Category: Business

The debate has been on since they came to the market. Some argue that they are harmful to health; others say they are not. The jury is still out on the suitability or otherwise of these drinks, reports Raji RotimI Solomon.

Are energy drinks what the makers claim they are? The producers claim that they are energy boosters good for busy executives, The drums they say, are not harmful to health despite being rich in caffeine. Therein lies the problem. Those against these products say they are too high in caffeine, which excessive intake is dangerous to health.

The suitability is otherwise of these products is always a subject of debate among people. In offices, at parties, homes and joints, there is always a heated debate over the consumption of these drinks.

Now a member of the House of Representatives Yacoob Bush-Alebiosu is set for battle over these drinks which he claims are dangerous to health. His move has given those in the energy drinks market the shivers. What will happen to the drinks? Are they on their way out? These are some of the questions being asked.

What does Bush-Alebiosu find bad in these drinks?

According to him, they have a life threatening effect on blood pressure, heart and brain functions. The abuse of the drinks among youth might cause mid-age mortality in the nearest future. He noted that it is mixed with alcohol to serve as suppressant, making the takers to consume more alcohol than the body can take under normal circumstances.

Depending on where they stand, not everybody agree with Bush-Alebiosu.

A consumer, Mayowa Oluwatomi, said: “If this is indeed dangerous to the health, then it shouldn’t have been granted sale and distribution license in the first place. How they are NAFDAC approved? Is it that the agency didn’t do its home-work before now? Secondly, I feel they should ban cigarettes instead of energy drinks, cigarettes are more dangerous to the health than caffeinated drinks. These are relevant points raised with no answers for now.

Energy drinks came into the country some years ago with Lucozade boost, this particular drink was associated with sick people who need energy supplement for them to gain strength. This was one of GlaxoSmithKline’s fast selling product.

It came first in dotted breakable bottles which later evolved to tetra paks. Orange Drugs came up with their own brand of energy drink, Passion, which came in sachets with powdery solution, an improvement to what was obtainable before.

The acceptance was wide since it was more handy and cheaper. Not too long, the market became more competitive with the influx of different brands of energy drinks in cans. The likes of Power Horse, Hype, Red bull, Hippo, Climax, Kiss, London Best, and the rest became regular features at parties, bars and clubs.

Some discoveries were made by drinkers which actually boost the popularity and sale of energy drinks in the country. These claims are not scientifically proven but they are generally accepted.

Many youth believe it works as an aphrodisiac, they believe it enhances sexual ability. Another fact that makes energy drink a toast, among youth, is the ability to mask alcohol.

Mixing energy drinks with alcohol, suppresses the alcoholic effect making a consumer drink more than his or her gauge without feeling the tipsiness.

An advertising guru, Mr. Idowu Esan, who has over the years handled several energy drink brands, gave a thorough analysis based on his opinion and experience of the drink.

He said: “Let us face it, anything that we take without caution would always have repercussions. Water, as vital as it is to human survival, if taken without moderation would become harmful to the body.

First there is no record of death or injury traceable to the consumption of energy drink to substantiate the Reps claim. Again, all the countries that were stated to have banned energy drinks still sell and distribute.

He stressed the danger in caffeine but he forgot to highlight the advantages of caffeine. Of course everybody knows that anything that has a negative side would also have the positive side.

• Japanese researchers have shown that caffeine increases memory;

• Caffeine mixed with carbs replenishes muscle glycogen concentrations faster after exercise;

• Caffeine detoxes the liver and cleanses the colon when taken as a caffeine enema;

• Caffeine can stimulate hair growth on balding men and women;

• Caffeine relieves post workout muscle pain by 48 per cent;

• Caffeine increases stamina during exercise.

These and much more are the benefits of caffeine, so it has nutritional and health benefits. Moreover, coffee contains more caffeine than energy drink, it’s not a reason to ban caffeine. Most energy drinks in Nigeria are approved by National Agency for Food and Drugs (NAFDAC), and all these they have checked and certified.

