Google Invests in African Internet Expansion for Future Revenue
May 04, 2011, 5:09 AM EDTBy Dulue Mbachu
May 4 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc. is helping to expand Internet access in Africa, the world’s poorest continent, laying the groundwork for revenue growth, said Joe Mucheru, the company’s head for sub-Saharan Africa.
The owner of the world’s most popular search engine is investing in infrastructure, creating search pages in local languages and helping universities adapt their curriculum to changing technology across Africa, Mucheru said in a phone interview on May 2 from Nairobi.
“It’s more about getting more people on the Internet,” he said. “At the moment revenue is not our focus. In the next few years, we could be looking at revenue.”
Africa, with about 1 billion people, has 15 percent of the world’s population and only 2 percent of its Internet users, Mucheru said, citing figures from the International Telecommunications Union. While Google’s revenue from the continent isn’t “a significant number,” the company sees a good investment opportunity in helping close the gap and getting more people to use the company’s products, said Mucheru.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country of 150 million people, where Google opened a two-day conference yesterday for local entrepreneurs and developers in Lagos, the commercial capital, is central to the company’s Africa policy, he said. Google’s engineers have flown in from around the world to provide training on the use of its applications for business and advertising, the company said.
Local Languages
Nigeria’s Internet users now make up about 29 percent of its population, a fourfold increase since 2008, according to the International Telecommunications Union. Google’s efforts to increase access include an arrangement with six universities in the country whereby it provides a link to the Internet and the institutions provide their own wireless network.
Google, based in Mountain View, California, has developed search engines in three Nigerian languages and is working on others to ensure that “language shouldn’t be a barrier” to the Internet, said Mucheru. The company is currently focusing its Africa efforts on South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria, with plans to add Cameroon and Ethiopia later this year.
New submarine fiber-optic links to Africa that have been completed or are being built promise an “abundance of cyber- connectivity,” said Mucheru. In anticipation of growing broadband capacity, Google is working with telecommunications companies, including Internet service providers, equipment manufacturers and software developers to take advantage of it, he said.
--With assistance from Emele Onu in Lagos, Nigeria. Editors: Robert Valpuesta, Jim Silver.
To contact the reporter on this story: Dulue Mbachu in Abuja at dmbachu@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Antony Sguazzin at asguazzin@bloomberg.net.
