Gentlemen of the press

Ladies and Gentlemen

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to our Group Headquarters, the Communications Centre and home of CNSSL Contact Centre Limited, A Contact Centre and our Business Process Outsource (BPO) operations in Mayfair Gardens, Lagos Nigeria.

We are Communication Network Support Services Limited, and Group of companies:

Our core business;

We operate in the telecom industry and provide support for Network Operators as Business Process Outsource (BPO) company.

We are a telecom engineering company as we deploy and maintain fiber optic cable backbone and last mile for telecom operators and various access networks such as copper to the loop, fibre to the loop, wireless local loop, Very Small aperture terminal satellite and other access networks.

We also provide on-line contact centre for private operators and we also do outbound telemarketing for the industry.

Our other operations cuts across, Media, as we own a private radio station Royal FM 95.1MHZ Ilorin, in the North Central, and Royal Television Service, an online TV station which focuses on Nigerian, our environment the people and the lifestyles.

We are also the publishers of Royal Times of Nigeria Newspapers. we are the Owners of Chesterfield Farm, located in both Kwara and Niger states, North Central Nigerian and owners of the Savannah Resort and event center both in Ilorin and Lagos.

Gentlemen of the Press, today i am receiving you in my capacity as the Chairman and Group Chief Executive officer of these Companies and the Chairman, Association of Licensed Telecommunication Operators of Nigeria. ALTON: the umbrella body of licensed providers of telecommunication services in Nigeria.

As you may be aware, The Nigeria Telecom industry is one of the highest contributors to our National GDP above 10% and also, one of the highest consistent contributors to our FDI over the past 13yrs.

I thank you for the good work you are doing in promoting the good of the industry which in part has contributed to the industry developing from 500000 lines to over 130million within 12 years

The industry is one of the most functional public service infrastructures, when compared with other social infrastructures such as power transport and the rest of them.

This industry has provided significant support for Small and Medium Scale Enterprises to thrive, which has helped in job creation and most of all an industry that is one of the highest employers of labor and of course the most contribution to our national human capital development.

In CNSLL we are contributing our little best to our national economic development. We are one of the highest employers of labour in the telecom Industry today, with our over 6000 graduate employee workforce.

We saw an early opportunity in business process outsourcing BPO and over the past seven years since our establishment we have developed capacity and human capital to support the telecom industry in Nigeria and other, sectors requiring our type of services in the Economy, such as the Power Sector, Oil and Gas Sector, Banking and Finance, Aviation and Transportation, Food and Beverage, Hospitality and Tourism and so on.

Business process outsourcing (BPO) involves the contracting of the operations and responsibilities of specific business functions (or processes) to a third-party service provider.

BPO is typically categorized into back office outsourcing, and front office outsourcing, which includes customer-related services such as contact center services.

The main advantage of BPO is the way in which it helps increase a company’s flexibility. In early 2000s BPO was all about cost efficiency, which allowed a certain level of flexibility at the time. Business process outsourcing enhances the flexibility of an organization in different ways:

Most services provided by BPO vendors are offered on a fee-for-service basis, This can help a company to become more flexible by transforming fixed into variable costs. A variable cost structure helps a company responding to changes in required capacity and does not require a company to invest in assets, thereby making the company more flexible. Outsourcing may provide a firm with increased flexibility in its resource management and may reduce response times to major environmental changes.

Another way in which BPO contributes to a company’s flexibility is that a company is able to focus on its core competencies, without being burdened by the demands of bureaucratic restraints.^[11]Key employees are herewith released from performing non-core or administrative processes and can invest more time and energy in building the firm’s core businesses.

A third way in which BPO increases organizational flexibility is by increasing the speed of business processes.  BPO therefore allows firms to retain their entrepreneurial speed and agility, which they would otherwise sacrifice in order to become efficient as they expanded.

India has revenues of US$10.9 billion from offshore BPO and over US$30 billion from IT and total BPO. India thus has some 7% share of the total BPO Industry, but a commanding 63% share of the offshore component.

Other locations like Philippines, and South Africa have emerged to take a share of the market.

The South African call center industry has grown and directly employs about 74 000 people, contributing over 0.92% to South Africa’s gross domestic product(GDP).

China is also trying to grow from a very small base in this industry.

However, while the BPO industry is expected to continue to grow in India, its market share of the offshore piece is expected to decline.  The Philippines has overtaken India as the largest call center industry in the world in 2010.

Eastern Europe is also an emerging BPO destination. Report has it that in 2010, 33,000 jobs were moved to Eastern European countries.

While the overall size of the industry and the number of developers in Eastern Europe is lower than India, the knowledge of European language such as French, Spanish, German and Italian by many Eastern Europeans, as well as the overall high quality of education in these locations, allows the BPO industry in this region to continue to grow. For example, the region has an estimated 17.2 million people with a tertiary education, compared to 13.6 million in India, making it an attractive choice for BPO, especially if more specialized projects are to be outsourced.

Studies have shown that Nigeria is the next major destination for BPO after India and the Philippines who currently have the highest number of Contact center operators. We have a high number of Graduates and the quality of training they receive is adequate for BPO service for needing industries across the world. But our policy and regulatory environment must be right, in order to win the confidence of the service providers and industries that may be willing to use Nigeria as a BPO destination.

At CNSSL CCL We are looking forward to being a destination of choice for BPO and so we are developing the right knowledge and human capital to position us for this great future opportunity as a business.

Gentlemen of the Press, permit me to take the opportunity of your visit to talk about the public perception of our Industry: today we are been batched from all sides due to issues of QOS.

As we are aware QoS is an on going process and consistent / continuous effort has to be made to achieve and systems it.

All the good of the industry is been accessed from QoS. This has seen the rating of all players going down south: no one is talking about the impact of employment creating again, no one is talking about the FDI of telecoms, no one is talking about the development of our national economy, for an industry that is contributing over 8% to our GDP.

The banking sector is doing 4% but they have been able to manage public perception better. There is no body in this room who does not use the banking service and there is no one who does not have poor costumer service related experience with the banks, but as an industry the banking sector is still well respected, because they manage better their public perception.

Gentlemen of the Press, we all must discourage the trend of sweeping condemnation of the Telecom industry in the public place, the industry is key to our economy and key to our future development as a nation: we must encourage operators, we must not discourage practitioners and we must not discourage investors by creating an image of a bad industry using only QoS as a factor.

Please in your tour of duty, help us with this campaign for the good of our industry.

Our organization is one of the products of the good that telecoms has brought, we currently engage almost 6000 Nigerian graduate, in direct employment as high as the workforce of some state government. Or MDA.

We are grateful to our Principal Partner MTN Nigeria for the opportunity to support them and MTN by this is an example of a Company supporting local companies in the development of our national human capital among other things. We wish other Big organizations will emulate MTN in this regard in order to enable us take the full benefits accruable from BPO. Imagine if many young enterprises in Nigeria will engage the number we talking about in BPO how well it will solve our unemployment problems.

And now, once again, it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to our Group Headquarters and It is now my pleasure to show you a short documentary of about our Group: CNSSL – a people and a story.

Thank you for coming and God bless

Engineer, Gbenga Adebayo

Chairman and Group Chief Executive Officer,

CNSSL Group.

Lagos, 16^th January 2014