The same thing with the Standard Organisation of Nigeria (SON). To complement my points, if you check for example Power-Horse you would see an instruction that states pregnant women, children, people that are sensitive to caffeine or diabetic patients should not take the drink. These instructions are to put moderation and to reduce possible health risks that might be associated with the drink for some particular people.”

Another consumer at a bar in Egbeda, Justice Umeh said: “I mix energy drink with my spirit but it is not for suppressing the alcoholic effect but for the taste it gives me. Secondly, I want to drink alcohol and still maintain my mental alertness and I have discovered that this mixture actually does this to me. I kill two birds with a stone.”

A nutritionist, Nneka Ajomale, said caffeine actually works as antioxidant which is very good for the health if taken moderately, and surprisingly these energy drinks contain it.”

Hewlett – Packard and Dell are fighting to control the computer hardware market by employing various strategies. Which firm will win the battle? Raji RotimI Solomon asks.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Dell are two of the biggest computer hardware companies which offer products, technologies, software, solutions and services to different categories of customers. Both companies are fighting to stay alive in the computer hardware market, and are trying to outsmart each other. The major question however is: “Who is really winning?”

HP was founded in 1934 in a garage by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard while Dell (originally named PCs Limited) was founded in 1984 by Michael Dell; a student of the University of Texas. And from humble beginnings, both companies are now ranked among the world’s Fortune 500 companies, with HP ranked by Forbes as number 15 in the World’s Most Powerful Brands while Dell is ranked number 41. Despite these ratings, HP and Dell are in murky waters due to bad sales recorded in the last quarter of 2012.

The rise of HP to the apex of PC manufacturers was as a result of good mergers and acquisitions (Compaq and Palm), viral advertising campaigns, good customer service support and the success of HP as a brand. The company launched online stores which enabled customers to buy products at company price and retail stores which allow customers to have a feel of the products they are about to invest in.

It also moved manufacturing plants to Asia to enable them mass produce and reduce production costs. This market strategy was a hit, and the company won over customers from its major competitor; Dell. Its product range of laptops, desktops and printers became synonymous with good pricing, design and performance.

However, the road downhill became eminent due to management crises, decreases in R&D investment, lack of innovation, bad acquisitions (Autonomy) and a myriad other issues. To save itself, the company cut jobs, performed internal restructuring and is also toying with the idea of selling Autonomy and EDS—subsidiaries acquired in 2011 and 2008 respectively.

In the early 90s, Dell became the king of PC manufacturers, fending off competition from IBM, Acer, Sony, HP, Toshiba etc. Its success was due to its ability to deliver individual PCs configured to customer specifications and a vibrant customer support applauded globally. To minimize the delay between order and delivery, the company sited its manufacturing plants close to its customers. This manufacturing policy reduced production costs to the minimum and made the company record huge profit margins.

However, after the resignation of Michael Dell as C.E.O, the company’s fortunes began to nosedive as major competitors moved manufacturing plants to Asia to enable them produce finer, better and cheaper PCs en mass. This move also exposed Dell’s lack of innovation and to further compound its woes, Dell’s once vibrant customer support became a shadow of itself. Customers complained, sales dwindled and executives lost their jobs.

Dell also shot itself in the foot by refusing to quickly change the way it received orders from consumers; a big mistake competitors capitalised on. But the biggest contributor to Dell’s impeachment as king was the failure of its brand. As Jonathan Salem Baskin rightly puts it “Dell doesn’t have DNA, or support an architecture of feelings, or own a particular emotion. It has no friends, and nobody loves it.

It makes computers, and its products look indistinguishable from those made by HP, Lenovo, ASUS, and many other manufacturers who probably share many of the same factories. So, its brand is constituted by that stuff, not the esoteric nonsense it has paid many millions of dollars to light up its conference rooms with. Every consumer product, from technology to apparel, is learning that branding can’t attach meaning to meaningless stuff anymore, but that brands need to do unique things. Dell hasn’t stood for something in a long, long time, and it’s hard to get consumers to pay for nothing special.” Dell’s troubles run so deep that stories of sale of the company have spread like wildfire in the media.

