How Mike Adenuga  Rewrote Nigeria’s Telecommunications Story 

In August 2003, Globacom entered a Nigerian telecommunications market already occupied by established international operators and made a decision that its competitors had not: it introduced per-second billing.

At the time, subscribers across Nigeria paid by the minute regardless of how long they actually spoke. Globacom changed that, and the shift was more than a pricing innovation. It signalled to the market that the terms of communication in Nigeria were negotiable, and that an indigenous company was willing to negotiate them downward in the consumer’s favour.

Twenty-three years later, that first disruption still defines how the company is remembered.

Globacom was founded by Dr Mike Adenuga Jr., one of Nigeria’s wealthiest men, whose other major holdings include Conoil and a significant presence in real estate. He built Globacom as a Nigerian-owned competitor in a sector dominated by multinationals, and he has retained sole ownership of it for 23 years, an unusual position in the Nigerian telecoms industry.

The company’s infrastructure ambitions grew alongside its subscriber base. It built the Glo-1 submarine cable connecting the United Kingdom directly to Nigeria, the first such cable to be owned by an African company, strengthening Nigeria’s access to international bandwidth at a time when digital connectivity was becoming essential to commerce and daily life. It rolled out 2.5G, 3G, and 4G LTE networks, expanded fibre infrastructure, and launched MoneyMaster PSB to bring mobile banking to underserved populations.

The cost of acquiring a SIM card, once above N20,000, fell to near-zero partly because of the competitive pressure Globacom created.

For its 23rd anniversary, the company launched a “Never Settle For Less” campaign and introduced Gloria, an AI-powered customer assistant on its revamped Glo Café app. The name of the campaign captures something true about the company’s origin story, namely, that it entered a market that had already settled. It decided not to.