will also be maintained here.

“ I have no doubt the other players in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry will also be looking to service and maintain their vessels at this ship yard once it becomes operational,”

NLNG is owned by four shareholders. They are the Federal Government of Nigeria, represented by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC (49%), Shell Gas BV, SGBV, (25.6%), Total LNG Nigeria Limited (15%), and Eni International (N.A,) N. V. S. a. r. l (10.4%).

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Commitment To Increase Domestic Cooking Gas - NLNG

Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Limited has affirmed its commitment to providing the nation with sufficient volumes of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) otherwise known as cooking gas, based on production operations from its six train facility at Bonny, Rivers State.

This assertion was made by the company’s chief executive officer, Mr. Babs Omotowa during a presentation titled NLNG’s Role in Developing the Domestic LPG Market at the Nigerian Liquefied Petroleum Gas Association (NLPGA) conference today in Abuja, where he was represented by Nigeria LNG’s Marketing and Development Manager, Mr. Abdulkadir Ahmed.

“NLNG’s intervention in the domestic LPG market began in 2007 with the dedication of some 150,000 metric tonnes of cooking gas annually, in response to an acute shortage of the product in the market at the time.
Only last year, the company further increased this volume by sixty-six per cent (66%) to 250,000 metric tonnes in readiness to meet growing utilisation of cooking gas by Nigerians”. 

According to the company’s chief executive, only about 600,000 metric tonnes of cooking gas have been absorbed by the local market since NLNG’s intervention in September 2007 because of market inefficiencies across the LPG value chain. These he added, include the absence of a functioning cylinder manufacturing plant, inadequate storage, poor transportation network and infrastructure, limited jetty availability and low-priority berthing given to LPG vessels, which have all conspired to thwart the market’s ability to absorb NLNG’s increased supply.
Advocating increased investment across the value chain to enable sustained and reliable product availability, Omotowa noted that NLNG which currently supplies some eighty per cent (80%) of the total cooking gas consumed by Nigerians, has also subsidised the product to the cost of about $50 million since the intervention began.
Other critical areas of possible intervention as highlighted by the NLNG CEO include terminal operation and development, distribution and retail, promotion and awareness and government policy and incentives for full maturity of the domestic LPG market.
Also speaking at the event, Dayo Adeshina, President, Nigerian LPG Association added:

“Due to Nigeria LNG’s intervention, the domestic LPG is not where it was when it came on the scene in September 2007. NLNG has been at the forefront of stabilising supply which has brought some obvious gains, including an almost seventy percent reduction in price from between N6,500 and N7,500 for a 12.5kg cylinder to its current price of between N2,800 and N3,500. But other stakeholders still have some way to go for the public to fully enjoy the gains of this intervention,”

NLNG is owned by four shareholders, namely, the Federal Government of Nigeria, represented by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC (49%), Shell Gas BV, SGBV, (25.6%), Total LNG Nigeria Limited (15%), and Eni International (N.A,) N. V. S. a. r. l (10.4%).

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