Another contributor to the dwindling fortunes of both companies is the boom in the mobile device market. As manufacturers like HTC, Apple and Samsung continue to improve on the processor power of their devices thereby giving them the ability to perform basic computer functions with ease, consumers have continued to favor these mobile machines. The result is a post-PC era the two PC giants didn’t see coming and are helpless against. Also, the increased popularity of cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Docs, Huddle, iCloud etc. have given more data storage options to users of mobile devices who no longer see sense in carrying their laptops everywhere.

And as executives of both companies are busy trying to get out of the mire they’ve found themselves, pundits are asking why the PC giants allowed the mobile device boom evade them. Clearly, both companies have no answer to the innovation of mobile device manufacturers.

The winners of the duel between these two companies are consumers who wait for the two warring factions to reduce prices and offer bonuses. Also, as more manufacturers like LG and Samsung emerge, consumers now have freedom to choose between different hardware specifications offered by different manufacturers especially at reduced cost. The result is that consumers are no longer blindly loyal to both brands which have offered nothing new in terms of innovation in recent years.

War has positives. War has negatives. It depends where you stand.

If you were around during the Nigerian civil war that consumed many lives, and left some families devastated over 40 years after, you would readily say war connotes bad omen. On the other hand, if you were on the other side, you would look in the mirror and smile because the war in question has united different tribes and tongues.

However, aside the civil war, which left a sour taste in the mouth, the regimes of some long gone military rulers fought a different kind of war in their effort to sanitise the country and keep things in their proper places. What did the strong rulers do? They thought (in their wisdom) that the problem with Nigerians and Nigeria was indiscipline, as such; Nigerians should be “disciplined”.

Therefore, they reasoned, the best way to go about it was to “force” Nigerians to behave in an orderly manner by “intimidating” them to form a long queue at the various bus stops, grocery stores, banking halls, on university campuses, everywhere, while soldiers lurked around to “discipline” any bloody civilian who contravenes the law.

Suddenly, the queue culture caught on. The news at nine on the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA), the nation’s TV station, was incomplete without the queue culture commercial being aired. The social scene also caught the queue bug as Fuji and Juju musicians sang about it. Popular sitcom, New Masquerade, dramatised it. “Andrew” voiced it. Students cracked jokes about it.

“The queue culture is working”, the military rulers thought, without paying particular attention to the endemic corruption in the guise of kickback, contract inflation, abandoned projects, vandalisation and arson, and other corrupt practices that characterised the democratically elected civilian regime, which that military junta toppled.

Then, that military regime thought “force” was the name of the game, thinking that it could cudgel Nigerians into participating in its war against indiscipline (WAI).

It thought with WAI, Nigeria would become a better and disciplined nation. That military regime was wrong. Why? What happened next would explain. While that military ruler was basking in its triumph and settling down to act out its next script, a coup, cooked by an insider, put an end to WAI, WAI brigades and the proponents of WAI.

What is the lesson? That is not the story for today. The focus is on another war being fought by another governor. The war today is against cash. Several scholars and monetary “experts” have pontificated on the cashless policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). Some said it is a policy whose time has come. Other said its time has not come. Yet, another set said for Nigeria to compete favourably with the other economies of the world in either Europe, the United States or Africa, Nigeria needs to transit from cash-based to cashless transactions.

The cashless initiative is aimed at encouraging more electronic-based transactions and reducing the amount of physical cash in circulation. To make its argument logical, the CBN said that the direct cost of cash management to the banking industry in 2009 was N114.5 billion with an estimated cost of N192 billion by 2012.

According to the CBN, the spiralling cash management cost, most of which is passed to customers in the form of bank charges and lending rates, is as a result of the country’s cash dominant economy. Therefore, the apex bank articulated its case; “the cashless policy would boost our economy as more money would be channelled through electronic process”.

Like the WAI experiment that failed to work from the inside out, the cashless policy is toeing the same route. The CBN has expended huge budget on the campaign in order to propagate the cashless policy, but it has not done it the way it would yield the desired result. There are still several grounds to cover. There are still several miles to go. There are still several stones left unturned. In addition, it seems the CBN is in a hurry to achieve its objectives of making Nigeria a cashless country.

