NEC Europe, a wholly owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation, has invested in XON, the sub-Sahara African ICT group, and the two organisations will have an integrated market approach that will combine their local expertise in the region to provide greater sales coverage in the sub-Sahara African market and accelerate regional growth for both companies in the telecoms, government, enterprise and energy sectors.
The two companies have explored joint sub-Sahara Africa business opportunities for the past 18 months and identified many areas of collaboration.
Naoki Iizuka, president and CEO, NEC Europe, says: “NEC has been operating in Africa for over 50 years through its representative offices and partners. Moreover, we enhanced our operation by setting up NEC Africa in 2011. This has enabled us to win many major contracts with government bodies, mobile and fixed operators and blue chip enterprises. With this strategic investment in XON, we’ll be able to meet pent up demand for NEC’s solutions by massively expanding our sub-Sahara African business consulting, systems integration and managed service support footprint as well as sales coverage.”
“NEC Africa was created in 2011 and has almost doubled its revenues in the past three years,” says Israel Skosana, chairman of XON. “Their approach to creating social value relating to energy, the environment, and food and water are common to all nations and we believe their solutions that address those key issues will help this relationship to flourish and help bring about social progress in our region.”
“NEC is a powerful brand and the global business employs nearly 100,000 employees with ¥2,935.5 billion net sales in FY 2014. We are excited about the change that NEC’s world class solutions, renowned for reliability in their advanced range of telecoms network infrastructure, public safety, renewable energy and system platform solutions could bring to Africa,” says Carel Coetzee, CEO of XON. “Their portfolio is designed to enable new consumer and enterprise services, improve the overall network service experience and efficiencies, and helps to increase the average revenue per user for telecommunication and Internet service providers.”