To show that the CBN has not put its acts together, it has come out to change the theme from cashless to cashlite, saying that it does not intend to foster a cashless environment but it would promote an environment where the use of cash is light. To ensure this cashlite push, it has imposed sanction and limitations on banking public and corporate organisations, which is akin to “forcing” Nigerians to form a “queue at every bus stop” without first working assiduously at changing the attitude, the culture, the belief of Nigerians about carrying cash.

Until Nigerians change their attitude and belief about carrying cash, the cashless policy is doomed. However, once the CBN can put machinery in place and begin to engage the different stakeholders that would assist it to achieve behavioural change at the grassroots level, then it can begin to expect a semblance of success.

War against cash cannot be won in the boardroom with long oak table and sartorial suits and bow ties, no. War against cash would be won on the streets. Nigeria would remain a mixed economy of cash and card, not solely card. Cash is stubborn. Cash is attractive. In Europe, cash is still in vogue, maybe not as obscenely common as in Nigeria. However, in 2011 cash made up 56 per cent of all UK payments, which comes to about £262 billion.

Everybody likes cash. You do too. We all like cash. Why? It makes things easy. It is fast. Its value is clear. Everybody accepts it. Banks, however, do not like cash because it is expensive to handle and move around. Nevertheless, get this: war against cash cannot be won by formulating monetary policy. Anyway, there are technologies that can reduce the cost of dispensing cash. The CBN and banks should invest in such technologies and stop fighting against cash because the CBN’s war against cash is not positive.

It was a day of mixed feelings and surprises as the first six contestants to make it into the Top 12 of the third season of the Etisalat sponsored Nigerian Idol show were chosen by the viewers. The lucky six, namely Sadeeat, Vicci, Debbie Rise, Oreoluwa Liyele A.K.A Immaculate; Kome Amagada and Job Emmanuel Idoko A.K.A Joe Emmal were among the first 20 of the Top 30 contestants who slugged it out over the past two weeks. The rest were not  so lucky.

One of the major surprises was the case of Obinna Michael A.K.A Mr. Byno who did not  make it through this stage of the competition. Widely regarded as a favourite, he cut a sorry figure as the results were announced. But that was the first surprise, as the duo of Moses Obi-Adigwe and Okafor Angus Sunday A.K.A Dani Angus also lost out in the voting, leaving the audience at the Dream Studio venue very disappointed.

The trio now hope to return through the wild card segment, a prerogative of the judges and the audience to bring back to the show some of the evicted contestants. But that may be a long shot, as they will not be the only ones with such hope. They will have 20 others to contend with.

Interestingly, two of the judges, Yinka Davis and Jeffery Daniels were as shocked as the audience with the voting results that has seen some of the contestants they see as promising talents being voted out. They advised the audience to vote more to keep their favourite contestants in the show.

Head of Events and Sponsorship, Etisalat Nigeria, Modupe Thani spoke in the same vein. She said it is disappointing to see such promising talents leave the competition when the show is about to enter its peak.

She encouraged the audience and viewers at home to vote for their favourite contestants as many times as possible so that they can have more votes to make them stay in the competition.

“Thankfully, we have the wild card segment of the show which gives the judges the opportunity to bring back two evicted contestants, while viewers have the opportunity to bring back one evicted contestant,” she said.

“To vote, Etisalat subscribers can dial the number of their favourite contestant on their Etisalat line, while to vote from other networks, subscribers can send the contestant’s number via SMS to the short code 33680,” Thani said.

She congratulated those that have made it to the next stage of the competition and encouraged them put in more effort to convince the audience and viewers at home that they deserve to win the star prize of 7.5 million naira.

Meanwhile, the final group of 10 contestants performed on Sunday’s show in a bid to win the hearts of Nigerian viewers and make it into the Top 12.

Voting for the third and final 10 of the top 30 contestants continues until midnight on Wednesday, January 30. To vote, dial the number of your favourite contestant on an Etisalat line or send the contestant’s number via SMS to 33680.

Winner of this season will take home N20 million worth of prizes, including N7.5 million in cash, a brand new SUV, and a recording contract with a record label. The first runner–up will receive the sum of N1.5 million and a saloon car which will be presented by Etisalat.